Good. I didn’t join up yet because I have a lot of shit to do, but TF2 is still an excellent game, especially in an age of even more aggressively monetised class-based shooters with worse balancing.
The fact that a 17 year old game is still going after that kind of neglect is a true testament to how good it is.
17 years? That’s not even old enough to drink!
25 freaking years?! I need a nap. Jesus Christ. This hurts. That was the game of my senior year. Now, thanks to your post not only does my body hurt, my soul hurts as well.
I’m gonna go lie down. Fucking hell.
Are you going to be on the server later? If we get 8 people we can play 4v4.
I’m always down for some team arena. Send me the pw on ICQ!
Rockets vs rails DM17 after?
Ugh, while I agree games have too much monetization nowadays, please don’t give TF2 a free pass. It paved the way for so much of what we see today.
100% agree, that’s why I said “even more” aggressive monetisation. It’s only less in comparison now, but it did indeed do a lot of the work paving the way, although CS probably did even more when it comes to Valve properties.
Pretty suspect about these numbers, given that before this ban wave about 78% of the steam player count for TF2 was bots (source). So this wouldn’t be a doubling of human players, but about a 10x increase. It’s possible… But to me this looks like a bunch more bots being spun up and evading the new ban measures.
As someone who has played casual the past few days, it is now hard to run into bots in games so i believe the player count; tho idk how long it will last/who knows when the bots would be back
Should have banned their entire accounts
Find out the region information too and add analytics to find other bots.
50% of the player count are bots that do not cheat … maybe.
I have been thinking about this: With the recent advancements in AI could you build a bot that pretends to be a human playing the game (with some intentional flaws in its gameplay – so no aimbot for example)?
I would imagine player behavior – like movement around obstacles – in tf2 would be a valuable data mine to train AI further.
With the recent advancements in AI it could say confusing nonsense in the chat…
Way back when TF2 was new, Valve put out heatmaps showing how their analytics tracked where players died in each level along with a bunch of other metrics. If that kind of data was public (or a major server collected their own data), I wonder what level of bots we’d have today.
I miss the old days of playing against Foxbot in the original Team Fortress. It sucks that bots are only used by cheaters/drop farmers these days instead of as an official way to pad out lobbies, or to let you play matches entirely single player.
Don’t give em any ideas