'Team Fortress 2' Has Been Overtaken By Evil Bots And The Devs Can't Fix It

Team Fortress 2 is a certified Valve title, which means it's a game people still play and love even over 15 years after its release without any desire hope for a sequel. Despite the incredible longevity of the team-based shooter that inspired Overwatch, the last many months saw the arrival of a swarm of bots that makes the game mostly unplayable and sees no sign of slowing down. These aren't just bots that exist and fill up the servers preventing human players from joining, but rather annoying bots seemingly hellbent on doing nothing other than ruining the game for everyone.

While nobody can tell exactly where these bots are coming from, chances are they're being sent by a hacker known as 4chan. Fans have gone on to create #savetf2, a campaign meant to raise awareness of the issue and pressure the developers into doing something, but that's a dumb idea. Like most video game-related hashtag campaigns, it does little more than raise the amount of harassment that these devs will have to face. We're talking about the people who've designed the beautifully intricate balance that makes this game work, they probably notice that there's something weird going wrong when all servers look like this:

But it's just not an easy job, as whoever is sending these also doesn't want them to go anywhere else and has programmed them to be just as insidious as possible. A new patch has angered fans for not just immediately getting rid of all bots, but that's not something they can just do – especially when we're talking about bots who could even steal the identity of players (relax, that's one issue that the patch did fix).

Top Image: Valve