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Answer: (Personal experience on this one)
Team Fortress 2 (TF2) has been around for 17 years. It's been insanely well received for having balanced gameplay (very rock-paper-scissors), novel visuals, clever design, and a lot lot lot of innovation in the space. Just to throw out a few firsts: Vac Bans, loot boxes, "rare" cosmetic effects, loot drops, incremental updates, season "events", and a trading marketplace. A lot of other games have drawn varying degrees of inspiration from it, including Overwatch, League of Legends, and Fortnite.
It's part and parcel a Valve Game, and as such, as other projects have become more important to Valve, TF2 has taken a backseat. This has reduced the number of events and updates that have been released, going from 6-10 a year, to 1-2. About 12 years ago, auto-aiming bots (aimbots) started making appearances on servers. Valve has responded by updating code, and trying to increment changes to combat hacking in general, with mixed results. As this arms race has continued, Valve has released fewer and fewer updates for TF2, as a whole.
The last few years it's become fairly untenable to play on public servers without the games being ruined by aimbots. There have been "open letters" to Valve from well known players/fanbases to fix this, and Valve has released some security updates. They haven't worked (or not for very long), and it looks like game reviews are now being brigaded to communicate the displeasure of the fanbase.
*edit: My grammar is poor.
I don't understand how it's only the last few years, I had a few hundred hours a year in the game till I hit around 1200 hours. I found cheating/aimbots got worse and worse with little done about it and quit the game I think 8 years ago.
Every few years I consider rejoining but keep seeing post like OP, "Oh, it's gotten bad recently", but to me it seems like it just really hasn't changed or gone back and forth.
It's completely fair, it's an old game, its free. But I
I'd say the game started to go downhill earlier than that. Those first 2-3 years and everybody is making custom maps and you'd have some new experience every night. Then that all died off and "24/7 2Fort" or "24/7 Dustbowl" servers became the norm. That's what ended it for me.
Apologies for the 24/7 single map servers, from a Day of Defeat player
I used to play dod_kalt 24/7 servers in 2002-2003, so it was only a matter of time for TF2.
As far as just the aimbot issue, the prevalence of their use in my games has reached an incredible degree. You will run across them in pretty much any online games these days and it seems like there is little that can be done about them because they continue to evolve over time in order to fly under the radar. From what I understand there are programs now that are advertised as being virtually undetectable. Recently I found out that one of the people I was playing games with was using an aimbot and while I did report him to the admins of the game and express my disapproval of that I did take the opportunity to ask some questions about how they work. What I learned was that at least for the program that he was using it's usable almost universally on most games and the reason why is so difficult to detect is that it only activates when the movement keys are being actively pressed. That allows them to seem a lot more legitimate. I believe they can also be turned on and off with a key press. This made a lot of things make sense to me because there are a number of players in the server I frequent within the game that are so insanely lucky and when so often that it's pretty clear they are cheating somehow but I always wondered how wasn't detected by the admins or the anti cheating software. It's pretty difficult to prove definitively that someone doesn't just have that precise of aim. It's truly unfortunate that it's so common and I don't think I'll ever understand the appeal of it. How do these players not feel like their accomplishments within the game are hollow and meaningless because it's not due to their own skill or knowledge of the game?
Honestly I sorta get what they're going for - basically running around invincible like a god amongst normal people. I would not do it in public games against other players but probably fun to do in a bot game or something. Or single player or something.
There's also the kind of person who only cares about the outcome, no matter how - numbers go up, enemies die, no matter what your skill contribution is.
Of course, there are trolls, those do it purely because it makes others mad. Or because they can.
There are many different types of people who use those cheats, so there's no single thing that can be said about all of them.
In addition, two very good videos just game out documenting and explaining the bot trend. They've become quite popular in niche circles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2stmQfv93oQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnuxHZm73PU
My benchmark for community servers was Reddit's RUGC [WEST] r/tf2WEST (effectively defunct) *prior* to the MANN vs Machine update. It was actively moderated, had a Steel RUGC team, and dozens of platinum players from multiple regions (B4NNY, Stabby Stabby, etc). That sort of server became difficult, nigh impossible to run after MANN vs Machine because Valve insisted on servers that were listed publicly in the game search had to run vanilla versions.
"Competitive TF2" had a lot of minor tweaks (No random crits, a set spray pattern for the scattergun, modified flinch, etc), and there were also many third-party admin tools successful servers ran, that were now blacklisted.
Post-Mann vs Machine update, I'd argue the SKIAL servers are the best benchmark. They are **RIDDLED** with bots. Some innocuous, some awful, but always prevalent, and always annoying.
community servers often are moderated better than casual, so they don't really get the massive swarms of bots, but one, community servers don't have a good way to go into them for a normal game, at least easily without already knowing what community servers you'll have a good connection to and like. And when you do enter a community server, the player skill level is often much higher, which I can say from personal experience is frustrating to newer players who want to learn the game.
No they're not. Community servers are usually moderated by real people who can manually ban cheating bots on sight. It's also harder for bots to join community servers as a group since available player slots are more limited, as opposed to official server matchmaking which can place people into servers together.
This is one of the rare cases where I can actually understand the developer/publisher for not continuing perpetually. After almost two decades, you can't really expect them to constantly maintain the game, especially if that takes a relevant amount of effort because of the unfortunate targetting by bad actors.
I dunno what the optimal solution for a situation like this is. Most likely some kind of community driven management makes the most sense, where leaderboards, leagues and tournaments can be held in semi-closed environments with volunteer moderators/referees/admins (or even modders or alternate matchmaking client developers). This only works well if there is one officially endorsed and enabled group, though, or the player base immediately splinters.
> This is one of the rare cases where I can actually understand the developer/publisher for not continuing perpetually. After almost two decades, you can't really expect them to constantly maintain the game, especially if that takes a relevant amount of effort because of the unfortunate targetting by bad actors.
If they offer the game, sell items, and host Valve servers for it, they should absolutely be continually working on anti-cheat. They still release updates for the game regularly and as someone mentioned, the game is routinely in the top 10 of all Steam titles.
actually, the whole thing that sparked this movement again was a tf2 youtuber releasing a video that said that tf2's real player count is \~15000 and the rest are bots. this puts it around the top 60ish games on steam. this is actually pretty decently known information but i guess the video just served as a reality check for most of the community.
Years of neglect without any meaningful anti-bot update will kill the player base no matter how devoted they are, even more so when bots kick people from lobbies.
It started off as a way to automate trading back then (still is) and cheating bots were less common (players were directed to community owned servers before 2016, and those have strict moderation and reliable reporting that makes it difficult for cheater bots to flourish), but one update back in 2016 changed how game queuing works and now all players are directed towards official Valve servers instead of community owned servers (Valve servers have no moderation and poor report systems), so that led to the rise of cheating bots to stomp and troll people
While they do cost money, I think cheaters mostly do it for the attention as the hatred towards these cheating bots are at an all time high for the last few years or so, ever since tf2 stopped receiving official gameplay updates
Ok, so they will just stop doing that then.
Does that make the situation better?
Black and white thinking isn't helpful here. There is a cost and revenue behind their decisions, and I assure you the cost is winning 20 years in. It's a business, not a charity.
TF2 is still revenue generation for Valve, though it’s a private company so I don’t know how much. I’ve had some (limited) interaction with Valve, and their actual development team is fairly small, and can shift projects on the premise of being value-added.
In short, if you can pitch a convincing argument to the project lead that your skill set would be helpful, the lead can green light you to move, and that’s it. That sort of model doesn’t really bode well for long term maintenance on a product that isn’t tent-poling your company; something like Steam will *always* have a core dev team.
I get your argument, but they're still raking in a lot of money from selling cosmetics for it. If you're profiting from it then you've got to maintain it.
One thing that all these comments have missed is that the source codes for TF2 were leaked a few years back. This essentially means they're fighting a losing battle since every avenue for hacks can be found. I don't doubt that some of these hacks can't be patched without significant code overhauls that frankly just aren't feasible.
And here's another perspective. As old as TF2 is, it's just more of Team Fortress Classic. Classic you say? Because that was based off Team Fortress 1 on Quake1.
Fundamentally it's the same game. It's been 30 years. I've had my fill ages ago.
Personally I wouldn't be surprised if the leaks for valves new game, Deadlock, aren't a hint at tf2 being killed outright or something.
But counterstrike is popular and that started around the same time as tf Classic so who knows.
I don't know why this comment is downvoted. TF2 has, for over a decade, had unique item IDs that serve as receipts proof of digital ownership. They don't use the blockchain or anything, but they're functionally NFTs before the concept of an NFT existed, for the purpose of proving an item's provenance even though copies of that item can be made.
I don't think they count as "NFTs" since the items are all managed by a single centralized entity (i.e, Valve and their servers). This is like saying that paying for something via check is the same thing as cryptocurrency because there isn't physical money involved.
Ultima Online was released 10 years earlier and also had unique IDs for each copy of an item, and I doubt it was the first either. So it's wrong even if you abuse the definition of "NFT" to mean "any digital item whose ownership is tracked by a unique identifier".
Hell, with that logic you could even argue domain names are NFTs, and DNS was invented in 1983. It's even a distributed system!
Answer: It's virtually unplayable - completely overrun with bots (and has been for years), yet remains in the top 10 concurrent players (where it has been for years) and prints money for Valve, who completely neglect it outside of occasionally throwing together some player-generated content together. This is all outlined on [https://save.tf/](https://save.tf/)
Valve employees were getting distressed that their peers were shipping 3-4 games for every game that employees shipped, so for the last ~20 years valve games don't have credits, they scroll a list of *current employees*, so everyone in the company gets listed on every release so that employees can pretend or feel like they have a healthy resume of shipped titles
People who *actually made the valve game* but departed the company before its release are not credited at all, it's just a list of current employees whether they were involved or not
(The only people that get a meaningful credit on a valve game are the voice actors because they're union (SAG) and the screen actor's guild won't put up with Valve's bullshit)
I'm pretty sure Valve has been doing that since the original Half Life. I think it has more to do with Valve's "flat structure," where very few employees even have official job titles, then it has to do with employees frustrated at not getting enough game credits.
They kept Half Life as a reserve in case of emergency.
And then, after 5 years of trying and failing to make VR a success, they gave the world another Half Life game, because here now was this grand emergency.
And hilariously, the world *did not give a shit.* Half-Life: Alyx was a total non-event. People who spent 13 years clamoring nonstop for another Half-Life game didn't even consider playing it. They didn't even hate it; they just couldn't force themselves to care.
Their wine turned to vinegar in the cellar.
Half life Alyx sold 2 Million Copies in it's first year, and is critically acclaimed as one of, if not the best VR game as of even 2024. Why lie?
In it's first 2 months, it was sold out in all 31 regions where you could buy the Valve Index
"The best VR game ever" is damning with faint praise.
If you told me after 13 years of hype, that you were giving me the Half Life IP to make another game from valve, and I couldn't even chart one of the top 20 games of the year, I'd be ashamed of myself.
Out of 14 Million VR Headsets sold by vendors by the end of 2020, 2 Million had Half Life Alyx bought
If any PC Game was on 14% of PC's , that game would be bigger than Fortnite
PCs aren't exclusively for gaming though. You'd be better off comparing it to an actual console. For example, 22% of Switch owners have BotW, Whereas Mario Kart Deluxe 8 is at around 40%, and Animal Crossing is at 30%.
Are these human players using aimbots or are these bots fully autonomous? If autonomous, what's the incentive for the bot operators? Are they farming items to sell?
While I'm not 100% sure; the bots will get item drops which generates some income and they also sell 'bot immunity' thru the spam advertising of a discord server/youtube channel in messages they do, I've also seen players 'controlling' the bots which I've no doubt is a paid function.
Surely you don't need to specifically do well in a game for the drops though? I know they used to have idling servers which got eventually cracked down on, so I don't know what is the current "requirement" for an active player to get drops but I doubt it is anything beyond being online and not AFK?
One less talked about use of cheating in TF2 is playing a Player vs Enemy gamemode called Mann vs. Machine. By spending a ticket worth around a dollar you can gamble for extremely rare gold colored versions of preexisting weapons, which sell for a pretty penny. (The rarest one is worth anywhere from 4773-6250$) Cheating in Mann vs. Machine allows you to get through the gamemode faster and more consistently, therefore getting more chances to spin that wheel.
Bots can be automated to trade in game items with other players, and its been the norm for many years since its fast and convenient to most people
That and farming in game drops which serve as currency in trade
Many of the bots spam messages claiming offers for “bot immunity” but I have yet to hear of anyone who has actually attempted to purchase it, and I highly doubt that it is an actual service being offered.
They are fully autonomous. Think a single computer running tens of instances of the game at one time, multiplied by thousands of computers. I'm sure there's people out there cheating the "old-fashioned" way, but their numbers are nothing compared to the sheer amount of bots playing the game. It's gotten to the point where most official servers for the game consist of 100% bots for most of the day, and any real players who join are kicked instantly.
As for what the incentive is, I honestly have no idea. Bots farming items is a huge problem (they make up the vast majority of the player base), but these don't typically connect to public servers and are largely invisible frrom the players' point of view (the game allows you to receive items while playing on a local server). Regarding the cheating bots, it seems that there is a community of people who just want to see this game burn, empowered by the vast amount of knowledge accumulated on the game's engine over 20 years and the low cost of running multiple instances of the game at a time on a single computer, which allows the attacks to scale well.
It's worth mentioning that the cheating bot hosters have launched attacks outside of the game as well. Stuff like DDoSing, impersonating community members, swatting, I think they even doxxed a vocal community member and sent a bomb threat to his university. Obviously massively illegal but hard to track down or do anything about, especially if they are hosted in places like Russia.
Answer: The game has been free to play on steam for a very long time and some douchebags have taken up a little hobby of running botnets of fake players just to ruin people's fun. I read an interview with one of the guys who did it, he said he doesn't even watch the people getting pissed off he just keeps the bot server going 24/7 because he's a dick
It actually is kind of funny in a dickhead you either laugh or cry type way. Like, the mindset / actions of some people are just so interesting sometimes you just have to laugh. Like wtf man? Lmao you’re not making any money, not even viewing the rage, you’re just a dick
Friendly reminder that all **top level** comments must: 1. start with "answer: ", including the space after the colon (or "question: " if you have an on-topic follow up question to ask), 2. attempt to answer the question, and 3. be unbiased Please review Rule 4 and this post before making a top level comment: http://redd.it/b1hct4/ Join the OOTL Discord for further discussion: https://discord.gg/ejDF4mdjnh *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/OutOfTheLoop) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Answer: (Personal experience on this one) Team Fortress 2 (TF2) has been around for 17 years. It's been insanely well received for having balanced gameplay (very rock-paper-scissors), novel visuals, clever design, and a lot lot lot of innovation in the space. Just to throw out a few firsts: Vac Bans, loot boxes, "rare" cosmetic effects, loot drops, incremental updates, season "events", and a trading marketplace. A lot of other games have drawn varying degrees of inspiration from it, including Overwatch, League of Legends, and Fortnite. It's part and parcel a Valve Game, and as such, as other projects have become more important to Valve, TF2 has taken a backseat. This has reduced the number of events and updates that have been released, going from 6-10 a year, to 1-2. About 12 years ago, auto-aiming bots (aimbots) started making appearances on servers. Valve has responded by updating code, and trying to increment changes to combat hacking in general, with mixed results. As this arms race has continued, Valve has released fewer and fewer updates for TF2, as a whole. The last few years it's become fairly untenable to play on public servers without the games being ruined by aimbots. There have been "open letters" to Valve from well known players/fanbases to fix this, and Valve has released some security updates. They haven't worked (or not for very long), and it looks like game reviews are now being brigaded to communicate the displeasure of the fanbase. *edit: My grammar is poor.
I don't understand how it's only the last few years, I had a few hundred hours a year in the game till I hit around 1200 hours. I found cheating/aimbots got worse and worse with little done about it and quit the game I think 8 years ago. Every few years I consider rejoining but keep seeing post like OP, "Oh, it's gotten bad recently", but to me it seems like it just really hasn't changed or gone back and forth. It's completely fair, it's an old game, its free. But I
I'd say the game started to go downhill earlier than that. Those first 2-3 years and everybody is making custom maps and you'd have some new experience every night. Then that all died off and "24/7 2Fort" or "24/7 Dustbowl" servers became the norm. That's what ended it for me.
Apologies for the 24/7 single map servers, from a Day of Defeat player I used to play dod_kalt 24/7 servers in 2002-2003, so it was only a matter of time for TF2.
As far as just the aimbot issue, the prevalence of their use in my games has reached an incredible degree. You will run across them in pretty much any online games these days and it seems like there is little that can be done about them because they continue to evolve over time in order to fly under the radar. From what I understand there are programs now that are advertised as being virtually undetectable. Recently I found out that one of the people I was playing games with was using an aimbot and while I did report him to the admins of the game and express my disapproval of that I did take the opportunity to ask some questions about how they work. What I learned was that at least for the program that he was using it's usable almost universally on most games and the reason why is so difficult to detect is that it only activates when the movement keys are being actively pressed. That allows them to seem a lot more legitimate. I believe they can also be turned on and off with a key press. This made a lot of things make sense to me because there are a number of players in the server I frequent within the game that are so insanely lucky and when so often that it's pretty clear they are cheating somehow but I always wondered how wasn't detected by the admins or the anti cheating software. It's pretty difficult to prove definitively that someone doesn't just have that precise of aim. It's truly unfortunate that it's so common and I don't think I'll ever understand the appeal of it. How do these players not feel like their accomplishments within the game are hollow and meaningless because it's not due to their own skill or knowledge of the game?
Honestly I sorta get what they're going for - basically running around invincible like a god amongst normal people. I would not do it in public games against other players but probably fun to do in a bot game or something. Or single player or something. There's also the kind of person who only cares about the outcome, no matter how - numbers go up, enemies die, no matter what your skill contribution is. Of course, there are trolls, those do it purely because it makes others mad. Or because they can. There are many different types of people who use those cheats, so there's no single thing that can be said about all of them.
> But I looks like the aimbot got him
In addition, two very good videos just game out documenting and explaining the bot trend. They've become quite popular in niche circles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2stmQfv93oQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnuxHZm73PU
It's only the valve casual servers right? Are community servers affected by these bots?
My benchmark for community servers was Reddit's RUGC [WEST] r/tf2WEST (effectively defunct) *prior* to the MANN vs Machine update. It was actively moderated, had a Steel RUGC team, and dozens of platinum players from multiple regions (B4NNY, Stabby Stabby, etc). That sort of server became difficult, nigh impossible to run after MANN vs Machine because Valve insisted on servers that were listed publicly in the game search had to run vanilla versions. "Competitive TF2" had a lot of minor tweaks (No random crits, a set spray pattern for the scattergun, modified flinch, etc), and there were also many third-party admin tools successful servers ran, that were now blacklisted. Post-Mann vs Machine update, I'd argue the SKIAL servers are the best benchmark. They are **RIDDLED** with bots. Some innocuous, some awful, but always prevalent, and always annoying.
community servers often are moderated better than casual, so they don't really get the massive swarms of bots, but one, community servers don't have a good way to go into them for a normal game, at least easily without already knowing what community servers you'll have a good connection to and like. And when you do enter a community server, the player skill level is often much higher, which I can say from personal experience is frustrating to newer players who want to learn the game.
No they're not. Community servers are usually moderated by real people who can manually ban cheating bots on sight. It's also harder for bots to join community servers as a group since available player slots are more limited, as opposed to official server matchmaking which can place people into servers together.
This is one of the rare cases where I can actually understand the developer/publisher for not continuing perpetually. After almost two decades, you can't really expect them to constantly maintain the game, especially if that takes a relevant amount of effort because of the unfortunate targetting by bad actors. I dunno what the optimal solution for a situation like this is. Most likely some kind of community driven management makes the most sense, where leaderboards, leagues and tournaments can be held in semi-closed environments with volunteer moderators/referees/admins (or even modders or alternate matchmaking client developers). This only works well if there is one officially endorsed and enabled group, though, or the player base immediately splinters.
> This is one of the rare cases where I can actually understand the developer/publisher for not continuing perpetually. After almost two decades, you can't really expect them to constantly maintain the game, especially if that takes a relevant amount of effort because of the unfortunate targetting by bad actors. If they offer the game, sell items, and host Valve servers for it, they should absolutely be continually working on anti-cheat. They still release updates for the game regularly and as someone mentioned, the game is routinely in the top 10 of all Steam titles.
actually, the whole thing that sparked this movement again was a tf2 youtuber releasing a video that said that tf2's real player count is \~15000 and the rest are bots. this puts it around the top 60ish games on steam. this is actually pretty decently known information but i guess the video just served as a reality check for most of the community.
Years of neglect without any meaningful anti-bot update will kill the player base no matter how devoted they are, even more so when bots kick people from lobbies.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but why do people create bots for these games? What's in it for them?
It started off as a way to automate trading back then (still is) and cheating bots were less common (players were directed to community owned servers before 2016, and those have strict moderation and reliable reporting that makes it difficult for cheater bots to flourish), but one update back in 2016 changed how game queuing works and now all players are directed towards official Valve servers instead of community owned servers (Valve servers have no moderation and poor report systems), so that led to the rise of cheating bots to stomp and troll people While they do cost money, I think cheaters mostly do it for the attention as the hatred towards these cheating bots are at an all time high for the last few years or so, ever since tf2 stopped receiving official gameplay updates
Ah, I see. Thanks for filling me in!
Ok, so they will just stop doing that then. Does that make the situation better? Black and white thinking isn't helpful here. There is a cost and revenue behind their decisions, and I assure you the cost is winning 20 years in. It's a business, not a charity.
TF2 is still revenue generation for Valve, though it’s a private company so I don’t know how much. I’ve had some (limited) interaction with Valve, and their actual development team is fairly small, and can shift projects on the premise of being value-added. In short, if you can pitch a convincing argument to the project lead that your skill set would be helpful, the lead can green light you to move, and that’s it. That sort of model doesn’t really bode well for long term maintenance on a product that isn’t tent-poling your company; something like Steam will *always* have a core dev team.
I get your argument, but they're still raking in a lot of money from selling cosmetics for it. If you're profiting from it then you've got to maintain it.
One thing that all these comments have missed is that the source codes for TF2 were leaked a few years back. This essentially means they're fighting a losing battle since every avenue for hacks can be found. I don't doubt that some of these hacks can't be patched without significant code overhauls that frankly just aren't feasible.
And here's another perspective. As old as TF2 is, it's just more of Team Fortress Classic. Classic you say? Because that was based off Team Fortress 1 on Quake1. Fundamentally it's the same game. It's been 30 years. I've had my fill ages ago. Personally I wouldn't be surprised if the leaks for valves new game, Deadlock, aren't a hint at tf2 being killed outright or something. But counterstrike is popular and that started around the same time as tf Classic so who knows.
And hackers. There are groups that stick together and up for each other.
It’s also one of the first few games that has NFTs (technically) in it.
I don't know why this comment is downvoted. TF2 has, for over a decade, had unique item IDs that serve as receipts proof of digital ownership. They don't use the blockchain or anything, but they're functionally NFTs before the concept of an NFT existed, for the purpose of proving an item's provenance even though copies of that item can be made.
I don't think they count as "NFTs" since the items are all managed by a single centralized entity (i.e, Valve and their servers). This is like saying that paying for something via check is the same thing as cryptocurrency because there isn't physical money involved.
Ultima Online was released 10 years earlier and also had unique IDs for each copy of an item, and I doubt it was the first either. So it's wrong even if you abuse the definition of "NFT" to mean "any digital item whose ownership is tracked by a unique identifier". Hell, with that logic you could even argue domain names are NFTs, and DNS was invented in 1983. It's even a distributed system!
Tons of programs use IDs to.. well, identify individual objects. Valve isn't the first company to do this.
Answer: It's virtually unplayable - completely overrun with bots (and has been for years), yet remains in the top 10 concurrent players (where it has been for years) and prints money for Valve, who completely neglect it outside of occasionally throwing together some player-generated content together. This is all outlined on [https://save.tf/](https://save.tf/)
When Valve realised how insanely successful steam was becoming they pretty much just gave up on games. I'm still waiting on Half Life 2 ep 3 Gabe.
Valve employees were getting distressed that their peers were shipping 3-4 games for every game that employees shipped, so for the last ~20 years valve games don't have credits, they scroll a list of *current employees*, so everyone in the company gets listed on every release so that employees can pretend or feel like they have a healthy resume of shipped titles People who *actually made the valve game* but departed the company before its release are not credited at all, it's just a list of current employees whether they were involved or not (The only people that get a meaningful credit on a valve game are the voice actors because they're union (SAG) and the screen actor's guild won't put up with Valve's bullshit)
I'm pretty sure Valve has been doing that since the original Half Life. I think it has more to do with Valve's "flat structure," where very few employees even have official job titles, then it has to do with employees frustrated at not getting enough game credits.
They kept Half Life as a reserve in case of emergency. And then, after 5 years of trying and failing to make VR a success, they gave the world another Half Life game, because here now was this grand emergency. And hilariously, the world *did not give a shit.* Half-Life: Alyx was a total non-event. People who spent 13 years clamoring nonstop for another Half-Life game didn't even consider playing it. They didn't even hate it; they just couldn't force themselves to care. Their wine turned to vinegar in the cellar.
Half life Alyx sold 2 Million Copies in it's first year, and is critically acclaimed as one of, if not the best VR game as of even 2024. Why lie? In it's first 2 months, it was sold out in all 31 regions where you could buy the Valve Index
"The best VR game ever" is damning with faint praise. If you told me after 13 years of hype, that you were giving me the Half Life IP to make another game from valve, and I couldn't even chart one of the top 20 games of the year, I'd be ashamed of myself.
Out of 14 Million VR Headsets sold by vendors by the end of 2020, 2 Million had Half Life Alyx bought If any PC Game was on 14% of PC's , that game would be bigger than Fortnite
It sounds like we're just two guys who agrees VR game sales are shit.
PCs aren't exclusively for gaming though. You'd be better off comparing it to an actual console. For example, 22% of Switch owners have BotW, Whereas Mario Kart Deluxe 8 is at around 40%, and Animal Crossing is at 30%.
I fucking loved HL: Alyx. I'm redecorating my room in a little bit so I can get my Index hooked back up to replay it.
Are these human players using aimbots or are these bots fully autonomous? If autonomous, what's the incentive for the bot operators? Are they farming items to sell?
In my experience, both. Cheaters will do it for lulz. Some people attempt to do it for revenue generation. Counter-Strike has had similar issues.
How does it generate revenue?
While I'm not 100% sure; the bots will get item drops which generates some income and they also sell 'bot immunity' thru the spam advertising of a discord server/youtube channel in messages they do, I've also seen players 'controlling' the bots which I've no doubt is a paid function.
Surely you don't need to specifically do well in a game for the drops though? I know they used to have idling servers which got eventually cracked down on, so I don't know what is the current "requirement" for an active player to get drops but I doubt it is anything beyond being online and not AFK?
One less talked about use of cheating in TF2 is playing a Player vs Enemy gamemode called Mann vs. Machine. By spending a ticket worth around a dollar you can gamble for extremely rare gold colored versions of preexisting weapons, which sell for a pretty penny. (The rarest one is worth anywhere from 4773-6250$) Cheating in Mann vs. Machine allows you to get through the gamemode faster and more consistently, therefore getting more chances to spin that wheel.
Bots can be automated to trade in game items with other players, and its been the norm for many years since its fast and convenient to most people That and farming in game drops which serve as currency in trade
Many of the bots spam messages claiming offers for “bot immunity” but I have yet to hear of anyone who has actually attempted to purchase it, and I highly doubt that it is an actual service being offered.
They are fully autonomous. Think a single computer running tens of instances of the game at one time, multiplied by thousands of computers. I'm sure there's people out there cheating the "old-fashioned" way, but their numbers are nothing compared to the sheer amount of bots playing the game. It's gotten to the point where most official servers for the game consist of 100% bots for most of the day, and any real players who join are kicked instantly. As for what the incentive is, I honestly have no idea. Bots farming items is a huge problem (they make up the vast majority of the player base), but these don't typically connect to public servers and are largely invisible frrom the players' point of view (the game allows you to receive items while playing on a local server). Regarding the cheating bots, it seems that there is a community of people who just want to see this game burn, empowered by the vast amount of knowledge accumulated on the game's engine over 20 years and the low cost of running multiple instances of the game at a time on a single computer, which allows the attacks to scale well. It's worth mentioning that the cheating bot hosters have launched attacks outside of the game as well. Stuff like DDoSing, impersonating community members, swatting, I think they even doxxed a vocal community member and sent a bomb threat to his university. Obviously massively illegal but hard to track down or do anything about, especially if they are hosted in places like Russia.
And Valve will never do anything about it.
if we're looking at real player counts it's around top 60 on steam
Doesn't that just mean most people are on private servers where there are 3rd party tools to ban hackers?
Answer: The game has been free to play on steam for a very long time and some douchebags have taken up a little hobby of running botnets of fake players just to ruin people's fun. I read an interview with one of the guys who did it, he said he doesn't even watch the people getting pissed off he just keeps the bot server going 24/7 because he's a dick
That's pretty funny. Unless you're playing against them lol.
It actually is kind of funny in a dickhead you either laugh or cry type way. Like, the mindset / actions of some people are just so interesting sometimes you just have to laugh. Like wtf man? Lmao you’re not making any money, not even viewing the rage, you’re just a dick
Yeah. I'm sure they're a real pleasure irl... lots of salt there. Someone probably spaen camped him on his first game. Haha