All the Bots Got Banned 

edit: hi hi, just wanna say be cautious about the 16k number. the whole thing is super noisy. we can't really know the wave size unless bot hosters want to tell us exactly how much they went up or down by. the 16k is mixed in with normal players coming in and out from steam maintenance, it could be idle bots being affected (they didn't come back, or got banned too lol), the timing steam polled player numbers, etc. regardless though it did look different to the previous tuesday downtime on the charts, there was two system messages* sent out about server downtime, where the last time they did that was (apparently) once on Oct 1, 2022, and you can hop in game and see the very clear lack of bots. i'm not aware of any exhaustive up to date list of bots globally so it'd be hard to make any estimations of the wave size. sorry if i caused any confusion here :> * tf2 system messages: x.com/TFSysMessages topic 2: i can't personally verify it but community bans are seemingly a big tent that encapsulates lots of varying kinds of bans underneath it. i've gotten reports that community bans do block access to VAC servers, and this reply (to this comment) that's seemingly a good summary of the lay of things: @polistirex Hi shounic, wanted to say, community bans will in some occasions but not always prevent you from joining a VAC secured server. I have several accounts which are marked as community banned that cannot join any valve server and in one case access the steam library at all. There are different ban reasons. If your ban is for any kind of account fraud OR game abuse like most bot accounts, it will be completely restricted. The same goes if you are caught buying an account off G2A for example. here's 30 mins of me running around looking for bots ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3R2QRiH6cHQ.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-4brSl210Z88.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-DZ0gGRjZPuE.html

Wave defeated, but there are more to come. Get to an upgrade station before they return.

Classic Valve >do nothing >then do something and say nothing

I saw a post about Valve putting bans on bot accounts but giving the connected main account(s) a warning. In other words, if Valve has detected that you have an account linked to the banned bots (how, I do not know, IP/MAC matches maybe), the host can still keep their main account. And if they continue hosting bots, then all of their accounts are affected. In other words, Valve is now trying just to scare off the bot hosters. No real fix to TF2 has been made, not even a tweak to the Source Engine. Personally I'd love to see some proper legal action against the bot hosters to put some actual pressure on them but beggars can't choosers. And I expect the bots to be back within a week.

The man who sacrified his Pwnage Saxxy to the Chaos Gods: *they called me a madman*

WAVE COMPLETE GET TO AN UPGRADE STATION

Literally TF2 cycle: Its over > ITS NOT OVER > Its over > ITS NOT OVER

In CS2 Valve is doing a thing where farming accounts are being silently banned; they seem to be VAC banned but there is nothing publicly visible on the account to indicate that it was banned, they just can't join official servers. farming bots used to be everywhere for months but I haven't seen any in a while now.

They haven't gotten on the treadmill just yet, but they're putting on the sweatpants

No way are valve on the treadmill finally

Could this be possibly the rare and unheard of "treadmill work"?

"You've pushed them back.. For now. Get to an upgrade station for the next wave."

It took us 5 fucking years for us to finally beat that first wave.

-0:18-- Now that the bots are gone, we can observe the natural TF2 player talking in chat- EDIT: It seems shou has censored the chat, respectfully so, since it was a bad taste shock comment about sexually assaulting Mr Beast because the natural TF2 player loves male pregnancy. Yeah... To not make this comment contempt, at 0:33 we can observe the natural TF2 player's sexual orientation

The tf2 cycle > Casual is infected with bots > #SaveTf2 #FixTf2 > Ban wave > Casual no longer infested with bots > Complaints stop > Valve moves on > Bots slowly trickle in over two years > Casual is infested with bots again > Repeat indefinitely

"Guys if we just make one dev actually ban some bots they'll shutup" I give it a week

"human grit always beats robot magic" - Jane doe

"Is this valve treadmill work?" My brothers in christ, they merely hopped on it for a second. We need to see if they will keep walking.

I get a feeling that the "treadmill" problem of infinitely banning bot accounts would become a staple of TF2 from now on, i just hope that bot hosters would eventually get bored of it and move on

I feel like this just means the Summer Update is just around the corner.

0:31 found a bot 1:00 “impossible to find a bot”

Clickbait? OH LOL NOT

Damn Valve actually did something

They are back on Oceanic server this morning.

1:00 that spy knifing the pyro is me lol

0:20 that Red chatter 💀

"Oh, a background Casual game to watch while listening to the situation" "*checks chat at 0:19*" *"...oh"*

Can't wait for a decade or two for suddenly a bunch of video essays titled "The great bot crisis of TF2"

0:14 Chile, Peru and Brazil servers aren't as bot infested as the rest of the world (may I say these are the safest servers rn). They're overlooked in comparison with Virginia, where it's most likely you get a botted server. In conclusion, give it some time before the bots are fully back.

This is, completely unironically, with no hyperbole or exaggeration, the single best piece of news I've seen in fucking years.

so here's what's *probably* happening over at valve: they know about fixtf2/savetf2, but fixing the problem would mean getting rid of all bots and most cheaters forever or at least a very long time, which would take a whole company's efforts to do in a timely fashion, and even then, it would take quite a while instead of being completely radio silent, they want the tf2 community to know they're working on the problem (even *if* it's just a dozen people) and went through with a ban wave for a very temporary solution for casual but like we know, they have so much more data than engineers to work with the data, so even if another ban wave happens, it won't be for at least a few months since a very small portion of hours will be set aside to do that

“Monsueir, does this mean…team fortress is back?” “No”

I was playing on the trenches server when this update happened, and I remember joking about how awesome it would be if there were a manual ban wave. I’m shocked they actually did something

Welp, within the hour a new wave of bots are all online and named some variant of “you can’t ban me”. They are right about this being treadmill work, you’d have to keep up with these manual bans all day

How lucky am I to start playing tf2 again as soon as the bots got deleted 💀

We may have won the battle but we still havent won the war we shall fight bravely

quick! play before they are remade

This video literally bought so many players back to tf2. I watched in real-time as people joined and asked "are the bots gone?"

Now we have to keep pushing for this.

Now valve needs to give f2p chat back

0:22 don't let the good news blind you from this beautiful chat message

okay one or two or all of 3 things happened 1: valve did something and actually, forever, fixed the bots-ish 2: bots giving us false hope 3: bot hosters got busted/bored 4:sex 2 was released

This is good, but don't let off the pressure, make sure this continues.

Valve found their admin password again. Turns our is was in the janitor's room in a cardboardbox, under 6 porn mags from 1998.

that's a start.

For everyone saying 'finally' or variants of it: lol no. Wait to celebrate in about 6 months or so, when and if the problem is clear it is not coming back. Until then, assume nothing is going to change, else we'll just repeat savetf2's premature celebration after the simple banwave, slight rework and valve response.

looks like that one guy finally gave out his 100 secret saxons

I mean, I found 3 at 8pm eastern standard. But they got banned mid match about 30 seconds after the round started.

Valve is finally doing something good

They will likely keep doing it in waves. How long before the next ban wave is hard to say. You want to annoy cheat devs, so banning bot accounts as soon as they join is a bad move. Instead, flag them and then ban them after some arbitrary timespan. That way, the cheat devs don't know what got them flagged, and it is harder to figure out how to avoid detection. Beyond this, Valve could also be starting to crack down on botted steam account generation. Which will make ban waves a lot more meaningful.

I played it two days ago after a long time and the situation was surreal, there were so many bots in the lobbies they kept kicking each other out. They would start vote kicking bots by randomly selecting players in the lobby, and all the other bots voted yes. Glad to see they fixed it, at least for the time being.

“They’ll soon be back” “And in greater numbers”

Banning bots is an endeavour akin to Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a mountain, but it's not about the unreachable goal of having 0 people exploiting the game, it's about the steps taken to get there. Hope that Valve is finally doing something, but don't let up the pressure just yet. We need to watch over them and make sure they do everything in their power to actually address TF2's problems.

Great! As a side note, I've just checked and from 33 accounts I've reported >2 months ago (but I have no idea if anyone read that email at all, lol!), 14 are VAC banned ("1 VAC ban on record", "33 day(s) since last ban") and 19 are deleted. Cheers!

WAVE COMPLETED [ Get to an upgrade station ]

This aged like milk. the bots are BACK in full force, more than before.

i played a few games in a row yesterday all without bots and it genuinely felt like something was missing 😭

Valve: "Banning bots was a treadmil work"

thing about to add, in Argentina (brazil servers, we dont find usually bots even before the ban wave, is just more concentred in the us)

Hope they get ON the treadmill correctly this time.

you can thank me, guys. It was actually me who banned all the bots.

keep it up! don't let the pressure off until TF2 is *properly* fixed! #FixTF2 !! make sure the bots don't come back!!

The guy who deleted his secret saxton in protest just a few hours before:💀

Wow, I'm impressed to see SOMETHING being done about this issue. The janitor, potted plant and intern deserve a raise for sure.

As if they wont be back in 3 days.

I've noticed this about 2 weeks ago already. For a few days I have met literally ZERO bots. Then they returned, but they were different as they weren't spamming the voice chat + had an imperfect aimbot (sometimes they would even miss), and had cosmetics. So presumably it was a different hoster. However, there wasn't that many of them this time around, so kicking them was a much easier task. Also a few days ago I saw severeal of them being VAC banned instantly upon joining the server. Great to see Valve finally doing something.

I wonder if Valve saying absolutely nothing is a tactical move they use while locking onto all the bots they can find so nobody expects the banwave

"don't give me hope"

0:28 no bots but it still tf2 (chat)

Yesterday I got to experience the fixtf2 bonk bots, those were so scary dude, the whole server was shivering

A good portion of the bans are idle traders bots, some of them were full inv stacked and that's probably why keys dropped

Thank you Janitor for your continuous work on TF2! At least he's listening!

We need to continue the pressure the hosters are gonna make more bots dont stop the demands ever

All Valve had to do was play the waiting game and click a button. Certified Valve classic.

I checked my personal list of known bot/cheater accounts and about 1/8th were deleted, another 1/3 had a game ban/vac ban visible, and the rest were untouched. So it seems like this ban wave was primarily targeted towards bot accounts, and not aimbot cheaters broadly.

Imagine how funny it would be if the omega r34 is what convinced valve to do something. Just like "NOPE. WE'RE NOT HAVING THAT."

This is a good start, but let's see if they can keep it up

They're all back again, time for another session on the treadmill valve

Valve realized releasing a new multiplayer game while holding the reputation for letting their multiplayer games rot was a bad idea.

Gaben put a sapper on the 'little' bot nest the hoster's created:D

1:00 soldier in pink is a cheater, he’s racked up quite a few bans

A surprise but a welcome one, I'm going to load up the game as soon as I can

Man this better be only the beginning!!

Remember: this isn’t a win yet. It’s a start, but without a more permanent fix, the FixTF2 movement needs to continue.

shounic be fr with me oh my god

ive seen a handful of bots here and there today but they're so far and few inbetween that they're insta kicked

Can't wait for Valve to proceed to think that's enough and do nothing else.

i know the bots will be back or at least attempt to come back, but in this short period I just wanna imagine: there are bot hosters someone who are currently scurrying trying to get their bots back online ASAP to make the game unplayable on official servers and I just have to think: why the only potential person with real incentive might be someone making money off of software that automizes the process for, whatever reason. And while I hate it, I understand why someone would want to fix that to keep making money. But if it's not that situation, I really don't get why anyone would bother putting the bots back up.

remember, just because they vac/deleted the bots, does not mean the protest is over. it's not over until they actually fix the game.

Well over 50% of the active player base is bots farming for drops in the title screen though

This means nothing because they always ban bots before seasonal updates. The only good news here is that the summer update hasn't been canceled due to save tf2 (which I heavily doubted would happen anyway)

Finally, inner peace

You're Doin' Good Lad!

Something i find "neat" in a way, is how this wasn't announced or anything, valve didn't respond to fix tf2 directly, it just outright banned the bots so the hosts had 0 time to prepare themselves. Idk just something i thought was fun to think about

literally right now queued a game (in NZ, so AUS servers), enemy team was 3 bots 1 normal players, and our team was 2 bots 4 normal players :( (it's VERY off peak for AUS though, 11:00am NZ, 9:00am AUS)

Thank you valve pot plant and janitor, very cool

remember that this doesn't mean we should completely abandon #fixtf2 and change our reviews to positive. this is just the beginning

I don't think I've ever been happier to have tf2 news on my timeline thank you 🙏

Im so glad valve got us an early summer gift

Shounic is the unsung pillar for this movement. Grounded Informative Straightforward