Sometimes something terrible happens to something beautiful. A speedrunner sneezes for three hours in a no-hit perfect run and gets tagged. Your favorite MMO is shutting down and ending a whole world. The corporate overlords of the least corporate RPG of all time get rid of its creators (opens in new tab). Something terrible happened to something beautiful when Valve dropped Team Fortress 2 into ruins. For years, it was virtually impossible to play a casual game of TF2 without being overwhelmed by automated snipers who would shoot everyone in sight, spam hate speech, and even drop links to child pornography.
Not content with killing everyone on the map, the bots started to evolve.
The bots owned TF2. It was really, really, bad. The community was fed up after years of neglect and finally decided to do something about it.
And maybe they just have #SavedTF2.
Team Fortress 2, one of the most influential shooters of all time, has a long and storied history. Developed over nine years from the bones of an old Quake mod, it was one of the first class-based FPS games and remains one of the most popular. Released in 2007 with Half-Life 2 and surprise hit Portal in the legendary Orange Box, it’s a big part of why Steam has become the juggernaut it is. TF2 is still regularly on Steam’s most played charts, even though it’s been five years since the last content update.
It wasn’t just a lack of updates that turned TF2 into a robot-infested wasteland. In April 2020, Valve confirmed: (opens in new tab) that the source code for TF2 and CS:GO had been leaked. Despite a message from the official Team Fortress Twitter account reassuring players that they had nothing to worry about, players began to notice a troubling trend almost immediately. While cheating has long been an issue in TF2, it was mostly the kind that plagues many online shooters – wall hacks, aimbots and the like. But this was different. Automated bots that chose the sniper class would join games, point guns at the sky and start killing everyone.
It didn’t end there. The bots became more and more toxic. Not content with killing everyone on the map, they began to evolve. They spammed terrible noise through communications. They posted links to all sorts of questionable nonsense in the chat. They changed their names to match those of real players, joined together and voted real people into the game. They made the game literal unplayable.
Frustrated, players took to social media and posted video after video about the situation. Unable to play in Valve’s official lobbies, players migrated to community servers like Uncle Dane’s Uncletopia and bowed down to what was to be a long, long winter. Gone were the good times of the Jungle Inferno update (a glorious month for Pyro power supply), gone were easy breezy 2Fort sniper parties, gone were demos that jumped sticky from cliffs. What had once been Valve’s greatest multiplayer game was adrift, and no update came to set the ship right.
Dedicated members of the community tried to make the most of it. Even during the worst of the crisis, TF2’s average players per month never dropped below 65,000, although there is some doubt as to how many of these were, well, the bots. Resilient fans have found ways to keep playing, patiently waiting for some sort of update from Valve. A tweet, a blog post, a patch. Something. But the players didn’t get any updates in 2020 or 2021 and instead were left with a burning question:
Why?
Call to the guns
Why were these bots so widespread? Why didn’t Valve do anything about it? What was in it for these sociopathic bot wranglers who thought it necessary to ruin everyone’s fun? Posted in a video in February 2020 (opens in new tab) who now has over a million views, YouTuber Toofty interviewed a number of cheaters to answer those questions. “It’s not a conspiracy theory,” he told me. “It’s pretty mundane at the end of the day. They’d come over to the comment section on my YouTube channel and talk openly about cheating. It didn’t take long for me to find some good pointers to follow.”
The cheaters gave a number of reasons, none very satisfying, that ultimately boiled down to one thing: they liked it. Some claimed to hold a grudge against certain developers, or just use hacks to combat certain strategies, but most just thought it was funny to turn people on. “I was hoping for some crazy genius hacker with an agenda, but instead I found some bored and sometimes lonely kids messing around.”
Annoying, sure. But in most cases, these types of people are a minor annoyance: they mess up a few games, occasionally screw up a server, and end up getting banned or bored. Valve’s negligence, however, allowed them to run rampant.
More than two years after the source code leaked, an idea began to crystallize. On May 7, 2022, a YouTuber named SquimJim posted a video (opens in new tab) calling on the community to contact Valve via email, even providing a form letter. A group of content creators collectively known as Chucklenuts (after the legendary Scout voice line, or maybe his adorable squirrel?) saw this and decided to take it a step further. They got together and came up with an idea for a peaceful protest – a protest from the community that loved the game so much. They would bring together every creator, every fan on Twitter, every Heavy with a minigun and an email account to raise their voices.
#SaveTF2 was born.
I asked ElMaxo (opens in new tab), one of the founding members, on the process. “SquimJim did a video and we ended up adding it to a Discord to talk to him about it, and it kinda kind of came out of that. Weezy (opens in new tab) had the idea to start with it, and we were all really on board. The worst thing we did was try.” The YouTubers urged their audience to respectfully reach out to Valve and ask them to address the situation, post positive things on Reddit, tweet with the hashtag.
On May 7, 2022, they posted their call to action, released a ton of heartwarming videos, and got #SaveTF2 trending at #1, with 400,000 tweets. They didn’t have to wait long for the universe to answer them.
Two days later, in the official account’s first tweet since 2020, Valve said: “TF2 community, we hear you! We love this game and know you do too. We see how big this problem has become and working to make things better .”
Action followed shortly after. In June and July, Valve pushed a number of updates to Team Fortress 2. It fixed an exploit that allowed players to use cheats on secure servers. It fixed the Ap-Sap and its godforsaken noise spam. It changed it so that both teams could run a kick voice at the same time, which helped clear out any bots that players could identify. Slowly, bots became less common, to the point that in researching this story I hadn’t once ruined a game by them (just because of my inability to hit the wide side of a shed).
Then the last domino fell, at least for now. On August 19, Valve took the TF2 servers offline. The server message read: “The item and matchmaking servers will be down for about five minutes for reasons.” Players started reporting VAC bans targeting bots, and it looked like thousands of accounts had been banned in one big purge. The crisis was finally over.
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I asked Maxo how it felt. “It’s insane,” he said. “Just the whole movement that came out of a 15-year-old game. It was beautiful to see the community gathering so well, people who haven’t played in years. It was really beautiful to be honest. If you ask someone about # SaveTF2 they will commend ShorK for organizing it really well. He made all the posters and brought everyone together, did so much of the work behind the scenes to make it all work. It was really special.”
Since the updates started in June, Team Fortress 2’s concurrent users have skyrocketed. From 68,000 in May to 130,000 in September, fans of rocket jumps, sticky traps and sniper back knives have returned. There’s still a bit of uncertainty: players still see a few bots in games, but nowhere near the number that there were before. The fight against cheaters in games seems to be one of the constants of the world along with taxes and I miss headshots.
Things are stable for now, but the community is still holding its breath. They’ve been burned before. Hopefully, though, this will mark a new beginning for TF2. At least Maxo believes so. “I think TF2 will have a renaissance. I think it will soar even higher. It’s going to be big again!”
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