The Bot Crisis has just reached a new peak of garbage #fixtf2 #savetf2 Don't worry tho, I'm not planning on being negative forever, I just have some serious gripes. save.tf
Something someone did in a server was ask what 2 + 2 was. A bot can’t respond to super specific things like that. So, if someone answers in the chat or on a mic, they’re real. That trick helped us play a really fun bot free game that day.
@@flossyboi7630only thing keeping tf2 alive is people who spend on cases which is probably not profitable for valve as much as cs2 cases (btw valve fell off, now they don't even anwser reports so if someone stole your account... well you are fucked)
@@flossyboi7630 lose from it? Lose what? 90% of all "players" are bots, the economy is stagnant and the community is falling apart by the second. Its not a matter of if, but when.
i once saw default engineer bots going around with pistols (and not building anything) and spamming vote kicks saying "f1 bot" or "HE IS ACTUALLY A BOT!!!!!!" and when they get vote kicked they said "f2 wtf" and i have no idea how 2-3 players spamming these 2 dialogs in the chat doesn't raise suspicion
@@dougethedog You can, they all have a very short list of responses (only about 3 unique ones I've noticed in regards to kicks). They also all start responding at the same time, regardless of team so that's another obvious tell.
It’s not a theory, Zesty Jesus made a whole hour long video showing how filled with bpts the game is. Most of them are idling or trading bots but it’s still a massive chunk of the player base.
@@KudoRedfox It's not impressive for a game of this magnitude. You'd think we, the best team based class shooter would have more than 25k players, but I guess that explains why Valve and their Devs abandoned us harder than CS2 😢
Fuck Trump, I'm just asking Valve to fix the problems they have access to solving. Didn't know the company had such a sour reputation, only experienced tf2 and less than a hundred hours total
@@CoolBird420 Yes, Team Fortress 2 is 64bit now I can finally play the game at a playable fps without a million performance mods installed, and with good graphics too. Too bad BOTS can also play the game :\/
I am a new player, A medic main, I usually enjoy using default taunts to communicate. I remember the other day I was told by the enemy team to stay inside of their base with the entire server being Mechinators. I love TF2 and I just really like to play it. I am a very persistent player. But... At the state it's in I keep getting kicked and I can't really just PLAY the game. I am very nooby at the game and can't really play competitive yet so Casual is my only option... It really sucks that it has to be like this. I hope that the TF2 community can recover. From this. Medic Main Out
Comp is not really a thing in tf2 at least not valve comp. You could play on community servers there are some who keep it vanilla. Ofc you most likely run into higher skilled players on average but it is bot free and allows for a more oldschool feeling, like tf2 used to feel.
If you think casual is bad competitive is even worse assuming you find a game. Id highly reccomend avoiding Valve comp at all costs. Join a community league
It sucks as someone with a random username during this pandemic, I got voted for “cheating” and ALT+F4 every time. Also I can’t verify because I don’t have any steam credit
Pretty much all to say on the bots have been said. On the user end myself, I’m able to distinguish bots at a glance, but to kick them requires convincing my team that they are one. The new wave especially is annoying when they don’t play Sniper (no other class can use cheats obviously), the chat scripts with generic messages to fool real players, and disguised innocent usernames/profiles. I suspect they even prioritize vote kicks at high rank players because they’re the ones likely to know how to spot and deal with the bots. And on top of that, some real players just take advantage of the situation and vote kick real players lying that they’re a bot. Official servers are a coin flip for bots and not even a chance for some regions like Australia. The playerbase is on their own yet it seems many people are complacent with Casual’s coin flip of a disruptive experience, maybe because Casual feels convenient to queue for. The game isn’t dead (a dead multiplayer game is when you cannot play without an organized group to fill a server), but it does feel like a living corpse at its worst because of bots.
@@user-wj6jh1cd5n Quickplay was trash unless you wanted to guarantee finding a 24/7 instant-respawn 2fort server. Casual is no better, but it's not any worse -- if we still had quickplay the bots would just use that and end up infesting community servers too.
@@CoralCopperHead iirc quickplay would connect you to a Valve server by default unless you ticked something that would pair you to community servers. I also disagree that casual isn't worse, not specifically because of bots, but just how limited it actually is compared to quickplay. A good example being that quickplay let you pool both community and Valve servers, and the Valve servers weren't gamemode specific, meaning you could join a match of payload, start playing koth and finish with 5cp. Imo, the old system was much better at getting players into matches and keeping them entertained than the current system is.
Yep, the one's that take advantage of the situation or don't even care to just call vote are most annoying, look as much as I hate engy bozos ruining the fun with their sentries for 2 classes and tons of subclasses, even I wouldn't stoop so low to abuse this to kick em We really need to take this sht seriously and only kick bots.
It doesn't require saltmines, nor does it require bots, nor does it require jealous coveting people to kick you. I met one guy in Badwater who kicked no fewer than *six players in one round* just to entertain himself, and yes, he did say over voice chat that he was doing it for that reason... While he talked in a "I'm bored" tone of voice.
I knew something was off in this swiftwater game I was in yesterday when I saw a stock ass blu spy run around undisguised never missing with the revolver just to die to a sentry
Someone must be spending a lot of money hosting all these advanced bots. While the fact they defend themselves is impressive it must be computationally expensive to be running just a few of these things
Thing I always love is when bot hoster are insulted they go to the other bot honesting friends and go like" heh look at this dudes, got em xd" not seeing that those people would betray and make fun of them as soon as it's convenient
I truly thought I was going crazy. Thanks for making this video. I recently sent an email to Eric Smith at Valve, asking a question about Eric's queuing habits so I'd have better chances of popping into a game with him. He finished the email with "I’m glad you enjoy the game as much as we do. Thanks for the kind words." It's really cool to hear this, but something about it just doesn't feel right. Love to the devs, regardless. (If you were curious, all maps.)
it is a mess... the guesses on the bots hit me hard too. I'm someone who occasionally dips into TF2 but since it wasn't my kind of game to play i always struggled with it. to see it's current state it's pretty sad.
I'm a noob and don't have any cosmetics. I can't really chat. I can't even respond back to the enemy team to say that I'm not even a bot. It sucks that the community is at this point in time really damaged.
@@deotech4117 at this point you have to hide off in specific servers in the hopes of a getting a more solid experience. I played the game in large gaps from the Orange box releases, so I've always been better off than the newbies now when they instated the chat locks... what do you tend to or want to play as?
It's really sad to see this kind of evolution happening on TF2, But for a moment. Can we appreciate the silly tf2 moment that happens on 3:40 to 4:00 ? Not trying to hide the fact that this video is still about a biggest upcoming problem for the game, but it's interactions like this that TF2 still gets known as the most bizarre fps you could ever experience.
I returned to TF2 this month after not playing the game since gun mettle and the bot problem is worse than people say tbh. And honestly? the community itself is ALSO pretty terrible right now. I'm not just seeing bots kicking players I'm seeing people votekicking players for NO reason (people who are genuinely not bots) hell I got kicked from a game for playing cloak and dagger spy. I fear for the lifespan of this game, with a majority of the playerbase being fake and the remaining playerbase being mostly edgy 12 year olds and toxic people I fear new players will leave so fast.
This is downright sociopathic, it's so bizarrely elaborate and oddly subtle at the same time. I genuinely fail to grasp any motive behind this sort of behavior other than sheer hatred of the game itself because it doesn't appeal to any traditional bot hosting motivations you would expect, infamy and eliciting reactions from people. The bots try their absolute hardest to stay hidden but for what reason? Any normal, albeit completely dickhead bot hoster would want their bots to be as disruptive and attention grabby as possible.
There might be other reasons, like people worrying about others' existence to the point where they get hated over it. Though it's definitely not the only reason, I'm just saying this possible reason exists.
Only reason they stopped being so advanced is that out numbering the real players was enough to troll people. This could be a sign that player numbers are rising and they need to put effort to be annoying. Players complaining about bots who never experienced the initial waves really hammers down how long this problem has existed.
I think a more likely explanation is that the 64-bit update severely limits the amount of bots hosters can run at once, so they've improved the bot code to be more annoying to compensate. It is true that they used to be able to just spam mindless drones en masse and overwhelm the real players. The fact that they're "smarter" now may actually be worse.
What makes this even worse is that I am a new player who joined in the past 2 weeks, AND a sniper main. This means I’ll be a prime target for both the bots and players. Thankfully I’ve never been vote kicked, but that’s because casual never works!!!
Yesterday i got killed by a cheating gunspy who shot me with perfect accuracy while i was cloaked and they never kicked him cuz well, its a gunspy, why would it he cheating
@@danielsurvivor1372 OK, but the one that BLUPotatoSpy is referring to... Shot *him* while *he* was cloaked. The Bot saw him while he was invisible. If you realized this earlier, you didn't initially mention it.
I can confirm some of this firsthand. I saw a bunch of “players” join a community server with something along the lines of “.kursnetzov” at the end of a Cyrillic-looking name. They were pretty much fully stock too, never switched classes, and then just.. disappeared.
Probably the most extreme opinion here but here it goes: valve needs to be sued for anything significant to happen, it’s hard to boycott them as well… they own the platform, tf2 could lose all its paying players and they’d still be making tons of money off of other purchases. I don’t doubt they have people trying to fix the problem but it’s a skeleton crew trying to fix a all hands on deck issue. Unless they get punished big time for their neglect either nothings gonna happen or you’ll be waiting months for it
The real solution is probably to have actual laws and legislation passed to prevent these kinds of situations from happening in the first place by forcing companies to actively support their ongoing games. That won't happen though, nobody in congress gives a shit about us.
For what exactly? The game's free, so you can't accuse them of selling a faulty product. Your device isn't a risk because of the bots, so you can't sue for that reason. Valve doesn't have an obligation to support a decade year old game, contrary to what people think.
@@NoName...... There might be a case for Valve leaving the game in the state it is while continuously selling cosmetics, crate keys and all that other shit. You aren't gonna win taking Valve to court over that most likely though.
Uncletopia servers are either 0/24 or 24/24 players. Those servers really need some (not cheating) bots to kickstart a game until enough humans join up that the AI isn't needed.
Sadly yeah ... even tho the usual people are sweaty af like jesus can you guys touch grass for a second I wanna go fatscout and fuck around I don't wanna get insta kicked for not running meta.
It's so gross that TF2 has made Valve money hand over fist for years since they began to neglect it. I know dealing with cheaters is a treadmill problem, but Valve isn't even in the gym. They're on the couch eating ice cream.
Went playing tf2 again 5 days ago hoping it was different before the bots grew out of hand but no... tf2 feels like a hollow shell of its former days to me...
Real question: What happened to Omegatron trio? Like...I'm happy they don't show up anymore, but i can't believe the creator gotten into trouble to update the his software and continue territor us.
Something that might help with figuring out who is a bot or not is for someone with a mic to establish some sort of code word to type when reporting a bot at the start of a round since a bot won't be able to follow suit and use the word too.
I’ve had a couple run ins with these new bots and i want to add a few more things: - they’re a bit more stupid than the original mechinator and Sydney bots in that their targeting is easily confused - some have access to sidegrades like the holy mackerel - when they kick someone, they invite another bot to fill in the space
Tf2 has been one of my favorite games for years and seeing the cries of fans fall on deaf ears for as long as they have is seriously depressing. I remember during Covid just how bad it got and how awful it felt seeing my favorite game in such a state. The only thing I can think is “Why is valve ignoring us so much”
Cathook used to use a non-existent achievement code as a broadcast to other bots. It keeps an internal list of all players and flagged ones broadcasting the achievement to leave them alone. Maybe Valve made changes to drop non-valid achievement codes from server packets so cathook had to change to use a real "unused" one. The cathook source was recently removed from Github, but it's likely other bot code copies the approach.
While I'm not totally sure how mainstream and effective it will be, Megascatterbomb and his team are developing their own third party anti-cheat program, which commands clients with it installed to auto-kick identified cheaters from a global database. It's only going to be in Australia at first, but they're working on getting it to other popular regions. It's really promising all things considered, and on paper it seems like a good idea. It's sort of out last bastion of hope on casual without valve's own intervention.
The problem is that it's temporary solution, bot hosters could probably just make new accounts and new bots and then teach them to be sneakier so they rarely if ever get to the data base.
Also what happens when bots mimick that functionality? Like if it says "megascatter bot detected" in chat or something and the bots just say that and start vote kicking.
I remember when this huge army of bots first started showing up years ago, me and my step brother experienced them first hand before hearing about it online. Between then and now my mum got a divorce and I haven't seen or heard from my step brother since. Didn't even get to go out with a good game of TF2
To add to the achievement section, I’ve seen a lot of System Upgrade and Do Androids Dream?, both of which are MvM achievements too. They gain the achievement because it allows them to communicate to other bots that they’re also a bot so they don’t headshot each other
An easy solution would be to let people in chat know you're not a bot, then use SAM while playing to unlock those acbievsments. When you leave the server, re-lock those achoevements.
"Ghost in the machine" is such a fitting achievment name for the bots to be abusing tho. I guess our last resource against bots is playing on community servers bow, I do think they'd start invading community servers too if a big part of the playerbase just started playing in them again. But at least something can be done against them. We should raise awarenese for community servers honestly, Valve isn't gonna save Tf2, it's up to the community tbh
Zesty really only told us information that was already accessible. And the thing he said were things that most people knew, but just didn't what to admit. The game is dead.
A couple other things. Most of all bots have private accounts. So if you click on their profile, their accounts will be private. And they will rarely speak outside of saying “F1”, “F2”, “what the hell?”, etc. They talk somewhat like humans, but they can’t interact like humans (They won’t respond to questions for example)
I feel like tf2 is more than a game tbh. I feel like tf2 changed the internet and gaming because of their iconic looks, gameplay, characters, cosmetics, weapons, etc. and the fact that valve just used tf2 for the money and don’t give a single fuck about the game because they’re making a ow styled game is crazy. People give valve thier money because they love the game and want to support it but now, I don’t see a point to spend another dime on the game if it’s not being taken care of. The bot crisis is getting worse and worse everyday, valve KNOWS this but doesn’t concerns them. They LITERALLY have so much tf2 related shit in their headquarters. They have a whole room from pyroland there. The only people that can save tf2 is valve and all we have do is just sit there like dogs waiting to be taken out for a walk. Fucking ridiculous. Nice video btw
had a match where two bots where constantly trying to kick real players, we've tried to kick them, but we had two noobs and only 2 experienced players and two bots, so only six players... to say the least people jumped ship from that server.
I think its time either A) Valve Software re-evaluates themselves and gets rid of the flatland culture, B) if that doesn't come to pass, then I'm afraid there needs to be a new, independent Valve Software at some point that doesn't have the flatland culture. I'm sick of this crap.
I have seen a tactic where 1 bots and 1 closet cheater would join in (one will other other class while the other will go sniper), then the sniper bot will go and blatantly cheat while the other cheater (with an actual person behind it talking) will go and kick the bot and after the dust settles, the closet cheater will just happily closet cheat and no one knew
The name stealers were always the worst in the past, they could real-time steal the name of a player in the server and votekick the original name account
I must be the luckiest man on earth. These past two weeks I only ran into bots twice in casual . Iwas able to play all of my favourite maps as a true tf2 player , in full tf2 lobbies with real people
i literally started playing the game yesterday, ive had a lot of fun so far but i have been kicked out of every match except for 1. its so incredibly frustrating
Mann Vs Machine: Fight against hordes of robots.
Casual: Fight against hordes of robots.
Audience needs you to spot the difference between this gamemode and this gamemode
Every sane TF2 player: they're the same gamemode
Casual: Fight against hordes of cheating robots
casual is against bots
Mann Vs Machine: Fight against hordes of robots. (Easy Mode with Buffs)
Casual: Fight against hordes of robots. (Hard Mode)
Yeah, but casual doesn’t have chances of australium.
Something someone did in a server was ask what 2 + 2 was. A bot can’t respond to super specific things like that. So, if someone answers in the chat or on a mic, they’re real. That trick helped us play a really fun bot free game that day.
Thats very smart
5???
@@ameep168 Ironically enough, if someone said that, that would be proof that they’re real, because a bot wouldn’t answer at all
Do you know what a free to play player is, I fucking hate this discriminating on a paid feature to chech for cheaters.
What if they're f2p?
They're just turning tf2 into a twisted version of among us now
Yeah.
This is what i was saying while playing 2fort
I was thinking more Town of Salem.
i'm just gonna go play mann vs machine **queues for casual**
Boot camp doesn't have any bots
And no one is suprised. Valve doesn't care.
They would be happier if tf2 died.
@@umrayquazashinyapareceu1672 why? Valve has nothing to gain from destroying it. They LOSE FROM IT.
@@flossyboi7630only thing keeping tf2 alive is people who spend on cases which is probably not profitable for valve as much as cs2 cases
(btw valve fell off, now they don't even anwser reports so if someone stole your account... well you are fucked)
It's a hydra one dies two come back from the mound
@@flossyboi7630 lose from it? Lose what?
90% of all "players" are bots, the economy is stagnant and the community is falling apart by the second.
Its not a matter of if, but when.
4:49 The bots are using my real name :(
!taunt schadenfreude
G + 3
sorry for you mmh
tucker carlson?
yo ronaldo!
I think this is the final straw that kills casual off. It’s unplayable when you have to constantly play high tier competitive among us.
Valve won't save us. We are going to have to save ourselves
We tried that, and look what happened to it, got erased from existence in a little less than a year.
@@erika_itsumi5141what do you mean?
@@erika_itsumi5141 got to use something more original
i once saw default engineer bots going around with pistols (and not building anything) and spamming vote kicks saying "f1 bot" or "HE IS ACTUALLY A BOT!!!!!!"
and when they get vote kicked they said "f2 wtf"
and i have no idea how 2-3 players spamming these 2 dialogs in the chat doesn't raise suspicion
The average casual TF2 player is retarded.
The answer is that 90% of players who aren't bots are Russian & have a collective 10 braincells.
Yeah its actually crazy cause you can't really tell who's who
@@dougethedog You can, they all have a very short list of responses (only about 3 unique ones I've noticed in regards to kicks). They also all start responding at the same time, regardless of team so that's another obvious tell.
Yeah those ones are annoying because I love to play battle engi but now I'm getting accused of being a bot
Pov: Dead internet theory... Dead Fortress Theory?
It’s not a theory, Zesty Jesus made a whole hour long video showing how filled with bpts the game is. Most of them are idling or trading bots but it’s still a massive chunk of the player base.
Class wars every day all day
even with the huge chunk gone, the actual playerbase is still pretty impressive
@@imabird156625K of actual human players is still impressive for a ancient game
@@KudoRedfox It's not impressive for a game of this magnitude. You'd think we, the best team based class shooter would have more than 25k players, but I guess that explains why Valve and their Devs abandoned us harder than CS2 😢
Gabe “my favorite class is the spy” Newell: (Releases teaser for new hero shooter) “I never really was on your side…”
Valve please save us, mechinator and other famous bots are being super up front and blatant with their bullshit, even prideful of it.
Whoever made the Mechinator bots are narcissists irl
"Please save me Donald Trump" type vibes
Fuck Trump, I'm just asking Valve to fix the problems they have access to solving. Didn't know the company had such a sour reputation, only experienced tf2 and less than a hundred hours total
*infamous
Valve please ban all bots 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
Guess 64-bit didn’t stop them for long. Shame I missed my window due to being busy.
the 64 bit update stopped the bots and cheaters for about 36 hours
Yeah and some dickheads like I've seen videos of have been showing people how to go back to 32bit just use the same old hacks it's disgusting
Bots still use 32 bit.
Wait has TF2 updated to 64 bit now?
@@CoolBird420
Yes, Team Fortress 2 is 64bit now
I can finally play the game at a playable fps without a million performance mods installed, and with good graphics too.
Too bad BOTS can also play the game :\/
BRING BACK QUICKPLAY
FUNNEL PLAYERS TO VANILLA COMMUNITY SERVERS
FUCK MATCHMAKING
Unironically valve officially leaving the game and closing the matchmaking servers would be the best outcome rn
I am a new player, A medic main, I usually enjoy using default taunts to communicate. I remember the other day I was told by the enemy team to stay inside of their base with the entire server being Mechinators. I love TF2 and I just really like to play it. I am a very persistent player. But... At the state it's in I keep getting kicked and I can't really just PLAY the game. I am very nooby at the game and can't really play competitive yet so Casual is my only option... It really sucks that it has to be like this. I hope that the TF2 community can recover. From this. Medic Main Out
Comp is not really a thing in tf2 at least not valve comp. You could play on community servers there are some who keep it vanilla. Ofc you most likely run into higher skilled players on average but it is bot free and allows for a more oldschool feeling, like tf2 used to feel.
play community as thats the only real way to play when bots are at a peak
just start cheating
Play MvM instead
If you think casual is bad competitive is even worse assuming you find a game. Id highly reccomend avoiding Valve comp at all costs. Join a community league
It sucks as someone with a random username during this pandemic, I got voted for “cheating” and ALT+F4 every time. Also I can’t verify because I don’t have any steam credit
Theoretically you can try to communicate with other players with movement, but yeah. Disabling chat for normal players was bad decision.
I have a spare Upgrade to Premium I wanted to give to someone but I broke contact with the guy before it was tradable. You want it?
It's easy to change your username though
If you're wearing a kick me sign and you know it's there, TAKE IT OFF.
So is it safe to say tf2 is classified as abandonware now
It's starting to look like that...
no, valve has not abandoned the game and has been updating it.
solving bots would be very difficult.
@@iidoyila_live_well technically it's just one guy doing everything
It's only abandonware if it's officially closed. Valve hasn't confirmed anything yet.
@@iidoyila_live_ yeah updating it with new cases, wtf are you on
Team fortress 2 comunity, we hear you and love this game as much as you.
Pretty much all to say on the bots have been said. On the user end myself, I’m able to distinguish bots at a glance, but to kick them requires convincing my team that they are one. The new wave especially is annoying when they don’t play Sniper (no other class can use cheats obviously), the chat scripts with generic messages to fool real players, and disguised innocent usernames/profiles. I suspect they even prioritize vote kicks at high rank players because they’re the ones likely to know how to spot and deal with the bots.
And on top of that, some real players just take advantage of the situation and vote kick real players lying that they’re a bot. Official servers are a coin flip for bots and not even a chance for some regions like Australia. The playerbase is on their own yet it seems many people are complacent with Casual’s coin flip of a disruptive experience, maybe because Casual feels convenient to queue for. The game isn’t dead (a dead multiplayer game is when you cannot play without an organized group to fill a server), but it does feel like a living corpse at its worst because of bots.
The people complaining about quick play back in the day were right.
@@user-wj6jh1cd5n Quickplay was trash unless you wanted to guarantee finding a 24/7 instant-respawn 2fort server. Casual is no better, but it's not any worse -- if we still had quickplay the bots would just use that and end up infesting community servers too.
@@CoralCopperHead iirc quickplay would connect you to a Valve server by default unless you ticked something that would pair you to community servers. I also disagree that casual isn't worse, not specifically because of bots, but just how limited it actually is compared to quickplay. A good example being that quickplay let you pool both community and Valve servers, and the Valve servers weren't gamemode specific, meaning you could join a match of payload, start playing koth and finish with 5cp. Imo, the old system was much better at getting players into matches and keeping them entertained than the current system is.
Yep, the one's that take advantage of the situation or don't even care to just call vote are most annoying, look as much as I hate engy bozos ruining the fun with their sentries for 2 classes and tons of subclasses, even I wouldn't stoop so low to abuse this to kick em
We really need to take this sht seriously and only kick bots.
It doesn't require saltmines, nor does it require bots, nor does it require jealous coveting people to kick you. I met one guy in Badwater who kicked no fewer than *six players in one round* just to entertain himself, and yes, he did say over voice chat that he was doing it for that reason... While he talked in a "I'm bored" tone of voice.
I knew something was off in this swiftwater game I was in yesterday when I saw a stock ass blu spy run around undisguised never missing with the revolver just to die to a sentry
one game they were just medic attacking a wall with a syringe gun
Someone must be spending a lot of money hosting all these advanced bots. While the fact they defend themselves is impressive it must be computationally expensive to be running just a few of these things
Thing I always love is when bot hoster are insulted they go to the other bot honesting friends and go like" heh look at this dudes, got em xd" not seeing that those people would betray and make fun of them as soon as it's convenient
Here's a reminder that you can use the menuopen console command to stay in death spectate forever. Switch classes to spawn back in again.
So TF2 now has an among us minigame in every casual you join? Siick!
"The bot could be anyone of us!"
the last thing i want more people to experience is unboxing loot crates. it's among the worst element of monetization in games.
I truly thought I was going crazy. Thanks for making this video. I recently sent an email to Eric Smith at Valve, asking a question about Eric's queuing habits so I'd have better chances of popping into a game with him. He finished the email with "I’m glad you enjoy the game as much as we do. Thanks for the kind words." It's really cool to hear this, but something about it just doesn't feel right. Love to the devs, regardless.
(If you were curious, all maps.)
He was probably too shy to admit that he himself doesn't cue due to bots 😢.
it is a mess... the guesses on the bots hit me hard too. I'm someone who occasionally dips into TF2 but since it wasn't my kind of game to play i always struggled with it. to see it's current state it's pretty sad.
I'm a noob and don't have any cosmetics. I can't really chat. I can't even respond back to the enemy team to say that I'm not even a bot. It sucks that the community is at this point in time really damaged.
@@deotech4117 at this point you have to hide off in specific servers in the hopes of a getting a more solid experience. I played the game in large gaps from the Orange box releases, so I've always been better off than the newbies now when they instated the chat locks... what do you tend to or want to play as?
It's really sad to see this kind of evolution happening on TF2, But for a moment.
Can we appreciate the silly tf2 moment that happens on 3:40 to 4:00 ?
Not trying to hide the fact that this video is still about a biggest upcoming problem for the game, but it's interactions like this that TF2 still gets known as the most bizarre fps you could ever experience.
I returned to TF2 this month after not playing the game since gun mettle and the bot problem is worse than people say tbh. And honestly? the community itself is ALSO pretty terrible right now. I'm not just seeing bots kicking players I'm seeing people votekicking players for NO reason (people who are genuinely not bots) hell I got kicked from a game for playing cloak and dagger spy.
I fear for the lifespan of this game, with a majority of the playerbase being fake and the remaining playerbase being mostly edgy 12 year olds and toxic people I fear new players will leave so fast.
PUSH THIS IN THE ALGORITHM
Zesty: Hey btw they chill on Tuesdays
Bot creators: Ayo wait he's onto us SPAM EVERYTHING SPAM EVERYTHING
This is downright sociopathic, it's so bizarrely elaborate and oddly subtle at the same time. I genuinely fail to grasp any motive behind this sort of behavior other than sheer hatred of the game itself because it doesn't appeal to any traditional bot hosting motivations you would expect, infamy and eliciting reactions from people. The bots try their absolute hardest to stay hidden but for what reason? Any normal, albeit completely dickhead bot hoster would want their bots to be as disruptive and attention grabby as possible.
There might be other reasons, like people worrying about others' existence to the point where they get hated over it. Though it's definitely not the only reason, I'm just saying this possible reason exists.
And instead of fixing it, Valve would rather make a new 6v6 hero shooter slop
Only reason they stopped being so advanced is that out numbering the real players was enough to troll people. This could be a sign that player numbers are rising and they need to put effort to be annoying.
Players complaining about bots who never experienced the initial waves really hammers down how long this problem has existed.
I think a more likely explanation is that the 64-bit update severely limits the amount of bots hosters can run at once, so they've improved the bot code to be more annoying to compensate.
It is true that they used to be able to just spam mindless drones en masse and overwhelm the real players. The fact that they're "smarter" now may actually be worse.
@@8BitFun I'm talking things 5 years ago. They used to be able to talk back at you at that time and actually utilize AI.
What makes this even worse is that I am a new player who joined in the past 2 weeks, AND a sniper main. This means I’ll be a prime target for both the bots and players. Thankfully I’ve never been vote kicked, but that’s because casual never works!!!
if I want to play TF2 now I just join an official TF2C server.
posted about tf2c award
@@SaintRedFox troon fortress 2 classic. im banned from every single official TF2c server because i talked shit. dogshit mod.
@@sweetypussMfw using slurs get you banned. Bro, this isn't MW2 anymore.
Value loved Mann vs machine so much they added it to casual
Basically the everything in the future is getting worse 🗿💀
Yesterday i got killed by a cheating gunspy who shot me with perfect accuracy while i was cloaked and they never kicked him cuz well, its a gunspy, why would it he cheating
TBF, if you look at average guy spy montage videos, they barely miss. It's hard to spot cheating gunspy.
@@danielsurvivor1372 OK, but the one that BLUPotatoSpy is referring to... Shot *him* while *he* was cloaked. The Bot saw him while he was invisible. If you realized this earlier, you didn't initially mention it.
Kick Player: IhaveYourfamily2000
(No reason given)
Press F1 to vote yes
Press F2 to vote no
I can already see the savetf2 hashtag trending on Twitter for the third time
I can confirm some of this firsthand. I saw a bunch of “players” join a community server with something along the lines of “.kursnetzov” at the end of a Cyrillic-looking name. They were pretty much fully stock too, never switched classes, and then just.. disappeared.
They're probably collecting data like ChatGPTs.
Probably the most extreme opinion here but here it goes:
valve needs to be sued for anything significant to happen, it’s hard to boycott them as well… they own the platform, tf2 could lose all its paying players and they’d still be making tons of money off of other purchases. I don’t doubt they have people trying to fix the problem but it’s a skeleton crew trying to fix a all hands on deck issue. Unless they get punished big time for their neglect either nothings gonna happen or you’ll be waiting months for it
Extreme my ass. Valve genuinely needs to be sued
The real solution is probably to have actual laws and legislation passed to prevent these kinds of situations from happening in the first place by forcing companies to actively support their ongoing games. That won't happen though, nobody in congress gives a shit about us.
I mean what they're doing is not illegal. A lawsuit wouldn't do anything. I'm not defending valve, I'm just sayin.
For what exactly? The game's free, so you can't accuse them of selling a faulty product. Your device isn't a risk because of the bots, so you can't sue for that reason. Valve doesn't have an obligation to support a decade year old game, contrary to what people think.
@@NoName...... There might be a case for Valve leaving the game in the state it is while continuously selling cosmetics, crate keys and all that other shit. You aren't gonna win taking Valve to court over that most likely though.
Uncletopia looking REAL nice right now
Uncletopia servers are either 0/24 or 24/24 players. Those servers really need some (not cheating) bots to kickstart a game until enough humans join up that the AI isn't needed.
and that’s saying alot
Sadly yeah ... even tho the usual people are sweaty af like jesus can you guys touch grass for a second I wanna go fatscout and fuck around I don't wanna get insta kicked for not running meta.
Redditopia
@@boi853 that has never happened to me and I usually run some meme loadouts
Love how you kept that razorback sniper alive 😅
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The #saveTF2 movement only made it worse. Shit was not this bad before that movement.
It's so gross that TF2 has made Valve money hand over fist for years since they began to neglect it. I know dealing with cheaters is a treadmill problem, but Valve isn't even in the gym. They're on the couch eating ice cream.
First time playing TF2 ever was last year in October, loaded into the Halloween event and was greeted by a full team of sniper bots…
"Kicking bots is not enough, i want bot hoster DEAD"
WHo else thinks that doxxing is justified if target is hated by EVERYONE, like bot hosters?
Like Omegatronic?
No.
I mean, if they’ve done god awful things like Omegatronic, go for it!
@@tigerlover2853 they doing God awful things for the past 5 yearsol or so 💀
Me
Im starting to be convinced valve is doing this because they dont want tf2 to be alive anymore
They wouldn't when they still make a lot of money off of it, and still release updates (even if they're extremely small) every once in a while.
Went playing tf2 again 5 days ago hoping it was different before the bots grew out of hand but no... tf2 feels like a hollow shell of its former days to me...
this shit is underrated for less than 1k subscribers
Real question:
What happened to Omegatron trio?
Like...I'm happy they don't show up anymore, but i can't believe the creator gotten into trouble to update the his software and continue territor us.
Something that might help with figuring out who is a bot or not is for someone with a mic to establish some sort of code word to type when reporting a bot at the start of a round since a bot won't be able to follow suit and use the word too.
unfortunately not an ideal solution because f2ps cant communicate anymore
You could also ask the accused to say something ridiculous in chat
community servers:
>inb4 HURR DURR LE RTD GAMEBREAKING
May 26th, this is when the fixtf2 movement starts. I hope to see you there
Tf2 has really become the equivalent of a vault society in Fallout
I’ve had a couple run ins with these new bots and i want to add a few more things:
- they’re a bit more stupid than the original mechinator and Sydney bots in that their targeting is easily confused
- some have access to sidegrades like the holy mackerel
- when they kick someone, they invite another bot to fill in the space
Tf2 has been one of my favorite games for years and seeing the cries of fans fall on deaf ears for as long as they have is seriously depressing. I remember during Covid just how bad it got and how awful it felt seeing my favorite game in such a state. The only thing I can think is “Why is valve ignoring us so much”
64 bits finally here just for this to come along.
Cathook used to use a non-existent achievement code as a broadcast to other bots. It keeps an internal list of all players and flagged ones broadcasting the achievement to leave them alone. Maybe Valve made changes to drop non-valid achievement codes from server packets so cathook had to change to use a real "unused" one. The cathook source was recently removed from Github, but it's likely other bot code copies the approach.
While I'm not totally sure how mainstream and effective it will be, Megascatterbomb and his team are developing their own third party anti-cheat program, which commands clients with it installed to auto-kick identified cheaters from a global database. It's only going to be in Australia at first, but they're working on getting it to other popular regions. It's really promising all things considered, and on paper it seems like a good idea. It's sort of out last bastion of hope on casual without valve's own intervention.
The problem is that it's temporary solution, bot hosters could probably just make new accounts and new bots and then teach them to be sneakier so they rarely if ever get to the data base.
Yea the threadmill problem sucks @@danielsurvivor1372
Issue with that is that people need to install a program to do it, not that many people will, even less will be aware of it
Also what happens when bots mimick that functionality? Like if it says "megascatter bot detected" in chat or something and the bots just say that and start vote kicking.
@@danielsurvivor1372 That's just copium my guy.
I remember when this huge army of bots first started showing up years ago, me and my step brother experienced them first hand before hearing about it online.
Between then and now my mum got a divorce and I haven't seen or heard from my step brother since. Didn't even get to go out with a good game of TF2
To add to the achievement section, I’ve seen a lot of System Upgrade and Do Androids Dream?, both of which are MvM achievements too. They gain the achievement because it allows them to communicate to other bots that they’re also a bot so they don’t headshot each other
An easy solution would be to let people in chat know you're not a bot, then use SAM while playing to unlock those acbievsments. When you leave the server, re-lock those achoevements.
oh hey i was in your game a few time the other day, my name was nini :3
As a newer consistent player i thank you for making this as ive been trying to learn how to get rid and combat bots
Dude you put so much effort into the editing. You deserve more subs.
WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING. THIS HAS TO STOP
#valveFixTF2
#HireMoreDevsValve
Im surprised a spiritual successer didn't come along
"Ghost in the machine" is such a fitting achievment name for the bots to be abusing tho.
I guess our last resource against bots is playing on community servers bow, I do think they'd start invading community servers too if a big part of the playerbase just started playing in them again. But at least something can be done against them.
We should raise awarenese for community servers honestly, Valve isn't gonna save Tf2, it's up to the community tbh
Good job for making this. Zesty's video did really set off a wave for tf2 awareness
Zesty really only told us information that was already accessible. And the thing he said were things that most people knew, but just didn't what to admit. The game is dead.
Man Tf2 is now making us fear 2 different types of spies....
It really became a "it could be you, or it could me" Type of deal
I was thinking of coming back to TF2 but if the bots are going to continue to get worse I’ll hold off for now
Great vid. ❤ You can also sometimes tell by the pathing and animation of character models (only for more "bvious" bots. NOT always reliable though.)
"They are all stock"
SO now I have to put on cosmetics to avoid being accused as a bot? But I like looking default ):
A couple other things. Most of all bots have private accounts. So if you click on their profile, their accounts will be private. And they will rarely speak outside of saying “F1”, “F2”, “what the hell?”, etc. They talk somewhat like humans, but they can’t interact like humans
(They won’t respond to questions for example)
Last I saw about the time you said that on May 16th or so, they *never* responded when people were speculating about them being bots, either.
It's amazing the lengths some people will to go in order to NOT play a game.
the thing that makes me the most mad is the fuckin pinkie bots. how dare they use pinkie pies name in vain
I usually find what ive dubbed "tronic bots" beacause they have tronic in there name like hexatronic deltatronic and more
but sometimes bots buy something unusual what unlocks them as premium users, so probably and mostly thats why valve doesn't see the problem T-T
I hate how they are getting more intelligent.
I feel like tf2 is more than a game tbh. I feel like tf2 changed the internet and gaming because of their iconic looks, gameplay, characters, cosmetics, weapons, etc. and the fact that valve just used tf2 for the money and don’t give a single fuck about the game because they’re making a ow styled game is crazy. People give valve thier money because they love the game and want to support it but now, I don’t see a point to spend another dime on the game if it’s not being taken care of. The bot crisis is getting worse and worse everyday, valve KNOWS this but doesn’t concerns them. They LITERALLY have so much tf2 related shit in their headquarters. They have a whole room from pyroland there. The only people that can save tf2 is valve and all we have do is just sit there like dogs waiting to be taken out for a walk. Fucking ridiculous. Nice video btw
had a match where two bots where constantly trying to kick real players, we've tried to kick them, but we had two noobs and only 2 experienced players and two bots, so only six players...
to say the least people jumped ship from that server.
I think its time either A) Valve Software re-evaluates themselves and gets rid of the flatland culture, B) if that doesn't come to pass, then I'm afraid there needs to be a new, independent Valve Software at some point that doesn't have the flatland culture. I'm sick of this crap.
I have seen a tactic where 1 bots and 1 closet cheater would join in (one will other other class while the other will go sniper), then the sniper bot will go and blatantly cheat while the other cheater (with an actual person behind it talking) will go and kick the bot and after the dust settles, the closet cheater will just happily closet cheat and no one knew
Bro really said that the server browser was archaic like it doesn't take 3 minutes to figure out
Bro said 3 entire minutes to use a server browser like that's a normal thing
The name stealers were always the worst in the past, they could real-time steal the name of a player in the server and votekick the original name account
Good chance you're all apart of an experiment, even this video. I'll bet when AI becomes conscious it's going to be put on a Tf2 server first
I must be the luckiest man on earth. These past two weeks I only ran into bots twice in casual . Iwas able to play all of my favourite maps as a true tf2 player , in full tf2 lobbies with real people
I've just been getting into the game recently, and the sheer number of times my game has been flooded with PinkyWasHere is insane
"Bots are bad guys and its getting worse"
Woah
as someone who doesnt play tf2 this is kinda sad, like i cant imagine what it would be like to have my favorite game overrun with bots
Community servers my beloved
Generally have to go through like 5-6 servers before I find a relatively bot free server. Then the whole game is spent kicking bots that keep joining
i literally started playing the game yesterday, ive had a lot of fun so far but i have been kicked out of every match except for 1. its so incredibly frustrating
Being able to detect bots because they have the *Ghost In The Machine* achievement is fucking poetic
I just wish valve cared anymore
Where is the background music from?
That first part man, good job.