 Good evening. Recently, the TF2 bot crisis has finally been picking up attention in the mainstream. And while that's great news for those in the game's downtrodden community, I've noticed a lot of misconceptions and even flat-out misinformation being spread about the situation by popular publications and internet personalities. So as someone who's played the game for over a decade, I want to try to set the record straight and help those uninitiated in the game's history understand just what's going on. Now, this is a complicated topic that even I don't understand all the nuances of. And it involves not just TF2's history, but also its developers history and also kind of the gaming industry as a whole. So I'm going to try to be as thorough as I can, but I'll warn you now that this video might be a little long-winded. So let's start right now from the very top. Who is Valve? Valve is a software and games company that was founded in 1996 and game they're footing after the release of the revolutionary FPS game Half-Life. They're privately owned, meaning they have more freedom than other video game companies who have to keep to shareholders' standards of product output. They release a game when they decide it's ready, not when their investors do. Half-Life's critical success led Valve to distance themselves from their publishing company Sierra and eventually goes solo after releasing the sequel Half-Life 2. Valve leveraged Half-Life 2 to direct attention to their online game distribution service Steam, which eventually became the most popular game distribution service in the world. In 2007, Valve released the phenomenal Orange Box Bundle, which on top of including a new Half-Life title and the critically acclaimed Puzzle Game Portal also let loose the ubiquitous Team Fortress 2. This class-based shooter may have spent nearly a decade in development hell, but it seemed to be worth it in the end. Thanks to its memorable art style, lovable characters and timeless gameplay, Team Fortress 2 remains one of the most popular games on Steam today, going on 15 years after its launch, mind you. Team Fortress 2 had an immense cultural impact. On a surface level, it spawned tons of timeless inside jokes and memes that still regularly ring out through the halls of the internet, and some of the most popular personalities on the internet trace their origins back to its community. But on a more material level, Team Fortress 2 also influenced tons of other video games. One of the most popular games in the world, Overwatch, takes a noticeable amount of inspiration from Team Fortress 2's class mechanics and gameplay design. Oh yeah, Team Fortress 2 also pioneered and made standard what would go on to become two of the most despised business practices in the entire video game industry. Microtransactions and in-game loot boxes. TF2 began adding unlockable weapons and hats in 2008, not even a year after its launch. Two years later, in 2010, these items had ballooned to such popularity that Valve launched an in-game storefront to allow players to purchase these weapons and hats outright, which led to the game amassing a huge in-game economy based around trading or even outright buying rare items. Players could also spend real-world money to buy keys to open crates that have minuscule chances of containing a rare item. This proved to be an incredibly lucrative business model, so much so that not only did it get brought over to other popular Valve titles like Counter-Strike Global Offensive and Dota 2, but also tons of other totally unrelated games. Several times a year, Valve would update Team Fortress 2 with new levels, as well as new hats and weapons for players to unlock or buy. And people were totally fine with it. As time went on, Valve began adding more fan-made hats and weapons into the game, giving the items creators a cut of profit. This allowed people to monetize their passion for TF2, which is pretty awesome. Indeed, one of the things TF2 is most fondly remembered for is the opportunities it provided for its fans. But this would also prove to be a pitfall. In 2017, Valve released Jungle Inferno, which marks the last time they've updated the game to add their own new maps, hats, weapons, or what have you. Since then, there have been seasonal updates every year, but their contents have been all purely community-made. That means Valve hasn't actively developed any assets for the game since 2017, five years ago. So, Valve doesn't want to touch their old game anymore. Why does that matter? Well, it doesn't. People used to be mad about it, but TF2 fans have long passed the point of expecting new shiny weapons and hats. I think most of them have realized that that ship sailed a long time ago. All they want now is a product that functions as advertised. TF2 as a game is in an absolutely horrific state. The game has always had a bit of a cheating problem, but it doesn't just have a cheating problem anymore. It has a botting problem. Thousands, probably more like tens of thousands of automated accounts connect to the game's central matchmaking system, and if a player lands in a server with them, which more often than not they will, they will find the game pretty much unplayable. These bots are programmed to pick the sniper class, and the moment they detect you, instantly kill you from any distance across the map, making enjoying the game nigh impossible. They're also very obnoxious in other ways, spamming communication channels with obscene language, often racial slurs, and copyrighted music too just in case some poor soul happens to be live-streaming. Oh yeah, they'll also initiate vote kicks to boot out real players, but not before copying their username and sometimes profile picture. Go ahead, if you're so inclined, boot up the game and start a casual queue. You will see that at certain hours of the day and especially during the night, this game is unplayable. This problem has persisted for a couple of years now. Some people chalk it up to a source code leak going viral back in 2020, some chalk it up to the game's outdated anti-cheat, but one thing's for certain, this is not what an actively supported AAA game looks like. You might ask why it's Valve's obligation to fix a 15-year-old game in the first place, and that's a great question. Under normal conditions, it wouldn't be. If Valve were to shut off this game's item server and say, well boys, we've had a good run, people would at least have some closure. But what we have here instead is a game that is ostensibly supported, primarily by community content, mind you, that generates unimaginable amounts of money for its publisher, but that straight up cannot be played in the advertised way. Hold on though, this game still has tens of thousands of active players, right? So the problem can't be that bad. Well, what a lot of loyal fans have resorted to is playing on custom servers, unofficial communities that are thinly propped up by volunteer moderation teams. These cost money, and if you're trying to build them to last, it can be quite a high price thanks to the necessity of DDoS protection and such. The most esteemed custom server branch, UncleTopia, is supported by the ginormous content creator UncleDane, and is easily costing him thousands of dollars every month. That means that if you want to enjoy your first experience with Team Fortress 2, you'll more than likely need to forego the official matchmaking and leveling system that every single player who boots up the game is immediately directed toward, and instead use a horrible, unintuitive UI carried over from the early 2000s that doesn't even format properly on certain modern displays to figure out how to join an unofficial server that is built on the back of a YouTuber. Of course, you'd be hard pressed to find another AAA game anything like this. So what does the Team Fortress 2 community want Valve to do about it? Well, they want transparency first and foremost. If the game is unsupported, they would rather Valve just announce that outright than continue to tease fans with new hats and miniskill bug fixes. But if Valve is going to keep calling this a free, actively updated game, then they want to be able to easily play the game without running into these bots. There's a couple ways to do this. Perhaps most sensibly is for Valve to allocate some of their functionally infinite resources to figure out a way to fix or at least mitigate the game's botting problem. Is that a difficult task? Yes. Is Valve a literal billion-dollar corporation with a CEO sporting a net worth more than that of former US President Donald John Trump? Also, yes. If that's too much, then I, and I'll admit I may be alone in this, suggest that they streamline the community server experience instead. If they're not willing to maintain the official servers, they really shouldn't be directing new players toward them. And if they're not even willing to work with the community at all, then I say just pull the plug on the game altogether already. This would obviously never happen because it would result in a loss of income for Valve, and it would look pretty pathetic on their part as well. But it would in all ways still be preferable to them continuing to parade the game's decaying corpse around for people to see like in Weekend at Burnies. Valve has pretty much always been considered the good guys of PC gaming, saviors even. But in the midst of the video game industry's decay, even they have fallen a far way down, and it's a sad sight for sure. Stagnated activity, thriving off of selling other people's games and microtransactions for cosmetics they didn't even create, and even sidelining community projects instead of endorsing them like they did in their prime. It's pretty fucked up, I'm not gonna lie. The situation has gotten bad enough to recently catch the ire of gaming journalism sites, and has also been getting attention from other game developers, and even one of Team Fortress 2's own voice actors. A lot of fans are hoping that this taking to the streets, so to say, will lead to Valve finally acknowledging the problem in a meaningful way, but we have yet to see any official comment. So that's where TF2 stands at the moment. The ball's in your court, Valve.