Valve is stepping in to deal with Team Fortress 2’s rampant bot issue

Team Fortress 2 has been plagued by bot issues for a while now, but Valve has finally pledged to fix them.

For the past couple of years, the multiplayer first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 has had some serious bot problems. These problems have been ramping up in recent months, with fans even going so far as to stage a peaceful protest asking Valve to do something about the issue. Now, finally, Valve is actually stepping in to take action.

“TF2 community, we hear you!” wrote the official Team Fortress 2 Twitter account. “We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things.” This is the first time the Team Fortress 2 account has actually posted since 2020, pointing at how out of hand things have gotten.

Of course, other than saying that it will work to improve things, Valve hasn’t said how it is going to do so, or how long it might take. It does make sense that a game as old as TF2 might not be as high a priority as Valve’s current projects, but the game does still have quite an active community. And the recent bot problems have made the game nearly unplayable.

When the bot problem first kicked off in 2020, Valve did step in to tackle the issue, but things clearly haven’t improved that much since then. In fact, Eurogamer even reported last year that the problem got so bad that players could purchase “bot immunity” so that they wouldn’t be targeted by said bots.

Earlier this week, the aim of the peaceful protest was to get the hashtag #SaveTF2 trending as evidence that the game still had a strong playerbase, and clearly it worked. How long-term Valve’s fix will be remains unclear, but at least something is being done.