Let's work together to fix the TF2 bot crisis!





As many of you probably know already, Team Fortress 2 is facing a massive bot problem, whose goal is to ruin the fun for everyone.
This hackers who make countless accounts letting a bot play the game, usually picking sniper with aimbot so they can insta-kill you, are making the game unplayable in official Valve servers.

You probably think than the game at this point is dead, but despite being 15 years old, it always stayed between the top 10 most played games on steam.

Those player numbers for so long, other companies could only dream about it.
Still top ten besides being in the market for a decade and a half, with the most loyal community I've ever seen in my entire life, and even a functional economy sustained entirely by the players.

After reading this, what has Valve done to fix this?
Spoiler: NOTHING.

Well, actually yes, they've done something to try stopping this, muting free to play players and making the voting system to forbid you to kick people right when you join.
But that's about it.

And because of Valve's lack of atention to the game, people has been making community servers.
The negative side of this is than usually these server are with crazy gamemodes such as x10 or Saxton Hale mode.

The closest thing we have are Uncletopia servers, hosted by Uncle Dane himself.
But it's not the same as Valve's (I'm not going to tell the whole list of changes, you can read them here if you want), the most significant being that it's full of pro players, which can overwelm new players.
It should be a compliment to casual, not a substitute.

Not to mention than the last big boy update (Jungle Inferno) was five years ago.

How I met the game

My first contact wasn't playing the game, but rather a video reaction of the spanish youtuber Zellendust (also the youtuber) of an SFM animation called "Funky nights at freddys 2".
If you ask, there's a scout at the begining of the video, I didn't wondered who the character was, just saw the video. (It's in spanish)

Some time later (2018) I casually discovered TF2 searching for free games in Steam, when I first saw it, I though the game was called "Team Fortress 2 Jungle Inferno" (I know, I was stupid lol).

And basically I fell in love with the game. The artstyle, the hats, amazing gameplay etc.
It's the game I've played the most time in my life, currently having 1.100 hours.

Whithout, TF2 I wouldn't have gotten interested in learning English, nor I would've met amazing people on the internet, so...

How can we do it?

It's simple, today we are using the hashtag #savetf2 in all social media.

In a coordinated effort to reach Valve's headquarters and letting them know about the situation, having basically all the TF2 community involved, including the Medic's voice actor himself!

But keep in mind this is a peaceful protest, so please, don't go harass anyone at Valve for it, at the end of the day, they are just regular people doing their jobs.

Breaking news???

I took a long time to write this, which I consider my longest blog post I've done so far. And it came as a big surprise to me than TF2's official twitter account posted this tweet after two years of no activity.

This is big news considering the account lost the twitter verification due not even logging into the account in a long period of time.
(They got it back recently with that tweet)

Although I would not declare victory yet, condidering Gabe Newel said in an interview the past year (which wasn't supposed to be filmed) than they were aware of the situation and they were planning an update.

I will personally stay skeptical but optimistic, at the end of the day we made them atleast to communicate.

To conclude this post I want to mention something.
When I played TF2 this morning, I saw a few cheaters with "#killtf2" on their name and more aggresive than usual, so my friend said than they are scared, I could not agree more withb that.

This is Juan Games, and I'll see you in the next post