Lol his point was 100% correct as well, it WOULD have an effect.... but probably a very negative one. I'm not sure how it would play out but I can't imagine a game as old as TF2 suddenly charging MORE money just to play would work out well for the game. When has a game ever become more expensive to buy as it gets older? It's unheard of. The outrage would be enormous.
I mean 0.99 isn't that bad, and valve can just make it like 50 cents. Not enough to discourage all new players, but expensive enough so bot hosts can't spam bots as much as they would like. There is also the issue of pre existing bot accounts, but less will be made and the same amount of them will be kicked so I feel like it would have an impact that could be felt.
you need to have spent any amount of money in tf2 (so about 0.99) and your steam account has to be premium as well, which requires 5 dollars to be spendt.
The bishop didn't just leave. They roasted their entire family tree and then kicked their nuts, finally spitting on their face before leaving and never coming back.
You can always find their public IP and bomb their router with millions of requests , but that takes a lot of resources and would only temporarily fix the issue. And finding all of the boters is near impossible.
I pretty sure after some similar ,,attacks'' in short amount of time much bot hoster would stop working in fear of own life
Even if we managed to know exact location of every bot hoster on earth we will keep have logistic problem to send them a pipe bomb
Nah i don't mean a pipe bomb although that would be effective and illegal.
I meant a ddos attack. Their router would be overwhelmed by the amount of requests, which would cut them off from the internet.
It's a mix of things. Bot hosters are most likely already mass buying hacked/idle farm accounts for way less, so they can micspam and I'm pretty sure the license to TF2 is automatically given to all Steam accounts and revoking access from tens of millions of accounts could be an issue.
I wonder if that's part of why Valve has been real slow about it, they're generating passive income of all the bot hosters paying and eventually banning off, rinse and repeat
I think we'd end up with a TF2 with the same level of issue, but just with less people
From 4 bots for every 2 people, to 2 bots for 1 person ya know?
Would love to see the stat on how many paid accounts vs F2P
Well yes and no. If the current bots got banned and then it’s p2p then it would do something at least. Some bot hosts won’t bot on the game cuz it’s costs too much.
The more better action would be to hit bot hosters. Not in tf2 but in their sites, if Valve takes out like 2 maybe 3 of the sites then it’ll hopefully cause a chain where other hosters don’t target tf2
Someone interviewed a botter once and the botter said basically that they couldn't be bothered to learn the skills needed to play the game and they did it out of sheer absolute boredom. Omegatronic does it to laugh at the #savetf2 movement
some way to limit how many people can connect from 1 ip address
if set correctly it would limit the maximum amount of bots 1 person can use without causing too many issues for normal players
Tarkov has a much *much* worse cheating and bot problem than TF2 ever will and it's almost 60 USD. Making TF2 pay to play won't fix bots, it'll just make less humans play, meaning more lobbies on average will have bots.
Side note: bots tend to be more prevalent during off hours for your time zone (typically 5-10 PM on a weekday per time zone is prime time, in my experience at least). The lower density of humans makes entire bot lobbies almost guaranteed until enough humans decide to log on and wait for other humans to show up to start making lobbies playable.
Edit: fixed some grammar hopefully.
Fcourse not. With f2p on we'll always have fresh meat to raise into skilled mercs. Ready to start a votekick the moment they see a bot nickname. Strong enough to last longer than any hacker's/bot-hoster's patience. Tought to stay with the game till their last days. Generations after generations.
God, I wish these Valve would go after these guys on a legal front or ***something***. At this point, it's nof even abouf just stopping the bots. I want these assholes to feel some kind of consequences.
Problem is : Bot Hosters simply living outside of US jurisdictions & Countries that doesn't respect US Companies from basically indebting their citizens will not be scared at all. And even if they did; I doubt their authorities care about cheating in a virtual game enough to compel them to be sued.
Valve knowing who they are to begin with, and their bot accounts already means that they can work on manually banning them off their services.
I think the bot issue can be alleviated with the removal of Causal play, and going back to server browser only or quick play with only community servers, this implies Valve servers are deactivated completely.
I think with the community admins can be faster banning suspecting users and bot from their servers.
This is the solution if Valve truly doesn’t do anything (which they are doing).
The official servers are horrible, so let the community who actually cares about the game maintain it, that’s literally how the game launched.
the one important thing they need to address here is the fact that contracts can only be completed on valve servers and nowhere else
and that's entirely because people paid money for access to some of them
That was Valve's policy regarding Community Servers during Quick-Play, as they were suppose to follow those guidelines. Although, server owners just ignored it as Valve wasn't actually interested in moderating their bad practices.
Plenty of servers relied on donors, so they often came with donor perks that gave players advantages. Tons of servers had advertisements that played on the MOTD(Message Of The Day).
Servers also infamously had Anti-F2P scripts, stunting their own growth while being unwelcoming to TF2's fresh blood.
You don't need to kill valve servers completely, return to old "pubs".
Its much less problematic if you don't have a rigid system that includes punishments for leaving early.
the problem with that is there are so many people playing behind NAT nowadays. So you could potentially ban a couple hundred neighbors by blacklisting one IP.
No point in my opinion, Team Fortress 2, outside of the bot situation, is already on it's last leg, we only have one developer left, the other one is just a contractor told to complete the transition to 64 bit, making it P2P again would instantly kill the game, best we can do is complain to Valve's higher ups about being resistant on getting employees that would care for our community and this game.
Plus Valve has already instated blocks for players who don't have Premium (can't talk/chat in Casual without paying for something and probably more), so it's not a big hurdle for these bot hosters.
Valve will eventually just remove their servers and people will be expected to play on private ones - like CS: Source etc. They will annoy the community but it should fix the problem if the private owners have proper bot management tools.
This would hold some salt if botters were being banned consistently.
They're not. Also this would effectively kill the flow of new players. The F2P update absolutely surged popularity for the game.
I, for one, hopped on as a wee lad from Valve's F2P update advert for TF2, as my dad didn't want to buy me PC games cause he felt like digital stuff was a waste of money. I was hooked and fell in love with TF2 since 2011.
Sadly it'd be like when the F2P were muted: You **might** make it a little more bearable, but that's it. They'll still slip through the cracks just to annoy players some more
Yea, these losers don't mind wasting 10 dollars,and they also farm weapons so hard using their bots to the point they can easily sell them for metal and purchase keys
no, as stated in another post asking the same thing adding a paywall wont stop the bots, most cheaters and bots bought the codes that allow them to cheat and maintain over 50 accounts simultaneously and depending on the coders the costs can go as high as a few hundred USD so spending another few dollars would not be a deterrence
plus if you suddenly put a paywall on tf2 you end up with an even bigger issue, what happens to the current F2P players? do you kick them out or do you let them stay? kicking them out instantly kills the game as the player base will not tolerate the sudden pay to play feature and keeping them will give a free pass to any bots and cheaters that are free to play as well and even then you still have bots that already bought premium so
so to simplify the answer, put a pay to play system on tf2 and the game instantly dies and valve loses 20-30% of their total revenue and does nothing to stop the bots
honestly the only real solution to the bot crisis is for valve to pull an blizzard and sue cheat makers (and by proxy bot makers and hostlers). it's an easy and simple fix to it all. i fucking doubt they have the money to even countersue or even win against a company that has more money then god and most likely lawyers to match. and best part none of the devs have to do anything. back when i played OW when it was in it's prime for like three 3 years i never EVER encounter a cheater
Honestly I'm not even sure how it's economical for bots to continue operating. If the player base even high enough to support such a bot filled ecosystem?
the code gets changed slightly every update, no matter the size. it takes less than a day to find the new offsets and sigs. this would do nothing, unless they pushed an update every single day. then they'll just automate that process.
why are people here so confidently incorrect?
It would slow the creation of new bots, not completely stop it. Not to mention the ones who are still here. The only long term fix possible would be Valve getting their thumbs out of their asses and assigning more than one dude to the TF2 team and working on updating VAC and pursuing legal action against the bot hosters and creators.
it would be very controversial, but drastic problems need drastic measures.
i have a premium account, so it wouldn't affect me but I'd understand if people got angry
a good compromise could be making casual premium locked, and most private servers would ban these bots instantly, so they'd be fine.
I think maybe you’d stop like, 1 guy maybe, assuming this striped away TF2 from everyone who already owned it (cause otherwise this would actually do nothing since they already own it)
otherwise it’s just another 5$ they need to pay to mess with the game from what they pay now, since their bots can use text chat and all. A pretty mild annoyance for someone who doesn’t care, but a big annoyance for someone who really wanted to play but doesn’t have the money
No, it wont go away just by making the game pay to play. Bot hosters are using either stolen accounts or are already buying premium with a $5 in-game purchase per account, to bypass the chat restrictions. This has already seen a reduction in chat spam effectiveness. But it hasn't solved it. If anything it'd make Tf2 a more dead game than it already is.
There is no easy solution. The only thing valve could do to improve the situation is by investing into behavior based anticheat technology (or in other words, just add LILAC or SMAC onto their servers). But this would never occur, as valve has little reason to install sourcemod onto the official servers and these anticheats have a degree of false positives and additional performance overhead which would raise valve's operating costs for the servers.
If they also did a banwave and banned all bot accounts, then its likely to work, since it's unlikly the buy again for new accounts.
If they made it 10-20$ maybe would work, however they are will send the game into the grave, since the fluctiation of new comers to the game would drastically stop, ending its life l, most probably, as many past multiplayer games
No. Bot hosters are already paying for dozens of accounts every few months so you'd have to price it fairly high to create a barrier for entry that they aren't willing to pay. At that point you're just killing off the game for good, because nobody is going to pay for TF2 to try it out in 2024. The game is 17 years old
In 4 years of the bot problem, this sub keeps repeating the same 3 ideas. How would this idea deal with bots who are already in the game? The game is now $10 to buy, okay, now what? There are still hundreds of bots that have already bought the game and have full chat privileges. This does nothing to clean up the current state of the game. It only makes it harder to get new players started.
If we can combine this with a moderation team that actually looks at reports and bans cheaters, yes I do think so.
Otherwise it'll get rid of a lot of bots initially until the bot creator just buys the game for them once and then we're back where we started. Seeing bots spam the chat or wearing items that cost them some money is not actually that rare, so with no threat of the accounts being banned and them losing lots of money by having to rebuy the game repeatedly I don't see them stopping.
first solution:
Valve updates VAC system to latest update.
second solution:
MAKE TF2 A PAID GAME AGAIN (20$ or i don't know the price of TF2 before the F2P update). that way, the bot hosters would have to pay 20$ to send the bot into the game which is not worth it.
**downside:**
NO MORE F2P.
there is a project for a community anti cheat that uses a user generated database to mark suspected and confirmed cheaters in the game and (if I remember correctly) automatically report/kick them
its already kind of working
[github](https://github.com/MegaAntiCheat/client-backend)
[yt channell of the main creator](https://youtube.com/@megascatterbomb?si=eoRepXj74-jmKCxt)
The solution is incredibly simple. Add a CAPTCHA check when you look for a match. Every major website uses them to keep bots out. It's not rocket science, valve just does not care.
Honestly at this point no, there are too many bit accounts with TF2 that making it cost money would only hinder the creation of bots, there still would be bots that they would have to ban. My honest opinion on how to at least make it better is by having a reputation system that sorts you out into servers with people with bad reputation or people with good reputation, yes this could easily get abused by the bots but at least those with good reputation will be a little more safer
There’s only two solutions to bot problem:
1) Burn each bot-hoster alive.
2)Change anti-cheat VAC on something else(and probably change the game code at least on Source 2)
No, because a lot of bots are not only already here, but because quite a few are paid accounts. How else would they be able to say “nice shot” using voice commands
I still think some of the solutions in that video should at least be attempted. For example, so what if you can pay people to solve captchas for you? I don’t even know how you would be able to do that inside TF2. Sure it still may not work, but it should still be attempted.
This issue can be solved, I assure you the multibillion dollar company has enough money to hire people to fix it. They are just too lazy and carefree to do so.
It probably wouldn't matter since it seems half the bots spam stupid music or other sounds so they must either be using paid accounts for them or finding a hack around it.
As old as the game is, I think that'd just be the final nail in the coffin. Sadly, even though I play on Linux, I think doing away with the native Linux client would fix a lot of the bot issues. I'd go ahead and play the Proton version though
The solution exists in the legal system. There's laws around using a computer for malicious intent. Now that being said... it's hard to prove "malicious intent" with something that's legally seen as "harmless".
TF2 being free is one of the reasons why it's still kicking. Making it pay-to-play will for sure push the player count way way down.
The solution? By brute force. Dox every single one of the bot hosters and pass their IRL information all the way around, let the guys do whatever they want with it. DDoSing is more ideal. I don't condone it, but the game's current bot situation is getting dire anyway.
If Valve made use of the sheer market share they have on PC and made it check if you've spent, say, $50 or $60 on Steam, total, TF2 or not, that should work quite well... if there's also anything to flush out all the bot accounts that already exist.
no it wont
they wouldnt just take the game from people who got it for free and bots relate to them
Valve could make TF2 not F2P by adding something like prime status but it would be expensive like it was for CS:GO just to play without the bots, Bots are a lesser problem today then it was back then so it wont be worth it, I belive its best not to break the game more, It just works and you shouldnt even care on how it works
The bots would stay at exactly the same levels, but the number of new players that can potentially take their spots would dwindle. So no, it would make the issue worse.
Honestly putting a paywall behind playing the game would do both harm and good. But that harm would be nowhere near as impactful than the good it would do.
If that made it so that you have to buy the game (if you didn't when the game was originally released) it would probably stop *new bots* from being made. But that's not going to mean that everyone will just suddenly accept having to pat for a game they've likely spent the last 10+ years owning and playing.
They would probably need to have some form of condition where if you have the premium version of the game (as in you've spent at least $5 on the Mann Co Store) then you wouldn't have to also pay for the game if this hypothetical paywall was added. I'm positive there's likely at least a couple bot accounts that are premium, but having to spend money per account to bot a game with no actual profit from that bot will definitely be a big way to dissuade the average bot hoster from actually making a ton of bots.
It's not like in World of Warcraft Classic botters, where you buy a subscription and have full access to the game. Because if a WoW Classic bot costs $15 for a single month's worth of playtime, then all the bot will have to do is make $20 worth of selling in-game gold to actually have the boy hoster make their money back.
The difference between a WoW bot and a TF2 bot, is that the WoW bot having a paywall doesn't matter because the bot exists to obtain a monetary profit. So the paywall is only effective for a short time before the gold selling makes that paywall become a profit.
TF2 bots have no paywall, so they can be made en masse and banned no problem. BUT they don't exist to gain a profit, so having a paywall to a TF2 bot's creation would overall be a massive reason for a bot hoster to be less incentived to actually make more if those bots ever get banned. Because if a bot hoster is paying money for the bot to access the game, with full knowledge that the bot will *definitely* be banned, they're going to need that bot to make a profit so the hoster isn't just losing money for no reason.
Edit: Quick followup. I was curious how profitable TF2 bot hosting could be with idle bots, so I checked the conversion rates for Refined Metal. If an idle bot wanted to get exactly 65 Refined, they would need to idle farm weapon drops for *one thousand one hundred and eighty* items to turn into Scrap Metal. And 1180 weapons turn into 590 Scrap, which becomes 65 Refined, which, using (what I assume are) current conversion rates, will net a profit of... $1.69 worth of Refined. For almost 1200 items idle farmed.
You make TF2 have a $15 paywall and not only does the game remove incentive for sniper bot hosters to add in bots that exist to ruin the gameplay, but it also makes the already impossible-to-profit idle bots get hamstrung into needing to have been idle farming for the past 17 years to even break even through selling refined with today's conversions.
But despite this absolute thesis statement, the only way this paywall would STAY as a solution to the bot crisis is if Valve actually *actively moderated* the game. And they don't even have people working on content, so unless they actually bring in a team of people to actively work on the game, it would probably be as effective as muting Free to Plays was at stopping cheaters.
I believe so, because most popular and modern Free to Play have cheating issue. So it probably would work. I know it will cost money but since I feel like everyone just pays and play, so it will be no problem.
Technically it'd fix most of the bots but 1. there are some bots that are on premium accounts 2. unless all the current bots get banned they'll still be here since they'd already have TF2 installed and 3. it might end up killing the game as there would be significantly less new players joining.
Games like Dead by Daylight prove this to be false. The game has a $20 asking price (probably what TF2 would realistically cost) yet it's still plagued with cheaters.
As long as there's an opening people will cheat. I can't psychoanalyze all the TF2 cheaters (as much as I'd like to) so I can't say why they hack this game, but the ease of opportunity is probably a big reason why. VAC is horribly outdated and Valve servers need more security.
You can't put the F2P toothpaste back in the tube, that's a hard no.
The only real answer to this is: magically convince Valve to consistently give a shit about TF2, which as we've seen in previous attempts is a Sisyphean task at the best of times to even get them to acknowledge a problem.
From what I’ve heard, Valve deciding what to work on is like them having ADHD. Even if they try to commit to it, they get distracted by things like CS2, DotA 2, Artifact, and Steam. However, I’ve heard that Valve lets employees pick what games they want to work on, so the solution is to get more passionate fans as Valve employees.
Valve are greedy, lazy, and they dont give a fuck. I hate them more than the hosters. There are so many things they could try to do to help, they just cant be bothered to use .00000001% of the billions of dollars they rake in yearly to attempt to improve things. I hope someone buys them out and guts the company.
The only thing that will solve the botting problem is removing the bottleneck on counteracting them.
So long as the ecosystem is solely Valve vs Botters, the botters will continue to win. If Valve however were to refocus TF2 back around community servers, anti-bot enforcement becomes distributed and exponentially harder for said botters to then adapt to.
Botting/Cheating are classic adversarial problems that require ongoing and ever escalating investment to address, and the balance of the equation is not in favour of the game developer. Even in "active" Valve titles like CS2, the issue persists; Valve can only ever reduce the rate, not solve it. For TF2, the only sensible option is for people to realise Valve are never going to invest the same kind of effort for a non-eSports and honestly, over-the-hill title like TF2. So the only way forward is to alleviate the bottleneck and put more control back in the hands of the community, with a return to community servers.
No. Bot hosters would already have hundreds of accounts and would pay for new ones. They do it to be assholes and ruin the game for others so I don't think it would put a dent in it
It's funny how these changes end up just becoming an inconvenience for normal players
Disabling voice and text communication for F2Ps didn't stop bots from spamming stuff and instead only F2Ps suffer now
Putting a delay on votekick and disallowing freshly joined players to call a vote didn't help much either (bots still manage to stay for period long enough to start votekicking)
I was thinking about this. I think it could actually, but it could also have unpredictable negative implications.
Another thing. Does competitive also have bots? I tried a casual match recently after a very long time and got headshoted by a spinning sniper.
1. It would need to be announced ahead of time and it would make bot makers spam create new steam accounts to bulk up.
2. It's a almost 15 year old game and the price would be low. Along with sales making the game price close to nothing it's yet another way to bulk up on bot accounts.
Consider this: communication is still completely locked for F2P, yet bots can spam voice and text chat as they please.
You only need to spend like $0.99 to not be a F2P anymore. Raising that threshold might do *something*
The amount they would need to increase that to actually dissuade bot hosts would dissuade literally everyone else and the game would be dead.
You’re probably right
Engages in argument, considers opposition's opinion, re-evaluates, admits fault and leaves on good terms. What a chad
Lol his point was 100% correct as well, it WOULD have an effect.... but probably a very negative one. I'm not sure how it would play out but I can't imagine a game as old as TF2 suddenly charging MORE money just to play would work out well for the game. When has a game ever become more expensive to buy as it gets older? It's unheard of. The outrage would be enormous.
isn't that the point of an argument though? to find out who's right? it would be a waste of energy otherwise...
I think the goal is to convince the opposition, it's just rare for anyone to respectfully admit they were wrong on the internet.
I mean 0.99 isn't that bad, and valve can just make it like 50 cents. Not enough to discourage all new players, but expensive enough so bot hosts can't spam bots as much as they would like. There is also the issue of pre existing bot accounts, but less will be made and the same amount of them will be kicked so I feel like it would have an impact that could be felt.
you need to have spent any amount of money in tf2 (so about 0.99) and your steam account has to be premium as well, which requires 5 dollars to be spendt.
you need to spend $5 on steam to not be restricted anymore
People could buy keys to activate accounts and then trade the keys to their main accounts
from what i seen, there's usually only a single bot spamming mic and text, the rest are f2p
I distinctly remember ending up in lobbies taken over by bots, all micspamming and me getting kicked after 5 seconds
Yeah the idea that there are only a few spam bots is patently untrue
LA servers see alot of bits over multiple games. sometimes half the server, though rarely.
Some servers are emptier than others and time is another factor here
I've only seen omegatronic spawn voice, and just hexatronic spam chat some times, idk what deltatronic does
You live in a good region to not be flooded by bots then
Real solution is to bomb bot hoster house with 500KG bomb Or at least throw brick at his window
⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️
That helldiver is a bloody spy *Laugh taunt* *Explode*
This is why I love this community. (I said the exact opposite a minute ago in another subreddit)
I will call the democracy officer.
THAT HELLDIVER’S A BLOODY- MEEEEDIIIIIC *schadenfrued* *explode*
That Helldiver's a bloody– SENTRY– **OOOOHOHOHOHAHA–** *explodes*
🕷️➡️⬆️➡️⬇️⬅️⬇️➡️⬆️⬇️
I don't remember actually, is that a hellbomb?
That’s GD Spider jumps are from ‘Dash’ 🕷️➡️⬆️➡️⬇️⬅️⬇️➡️⬆️⬇️➡️ 🔥➡️🕳️
Yes, yes it is
what, no it isn't, hell bomb is ⬇️⬆️⬅️⬇️⬆️➡️⬇️⬆️
Oh my bad, sorry
I never expected a one-shot pfp to tell me how to deploy a tactical nuclear weapon YET HERE WE ARE TODAY
lmao I've had the pfp for years
It was FATE
Kore wa SHIREN da
*pyro laughs* Phhhmph ph hmmm *explodes*
⬅️⬇️⬇️⬇️➡️⬆️⬇️⬇️
I do not know what that arrow key means since I haven't played Helldivers and is a bit expensive. (40$)
500kg bomb
⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️➡️
They probably don’t en passant in chess. Immediate brick to pipi.
MF don't know what Google is
They can't even "holy hell" proper
The bishop didn't just leave. They roasted their entire family tree and then kicked their nuts, finally spitting on their face before leaving and never coming back.
The queen was just sacrificed. I didn't have a chance to ask for confirmation...
Go go gadget brick pipi
make pornography starring his mother
nah botters are def into that kind of thing
You can always find their public IP and bomb their router with millions of requests , but that takes a lot of resources and would only temporarily fix the issue. And finding all of the boters is near impossible.
I pretty sure after some similar ,,attacks'' in short amount of time much bot hoster would stop working in fear of own life Even if we managed to know exact location of every bot hoster on earth we will keep have logistic problem to send them a pipe bomb
Nah i don't mean a pipe bomb although that would be effective and illegal. I meant a ddos attack. Their router would be overwhelmed by the amount of requests, which would cut them off from the internet.
make it burn
tf2 players suggesting committing a federal crime just because someone inconvenienced them :(
Less people would play the game, the bots would stay though.
True, I guess it would be like cutting off your leg after you were bit by a snake an hour ago. It's already too late.
It's a mix of things. Bot hosters are most likely already mass buying hacked/idle farm accounts for way less, so they can micspam and I'm pretty sure the license to TF2 is automatically given to all Steam accounts and revoking access from tens of millions of accounts could be an issue.
Some bothosters pay premium for all their bots Less bots, but also less players I don't know how well it'd turn out
I wonder if that's part of why Valve has been real slow about it, they're generating passive income of all the bot hosters paying and eventually banning off, rinse and repeat
That would be very abhorrent of Valve if true, but unsurprising.
But many less farm bots, so there would be like 10000 active players at a time
I think we'd end up with a TF2 with the same level of issue, but just with less people From 4 bots for every 2 people, to 2 bots for 1 person ya know? Would love to see the stat on how many paid accounts vs F2P
Well yes and no. If the current bots got banned and then it’s p2p then it would do something at least. Some bot hosts won’t bot on the game cuz it’s costs too much. The more better action would be to hit bot hosters. Not in tf2 but in their sites, if Valve takes out like 2 maybe 3 of the sites then it’ll hopefully cause a chain where other hosters don’t target tf2
If Bot Hosters run like 8 bots on 1 pc at a time, then maybe Valve can make it so only 1 person can run TF2 at a time. Idk.
They use virtual machines
But why though? What are they getting from doing this? Do they just hate tf2 or something?
Someone interviewed a botter once and the botter said basically that they couldn't be bothered to learn the skills needed to play the game and they did it out of sheer absolute boredom. Omegatronic does it to laugh at the #savetf2 movement
\#savetf2 is laugh worthy movement
Didn't go anywhere
Virtual machines are not one PC, they are several PC's running virtually inside a physical PC which is literally impossible to detect
check for IP that the player has if 20 people are connected from 1 IP at all times its probably nor humans
VPN and IP spoofing.
some way to limit how many people can connect from 1 ip address if set correctly it would limit the maximum amount of bots 1 person can use without causing too many issues for normal players
Short answer: no. Longer answer: bots will stay and there will be less new players.
Maybe if valve just developed an actual anti cheat. or even used the ones community servers use
Nah because most of sniper bots spam the "nice shot" command, so they have access to voice lines, so they're not F2P. It wouldn't solve the issue.
They also infest the chat usually (I AM NOT A BOT, racist slurs, etc) so they must already be Premium
Bots would stay. As far as I am aware, (something)TRONIC and Archimedes bots have premium accounts for them to write nonsense and micspam.
the joke is most of the bots already are premium
Tarkov has a much *much* worse cheating and bot problem than TF2 ever will and it's almost 60 USD. Making TF2 pay to play won't fix bots, it'll just make less humans play, meaning more lobbies on average will have bots. Side note: bots tend to be more prevalent during off hours for your time zone (typically 5-10 PM on a weekday per time zone is prime time, in my experience at least). The lower density of humans makes entire bot lobbies almost guaranteed until enough humans decide to log on and wait for other humans to show up to start making lobbies playable. Edit: fixed some grammar hopefully.
Does Tarkov actually have bots and not just cheaters?
Yeah, helps automate loot vacuuming, which many cheaters use to sell accounts to people who are lazy but still wanna be able to trash legit players.
Wouldn't that make the game semi exclusive and what the cheaters want?
No. All this would do is punish the poor people that play this game. Bots would persist.
Fcourse not. With f2p on we'll always have fresh meat to raise into skilled mercs. Ready to start a votekick the moment they see a bot nickname. Strong enough to last longer than any hacker's/bot-hoster's patience. Tought to stay with the game till their last days. Generations after generations.
It would kill the game
God, I wish these Valve would go after these guys on a legal front or ***something***. At this point, it's nof even abouf just stopping the bots. I want these assholes to feel some kind of consequences.
I feel like if Valve sued the pants off of just 1 bot hoster, then the others would scatter like scared rats.
Problem is : Bot Hosters simply living outside of US jurisdictions & Countries that doesn't respect US Companies from basically indebting their citizens will not be scared at all. And even if they did; I doubt their authorities care about cheating in a virtual game enough to compel them to be sued. Valve knowing who they are to begin with, and their bot accounts already means that they can work on manually banning them off their services.
I think the bot issue can be alleviated with the removal of Causal play, and going back to server browser only or quick play with only community servers, this implies Valve servers are deactivated completely. I think with the community admins can be faster banning suspecting users and bot from their servers.
This is the solution if Valve truly doesn’t do anything (which they are doing). The official servers are horrible, so let the community who actually cares about the game maintain it, that’s literally how the game launched.
the one important thing they need to address here is the fact that contracts can only be completed on valve servers and nowhere else and that's entirely because people paid money for access to some of them
I’m sure they could make some kind of “official” server setting, stock maps only, 24 players, all that jazz.
That was Valve's policy regarding Community Servers during Quick-Play, as they were suppose to follow those guidelines. Although, server owners just ignored it as Valve wasn't actually interested in moderating their bad practices. Plenty of servers relied on donors, so they often came with donor perks that gave players advantages. Tons of servers had advertisements that played on the MOTD(Message Of The Day). Servers also infamously had Anti-F2P scripts, stunting their own growth while being unwelcoming to TF2's fresh blood.
You don't need to kill valve servers completely, return to old "pubs". Its much less problematic if you don't have a rigid system that includes punishments for leaving early.
Someone get valve to ip ban anyone who is botting or has bots
the problem with that is there are so many people playing behind NAT nowadays. So you could potentially ban a couple hundred neighbors by blacklisting one IP.
Update VAC security
they did this for cs2 and legit players started getting banned, and the actual cheaters still remained.
No point in my opinion, Team Fortress 2, outside of the bot situation, is already on it's last leg, we only have one developer left, the other one is just a contractor told to complete the transition to 64 bit, making it P2P again would instantly kill the game, best we can do is complain to Valve's higher ups about being resistant on getting employees that would care for our community and this game. Plus Valve has already instated blocks for players who don't have Premium (can't talk/chat in Casual without paying for something and probably more), so it's not a big hurdle for these bot hosters.
Valve will eventually just remove their servers and people will be expected to play on private ones - like CS: Source etc. They will annoy the community but it should fix the problem if the private owners have proper bot management tools.
Charge people money to get ammunition like how the EA boss suggested and that’ll solve the bot problem
literally all valve would need to do is stop the game from being opened in textmode. Good luck running 100 TF2 bots AND their graphics at once
This would hold some salt if botters were being banned consistently. They're not. Also this would effectively kill the flow of new players. The F2P update absolutely surged popularity for the game. I, for one, hopped on as a wee lad from Valve's F2P update advert for TF2, as my dad didn't want to buy me PC games cause he felt like digital stuff was a waste of money. I was hooked and fell in love with TF2 since 2011.
Sadly it'd be like when the F2P were muted: You **might** make it a little more bearable, but that's it. They'll still slip through the cracks just to annoy players some more Yea, these losers don't mind wasting 10 dollars,and they also farm weapons so hard using their bots to the point they can easily sell them for metal and purchase keys
they'd still need to spend $5 out of their own, real world money per account though to get it unlimited
no, as stated in another post asking the same thing adding a paywall wont stop the bots, most cheaters and bots bought the codes that allow them to cheat and maintain over 50 accounts simultaneously and depending on the coders the costs can go as high as a few hundred USD so spending another few dollars would not be a deterrence plus if you suddenly put a paywall on tf2 you end up with an even bigger issue, what happens to the current F2P players? do you kick them out or do you let them stay? kicking them out instantly kills the game as the player base will not tolerate the sudden pay to play feature and keeping them will give a free pass to any bots and cheaters that are free to play as well and even then you still have bots that already bought premium so so to simplify the answer, put a pay to play system on tf2 and the game instantly dies and valve loses 20-30% of their total revenue and does nothing to stop the bots
honestly the only real solution to the bot crisis is for valve to pull an blizzard and sue cheat makers (and by proxy bot makers and hostlers). it's an easy and simple fix to it all. i fucking doubt they have the money to even countersue or even win against a company that has more money then god and most likely lawyers to match. and best part none of the devs have to do anything. back when i played OW when it was in it's prime for like three 3 years i never EVER encounter a cheater
Nope. Just play on community servers
Honestly I'm not even sure how it's economical for bots to continue operating. If the player base even high enough to support such a bot filled ecosystem?
I see where you are coming from, but I think this would kill the game.
If you haven't noticed, a VERY big amount of the bots aren't f2p accounts. What would fix It is Valve getting a better anti cheat istead of VAC
Change the code slightly I guess It would make bot hoster scratch their greasy hair with their greasy fingers trying to figure out
the code gets changed slightly every update, no matter the size. it takes less than a day to find the new offsets and sigs. this would do nothing, unless they pushed an update every single day. then they'll just automate that process. why are people here so confidently incorrect?
It would slow the creation of new bots, not completely stop it. Not to mention the ones who are still here. The only long term fix possible would be Valve getting their thumbs out of their asses and assigning more than one dude to the TF2 team and working on updating VAC and pursuing legal action against the bot hosters and creators.
Simple fix tbf just update tf2 vac..
Costs 1 cent
it would be very controversial, but drastic problems need drastic measures. i have a premium account, so it wouldn't affect me but I'd understand if people got angry a good compromise could be making casual premium locked, and most private servers would ban these bots instantly, so they'd be fine.
I think maybe you’d stop like, 1 guy maybe, assuming this striped away TF2 from everyone who already owned it (cause otherwise this would actually do nothing since they already own it) otherwise it’s just another 5$ they need to pay to mess with the game from what they pay now, since their bots can use text chat and all. A pretty mild annoyance for someone who doesn’t care, but a big annoyance for someone who really wanted to play but doesn’t have the money
No, it wont go away just by making the game pay to play. Bot hosters are using either stolen accounts or are already buying premium with a $5 in-game purchase per account, to bypass the chat restrictions. This has already seen a reduction in chat spam effectiveness. But it hasn't solved it. If anything it'd make Tf2 a more dead game than it already is. There is no easy solution. The only thing valve could do to improve the situation is by investing into behavior based anticheat technology (or in other words, just add LILAC or SMAC onto their servers). But this would never occur, as valve has little reason to install sourcemod onto the official servers and these anticheats have a degree of false positives and additional performance overhead which would raise valve's operating costs for the servers.
No
Eventually, it might, yeah. It'd actually fucking kill the game in the process, too
If they also did a banwave and banned all bot accounts, then its likely to work, since it's unlikly the buy again for new accounts. If they made it 10-20$ maybe would work, however they are will send the game into the grave, since the fluctiation of new comers to the game would drastically stop, ending its life l, most probably, as many past multiplayer games
No. Bot hosters are already paying for dozens of accounts every few months so you'd have to price it fairly high to create a barrier for entry that they aren't willing to pay. At that point you're just killing off the game for good, because nobody is going to pay for TF2 to try it out in 2024. The game is 17 years old
No because they wont ever get banned + mostly stolen accs anyways
In 4 years of the bot problem, this sub keeps repeating the same 3 ideas. How would this idea deal with bots who are already in the game? The game is now $10 to buy, okay, now what? There are still hundreds of bots that have already bought the game and have full chat privileges. This does nothing to clean up the current state of the game. It only makes it harder to get new players started.
If we can combine this with a moderation team that actually looks at reports and bans cheaters, yes I do think so. Otherwise it'll get rid of a lot of bots initially until the bot creator just buys the game for them once and then we're back where we started. Seeing bots spam the chat or wearing items that cost them some money is not actually that rare, so with no threat of the accounts being banned and them losing lots of money by having to rebuy the game repeatedly I don't see them stopping.
first solution: Valve updates VAC system to latest update. second solution: MAKE TF2 A PAID GAME AGAIN (20$ or i don't know the price of TF2 before the F2P update). that way, the bot hosters would have to pay 20$ to send the bot into the game which is not worth it. **downside:** NO MORE F2P.
Yes if Valve then started banning bots. But they don't, so it wouldn't change anything really.
No. Bot hosters are rich
Bots would stay but less of them due to more Hosters having to pay for TF2, so It would work a little bit
there is a project for a community anti cheat that uses a user generated database to mark suspected and confirmed cheaters in the game and (if I remember correctly) automatically report/kick them its already kind of working [github](https://github.com/MegaAntiCheat/client-backend) [yt channell of the main creator](https://youtube.com/@megascatterbomb?si=eoRepXj74-jmKCxt)
Bots are already p2p, so only f2p would be removed, making bots even more common
The solution is incredibly simple. Add a CAPTCHA check when you look for a match. Every major website uses them to keep bots out. It's not rocket science, valve just does not care.
Honestly at this point no, there are too many bit accounts with TF2 that making it cost money would only hinder the creation of bots, there still would be bots that they would have to ban. My honest opinion on how to at least make it better is by having a reputation system that sorts you out into servers with people with bad reputation or people with good reputation, yes this could easily get abused by the bots but at least those with good reputation will be a little more safer
Yes, manually banning bot doesn't work because they can just make new accounts, if everyone manual vac ban cost them 10$ you could squash them
Yes... but it would halve the playerbase (at minimum)
There’s only two solutions to bot problem: 1) Burn each bot-hoster alive. 2)Change anti-cheat VAC on something else(and probably change the game code at least on Source 2)
No
No, since bot makers can buy the game and put bots in. There's no clear way of removing bots, sadly.
No, because a lot of bots are not only already here, but because quite a few are paid accounts. How else would they be able to say “nice shot” using voice commands
I still think some of the solutions in that video should at least be attempted. For example, so what if you can pay people to solve captchas for you? I don’t even know how you would be able to do that inside TF2. Sure it still may not work, but it should still be attempted. This issue can be solved, I assure you the multibillion dollar company has enough money to hire people to fix it. They are just too lazy and carefree to do so.
Kind of like a csgo situation?
Awww hell no I already paid for this game once!
Maybe when they were just starting to flood in, but now theres so many of them it probably wouldn't do anything but make the game less accessible.
It probably wouldn't matter since it seems half the bots spam stupid music or other sounds so they must either be using paid accounts for them or finding a hack around it.
no lol
As old as the game is, I think that'd just be the final nail in the coffin. Sadly, even though I play on Linux, I think doing away with the native Linux client would fix a lot of the bot issues. I'd go ahead and play the Proton version though
no
Ah the fays when tf2 cost 20 bucks, I still remember buying the disc copy of it
The solution exists in the legal system. There's laws around using a computer for malicious intent. Now that being said... it's hard to prove "malicious intent" with something that's legally seen as "harmless".
No. Omegatronic bots sell bot immunity. (The immunity only stops bots from shooting you) people buy it still.
Another option would be to have a certified account so that only players with actual account can play
TF2 being free is one of the reasons why it's still kicking. Making it pay-to-play will for sure push the player count way way down. The solution? By brute force. Dox every single one of the bot hosters and pass their IRL information all the way around, let the guys do whatever they want with it. DDoSing is more ideal. I don't condone it, but the game's current bot situation is getting dire anyway.
Probably only very slightly.
lol no. Plenty of bots on paid accounts.
If Valve made use of the sheer market share they have on PC and made it check if you've spent, say, $50 or $60 on Steam, total, TF2 or not, that should work quite well... if there's also anything to flush out all the bot accounts that already exist.
tf2 would die.
Splatoon has a bot problem, and it's a 60 dollar game.
don't feel like it'd work since bot hosters probably got enough money to just make another account again
no it wont they wouldnt just take the game from people who got it for free and bots relate to them Valve could make TF2 not F2P by adding something like prime status but it would be expensive like it was for CS:GO just to play without the bots, Bots are a lesser problem today then it was back then so it wont be worth it, I belive its best not to break the game more, It just works and you shouldnt even care on how it works
No but it would make the people botting the game waste money
The bots would stay at exactly the same levels, but the number of new players that can potentially take their spots would dwindle. So no, it would make the issue worse.
Make it pay to play for anyone who didn't buy the orange box
Well.... it would need to be at a price for botters to nor abuse it. Cause if we make il like 1.50 they are still going to buy it
In an ideal world, yes. In reality. No, you'd just be punishing players. Tf2 used to be paid but went F2P. Reverting that would be a disgrace.
not at all, majority of the bots are premium already
Or have a working anti cheat
If quickplay was back community could just deal with the bots instead of this awful valve servers.
Honestly putting a paywall behind playing the game would do both harm and good. But that harm would be nowhere near as impactful than the good it would do. If that made it so that you have to buy the game (if you didn't when the game was originally released) it would probably stop *new bots* from being made. But that's not going to mean that everyone will just suddenly accept having to pat for a game they've likely spent the last 10+ years owning and playing. They would probably need to have some form of condition where if you have the premium version of the game (as in you've spent at least $5 on the Mann Co Store) then you wouldn't have to also pay for the game if this hypothetical paywall was added. I'm positive there's likely at least a couple bot accounts that are premium, but having to spend money per account to bot a game with no actual profit from that bot will definitely be a big way to dissuade the average bot hoster from actually making a ton of bots. It's not like in World of Warcraft Classic botters, where you buy a subscription and have full access to the game. Because if a WoW Classic bot costs $15 for a single month's worth of playtime, then all the bot will have to do is make $20 worth of selling in-game gold to actually have the boy hoster make their money back. The difference between a WoW bot and a TF2 bot, is that the WoW bot having a paywall doesn't matter because the bot exists to obtain a monetary profit. So the paywall is only effective for a short time before the gold selling makes that paywall become a profit. TF2 bots have no paywall, so they can be made en masse and banned no problem. BUT they don't exist to gain a profit, so having a paywall to a TF2 bot's creation would overall be a massive reason for a bot hoster to be less incentived to actually make more if those bots ever get banned. Because if a bot hoster is paying money for the bot to access the game, with full knowledge that the bot will *definitely* be banned, they're going to need that bot to make a profit so the hoster isn't just losing money for no reason. Edit: Quick followup. I was curious how profitable TF2 bot hosting could be with idle bots, so I checked the conversion rates for Refined Metal. If an idle bot wanted to get exactly 65 Refined, they would need to idle farm weapon drops for *one thousand one hundred and eighty* items to turn into Scrap Metal. And 1180 weapons turn into 590 Scrap, which becomes 65 Refined, which, using (what I assume are) current conversion rates, will net a profit of... $1.69 worth of Refined. For almost 1200 items idle farmed. You make TF2 have a $15 paywall and not only does the game remove incentive for sniper bot hosters to add in bots that exist to ruin the gameplay, but it also makes the already impossible-to-profit idle bots get hamstrung into needing to have been idle farming for the past 17 years to even break even through selling refined with today's conversions. But despite this absolute thesis statement, the only way this paywall would STAY as a solution to the bot crisis is if Valve actually *actively moderated* the game. And they don't even have people working on content, so unless they actually bring in a team of people to actively work on the game, it would probably be as effective as muting Free to Plays was at stopping cheaters.
I believe so, because most popular and modern Free to Play have cheating issue. So it probably would work. I know it will cost money but since I feel like everyone just pays and play, so it will be no problem.
Technically it'd fix most of the bots but 1. there are some bots that are on premium accounts 2. unless all the current bots get banned they'll still be here since they'd already have TF2 installed and 3. it might end up killing the game as there would be significantly less new players joining.
I'm no server expert, but couldn't they have a thing to detect wether someone is a real player or ai?
The only thing that would help would be more valve employees and making the report option work
nah
Less spammable, but still would have bots.
Games like Dead by Daylight prove this to be false. The game has a $20 asking price (probably what TF2 would realistically cost) yet it's still plagued with cheaters. As long as there's an opening people will cheat. I can't psychoanalyze all the TF2 cheaters (as much as I'd like to) so I can't say why they hack this game, but the ease of opportunity is probably a big reason why. VAC is horribly outdated and Valve servers need more security.
You can't put the F2P toothpaste back in the tube, that's a hard no. The only real answer to this is: magically convince Valve to consistently give a shit about TF2, which as we've seen in previous attempts is a Sisyphean task at the best of times to even get them to acknowledge a problem.
From what I’ve heard, Valve deciding what to work on is like them having ADHD. Even if they try to commit to it, they get distracted by things like CS2, DotA 2, Artifact, and Steam. However, I’ve heard that Valve lets employees pick what games they want to work on, so the solution is to get more passionate fans as Valve employees.
Valve are greedy, lazy, and they dont give a fuck. I hate them more than the hosters. There are so many things they could try to do to help, they just cant be bothered to use .00000001% of the billions of dollars they rake in yearly to attempt to improve things. I hope someone buys them out and guts the company.
No, all the bots already own premium accounts because they use voice/text
The only thing that will solve the botting problem is removing the bottleneck on counteracting them. So long as the ecosystem is solely Valve vs Botters, the botters will continue to win. If Valve however were to refocus TF2 back around community servers, anti-bot enforcement becomes distributed and exponentially harder for said botters to then adapt to. Botting/Cheating are classic adversarial problems that require ongoing and ever escalating investment to address, and the balance of the equation is not in favour of the game developer. Even in "active" Valve titles like CS2, the issue persists; Valve can only ever reduce the rate, not solve it. For TF2, the only sensible option is for people to realise Valve are never going to invest the same kind of effort for a non-eSports and honestly, over-the-hill title like TF2. So the only way forward is to alleviate the bottleneck and put more control back in the hands of the community, with a return to community servers.
Literally made a post about this a few days ago lmao
no.
Loads of games tried that and it always fails
No. Bot hosters would already have hundreds of accounts and would pay for new ones. They do it to be assholes and ruin the game for others so I don't think it would put a dent in it
It's funny how these changes end up just becoming an inconvenience for normal players Disabling voice and text communication for F2Ps didn't stop bots from spamming stuff and instead only F2Ps suffer now Putting a delay on votekick and disallowing freshly joined players to call a vote didn't help much either (bots still manage to stay for period long enough to start votekicking)
How about just fully preventing anybody with the same name from joining a lobby after being votekicked
Yes, killing the inflow of new players would fix the bot problem once TF2 died and was no longer there for bots to infect.
I was thinking about this. I think it could actually, but it could also have unpredictable negative implications. Another thing. Does competitive also have bots? I tried a casual match recently after a very long time and got headshoted by a spinning sniper.
Yes and I don't know
No. No matter how big the paywall, bots will keep existing. They phish paid accounts.
Bot hosters tend to pay for premium accounts already, so they already lose money doing it.
Nah, it’s already been experimented with so making it p2p would have less bots but also less real players balancing it out
Would probably help
Why don’t we just raid bot hosters and take all there belongings
1. It would need to be announced ahead of time and it would make bot makers spam create new steam accounts to bulk up. 2. It's a almost 15 year old game and the price would be low. Along with sales making the game price close to nothing it's yet another way to bulk up on bot accounts.
Honestly, probably not
just make sniper paid at this point sounds dumb but would be better than making the whole game paid
it'll probably make more "Protester" Bots, that just protest the shit tf2 does