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Fans protest against Valve to save Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 community has organised an online protest against Valve. Fans of the first-person shooter decided to take... Daria Belous | 27. May 2022

Team Fortress 2 community has organised an online protest against Valve. Fans of the first-person shooter decided to take matters into their own hands and message the game’s developer directly about its unsolvable problems. 

In the end, the Team Fortress 2 community managed to get an answer from Valve, saying the developer is working on the issue.

What is the reason for TF2 protests? 

One of the most significant problems of Team Fortress 2 is bot attacks, which have been ongoing since 2020 as a result of the online leakage of the game’s source code. Attacking bots can headshot players with non-human accuracy, play loud music in the voice chat, spam violent and inappropriate messages and even kick players out of the game. 

Because of this, the game has become generally unplayable, but Valve hasn’t done anything to solve the issue and didn’t address the situation directly. Despite the immense issues the game is battling, the developer releases paid cosmetic items every six months. Plus, there’s another issue bots can allegedly buy virtual goods and sell them for real money. 

Given all these facts, public matchmaking in Team Fortress 2 is mostly impossible to play. Some players create private servers, however, they are mostly custom, which is not a solution for classic mode lovers. These factors limit the existing players and the game obviously doesn’t attract new players because likely no one will play a game where bots have such advantages. 

How the protest wave has started? 

At first, the Team Fortress 2 community expressed their disappointment online, however, no one responded. It wasn’t until numerous popular content creators started to share their own issues with Team Fortress 2 on their media channels, that things got into action.

One of the examples is YouTube content creator SquimJim, who made a video about the troubling situation in Team Fortress 2, which drew the attention of multiple gaming news outlets. 

 

In the end, the case culminated in content makers including SquimJim, Casperr, Solarlight and the fans uniting and launching a peaceful protest to finally call out Valve on the issue and bring justice to the game. 

On Wednesday, May 26, people started spamming the “#savetf2” via different social media platforms, making the hashtag enter the top Twitter trends that day.

About 280,000 tweets later, the community finally got an answer from the developers via the official Team Fortress 2 Twitter account, which hasn’t been updated in two years. Valve assured fans that the dev team is working on the fix, however, it is not clear how much time will be needed to turn the game back to its normal state.

 

Image credit: Valve