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It's been a long road for Valve fighting against bots in Team Fortress 2 but it looks like the community has been overall quite happy with the latest changes.

This has led to Team Fortress 2 seeing a popularity explosion in users playing, with it hitting a new all-time peak of 151,253 around 3 days ago with the previous peak being 147,360 back in December 2020 which you can see (along with much more) on the useful SteamDB website.

Originally released in 2007 so it's pretty old now (but still lots of fun), and Team Fortress 2 was one of the first Western created games to end up with loot boxes which ended up proving quite lucrative for Valve who also added them into Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Valve has gradually updated Team Fortress 2 less over the years, which bots seemed to have taken hold of and which ended up causing quite a mess. Valve keeps taking small steps to improve it and it certainly seems like the recent updates have helped.

The questions are: how long until bots find more workarounds and will Valve keep patching? Let's hope for the best for what's now a classic shooter.

You can play TF2 free on Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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2 comments

M@GOid Jun 28, 2021
Whiny kids and cheaters, were the reasons I gave up on competitive multiplayer more than a decade ago. Valve is not the only one with this problem, unfortunately. I have a friend who is a unrepentant cheater and he find other cheaters even on soccer games, which in turn, is his excuse to also use cheats. Heck, even on games where there is not competitive multiplayer, there are cheaters on the scoreboards...

I happily migrated to coop multiplayer, particularly L4D2, where I have been very happy over the years. Not totally clean of cheaters, but a much better place thanks to Steam friends and self-hosting servers.


Last edited by M@GOid on 28 June 2021 at 11:36 am UTC
Bogomips Jun 28, 2021
The "lucrative" turn of events is exactly when I stopped playing TF2 and it was a really good game at the time.
And to this day I still don't understand cheaters motivation there is no skill, no satisfaction, no recognition. It makes a game completely funproof and unappealing. Can't they play only with other cheaters?

Part of the gameplay routine for me on CS:GO is reporting cheaters, and frankly, if it wasn't for my team of friends I would have stopped playing completely or do what we did with CS:Source, paying for a private server and developing a dozen of plugins to prevent cheating (and it was so nice to see cheaters losing miserably when some security kicked in or being autokicked when trying to reconnect, etc.)
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