25,000 Negative Reviews On Steam — The Campaign To Save Team Fortress 2

For years now, Valve’s class-based competitive first-person shooter, Team Fortress 2, has been infested with cheaters and bots. It’s become such a big issue that community servers are now more popular than the game’s official matchmaking just because they have active moderation and sometimes a player-developed anti-cheat.

In just a few days, the recent reviews section of TF2’s store page had changed to “mostly negative”. While the main programming of the aimbots is to join servers and insta-kill all players, the problem goes far beyond just that. The bot hosters use their aimbots to attack and harass community members all the time — they use the in-game text and voice chat to spread hate speech and advertise their “immunity services” which, according to them, prevent these bots from killing you, and these cost a lot. For people who bought these services and proved they were a scam — the hosters posted both the credit card and addresses of these people online. Sometimes they even go so far as to commit full-on cybercrimes, like launching DDoS attacks and even swatting one of their critics.

And what did Valve do? Absolutely nothing. This vile behaviour is rampant in Team Fortress 2, and yet Valve doesn’t even attempt to stop it. The issue isn’t that Valve isn’t allocating resources to combat that, though, it’s that it keeps the game in sort of a limbo state — the servers are still up and running smoothly, but nothing is being done to stop this horrendous activity. If Valve decides to completely kill the game, closing all the servers, including the Mann Co. store, there won’t be matchmaking and, therefore, no botting.

However, that isn’t what I and many other members of the TF2 community wish: we want the game to go back to all its glory. How it was just 10 years ago was massively better than this — content updates, many active developers, but still, most importantly: fix the botting issue. To achieve this state again, the community has started a campaign and petition to get Valve to care about the game again and finally fix it.

The #FixTF2 campaign has been going on for the last couple of days, and it is the thing behind the influx of the game’s negative reviews. Its main point is to get rid of the aimbots and make Team Fortress 2 playable again. Its main action was on the 3rd of June when community members posted thousands of screenshots and videos showcasing the issue on many social media platforms. The reason for this action was to shine a light on this problem in TF2 and prove that the game is not naturally dying, it is being intentionally killed.

If you agree that this kind of thing should not keep on happening and that Valve has to do something about it, go ahead and sign the petition, the more signatures there are, the higher the chances of Valve actually doing something. Tell your friends too, we need as many people as we can to achieve the goal of having a fixed game. This timeless classic is rapidly reaching 18 years of age — let’s give it a good adult life once it does.