The SaveTF2 campaign to get Valve to beat the Team Fortress 2 bots has begun

After announcing the SaveTF2 campaign recently, today the actual campaign to get Valve to fix up Team Fortress 2 has properly begun.

The petition on their campaign website has now reached over 100,000 signatures, which the organisers say they will forward onto Valve directly to try and get their attention. On top of that, they're asking people today to use the "#SaveTF2" hashtag across social media to highlight the problems. It's already massing a whole lot of posts on X (formerly Twitter) about the issues people face trying to play it and has entered X's trending topics.

It has been a problem for a few years now, and while Valve has put out various updates, the bots as always fight back. The game appears to be full of not just aimbots, but according to the campaign website the bots also "abuse the in-game text and voice chats to spread the most vile hate speech imaginable, while simultaneously advertising their “bot immunity services” in an attempt to scam the players desperately looking for a solution" and… "They’ve used these same means to dox people’s personal information and broadcast it to the player-base against their will. Bot hosters have even gone so far as to commit actual crimes, such as using AI voice-modifiers to impersonate and slander non-consenting parties, launching persistent DDoS attacks, and have even swatted one of their most ardent critics".

You would think if the problem was that serious, that Valve would have put a bit more developer time on it by now. Although, they are still updating it now and then, like the 64bit update recently.