Team Fortress 2has been a long-standing pillar of the multiplayer FPS genre that has managed to maintain its player base over an incredibly long lifespan. However,Team Fortress 2has had widely reported issues with casual matches being flooded with bots, and players are saying that the attempts of developer Valve to fix the problem have not been all that successful.
The first attempts taken by Valve to address the issue happened in June 2020 by placing hefty restrictions on what free-to-play accounts could do. This did not fix the problem completely, leading to theTeam Fortress 2community organizing anti-bot botsand subreddits to combat the issues.
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Despite all the effort, vanillaTeam Fortress 2is still suffering from a bot infestationand those running the bots seem to be trying to leverage them in a digital racketeering-like scheme. Screenshots have begun surfacing within the community of bots advertising a “bot immunity” service that claims the player will be ignored by bots of that specific brand. There have also been reports of some bot operators offering to be “bought out,” with one claiming that for a $500 payout they will take their over 100 bots offline for good. Of course, there is no guarantee that whoever posted that offer owns any of the bots or would deactivate them permanently once paid if they did.
This new development inTeam Fortress 2’s bot problem puts even further pressure on Valve to intervene yet again and put a stop to the game’s issues. It has been nearly a year since it first felt the game’s bot problem was bad enough to be worthy of attention, and the situation has only worsened since. Hopefully, the company will figure out a permanent fix that will eradicate the bot presence for good so thatTeam Fortress 2players can go back to enjoying the gamefree of harassment.
