On May 7th, 2022 a YouTuber named SquimJim posted a video (opens in new tab) calling on the community to reach out to Valve via email, even supplying a form letter. Over two years after the source code leak, an idea began to crystallize. Valve's negligence, however, was letting them run rampant. But in most cases, people like this are a minor irritation-they mess up a game or two, ruin the occasional server, then end up getting banned or bored. 'I was hoping for some crazed, genius hacker with an agenda, but instead I just found some bored and sometimes lonely kids messing about.'Īnnoying, to be sure.

Some claimed to have a grudge against certain developers, or to only use hacks to fight certain strategies, but most just thought it was funny to get a rise out of people. The cheaters gave a number of reasons, none of them very satisfactory, that ultimately boiled down to one thing: They thought it was fun. It didn't take long before I found some good leads I could follow.' They would come into the comments section on my YouTube channel and talk about cheating quite openly. 'It's kind of quite mundane at the end of the day. 'It's not some conspiracy theory,' he told me. Why were these bots so prevalent? Why wasn't Valve doing something about it? What was in it for these sociopathic bot wranglers that saw fit to ruin everyone's fun? In a video posted in February 2020 (opens in new tab) that now has over a million views, YouTuber Toofty interviewed a number of cheaters to answer those questions. But the players got no updates in 2020 or 2021, and were left instead with a burning question: Resilient fans did find ways to keep playing, patiently waiting for some kind of an update from Valve. Even during the worst of the crisis, TF2's average players per month never dipped below 65,000-although there is some question of just how many of these were, well, the bots. What had once been Valve's greatest multiplayer game was adrift, and no update arrived to right the ship.ĭedicated members of the community tried to make the best of it. Gone were the good times of the Jungle Inferno update (a glorious month for Pyro mains), gone were easy breezy 2Fort sniper fests, gone were demomen sticky jumping off cliffs. Unable to play on Valve's official lobbies, players migrated to community servers like Uncle Dane's Uncletopia and hunkered down for what would end up being a long, long winter. Frustrated, players took to social media and posted video after video about the situation.

Game maker forums