All the Bots Got Banned

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bot checking in casual:

ty melt bakugo cleffy discord & @megascatterbomb :)

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[shounic]

edit: hi hi, just wanna say be cautious about the 16k number. the whole thing is super noisy. we can't really know the wave size unless bot hosters want to tell us exactly how much they went up or down by.

the 16k is mixed in with normal players coming in and out from steam maintenance, it could be idle bots being affected (they didn't come back, or got banned too lol), the timing steam polled player numbers, etc. regardless though it did look different to the previous tuesday downtime on the charts, there was two system messages* sent out about server downtime, where the last time they did that was (apparently) once on Oct 1, 2022, and you can hop in game and see the very clear lack of bots. i'm not aware of any exhaustive up to date list of bots globally so it'd be hard to make any estimations of the wave size. sorry if i caused any confusion here :>


topic 2: i can't personally verify it but community bans are seemingly a big tent that encapsulates lots of varying kinds of bans underneath it. i've gotten reports that community bans do block access to VAC servers, and this reply (to this comment) that's seemingly a good summary of the lay of things:

@polistirex
Hi shounic, wanted to say, community bans will in some occasions but not always prevent you from joining a VAC secured server. I have several accounts which are marked as community banned that cannot join any valve server and in one case access the steam library at all. There are different ban reasons. If your ban is for any kind of account fraud OR game abuse like most bot accounts, it will be completely restricted. The same goes if you are caught buying an account off G2A for example.

here's 30 mins of me running around looking for bots

[absoultethings]

Wave defeated, but there are more to come. Get to an upgrade station before they return.

[wigmanmania]

Classic Valve
>do nothing
>then do something and say nothing

[JUUDOLF]

I saw a post about Valve putting bans on bot accounts but giving the connected main account(s) a warning. In other words, if Valve has detected that you have an account linked to the banned bots (how, I do not know, IP/MAC matches maybe), the host can still keep their main account. And if they continue hosting bots, then all of their accounts are affected.

In other words, Valve is now trying just to scare off the bot hosters. No real fix to TF2 has been made, not even a tweak to the Source Engine.

Personally I'd love to see some proper legal action against the bot hosters to put some actual pressure on them but beggars can't choosers. And I expect the bots to be back within a week.

[davymachinegun]

WAVE COMPLETE
GET TO AN UPGRADE STATION

[AcidTehObjectThingyIsBack]

Literally TF2 cycle:
Its over > ITS NOT OVER > Its over > ITS NOT OVER

[Dr_Weirdoo]

The man who sacrified his Pwnage Saxxy to the Chaos Gods:

*they called me a madman*

[_sukuratchi]

No way are valve on the treadmill finally

[drgabi]

-0:18-- Now that the bots are gone, we can observe the natural TF2 player talking in chat-
EDIT: It seems shou has censored the chat, respectfully so, since it was a bad taste shock comment about sexually assaulting Mr Beast because the natural TF2 player loves male pregnancy. Yeah...
To not make this comment contempt, at 0:33 we can observe the natural TF2 player's sexual orientation

[henrym]

In CS2 Valve is doing a thing where farming accounts are being silently banned; they seem to be VAC banned but there is nothing publicly visible on the account to indicate that it was banned, they just can't join official servers. farming bots used to be everywhere for months but I haven't seen any in a while now.

[anironfarm]

The tf2 cycle

> Casual is infected with bots
> #SaveTf2 #FixTf2
> Ban wave
> Casual no longer infested with bots
> Complaints stop
> Valve moves on
> Bots slowly trickle in over two years
> Casual is infested with bots again
> Repeat indefinitely

[aname.whatdidyouexpect]

Could this be possibly the rare and unheard of "treadmill work"?

[squadbroken]

They haven't gotten on the treadmill just yet, but they're putting on the sweatpants

[hawkin_gaming]

I get a feeling that the "treadmill" problem of infinitely banning bot accounts would become a staple of TF2 from now on, i just hope that bot hosters would eventually get bored of it and move on

[NuclearFissionDotCore]

"You've pushed them back.. For now. Get to an upgrade station for the next wave."

[norvillerogers]

"Is this valve treadmill work?" My brothers in christ, they merely hopped on it for a second. We need to see if they will keep walking.

[mmccluer]

It took us 5 fucking years for us to finally beat that first wave.

[DaSomebody_]

"Oh, a background Casual game to watch while listening to the situation"
"*checks chat at 0:19*"
*"...oh"*

[Cappuccino_Rabbit]

Can't wait for a decade or two for suddenly a bunch of video essays titled "The great bot crisis of TF2"

[pizza-for-mountains]

so here's what's *probably* happening over at valve:

they know about fixtf2/savetf2, but fixing the problem would mean getting rid of all bots and most cheaters forever or at least a very long time, which would take a whole company's efforts to do in a timely fashion, and even then, it would take quite a while

instead of being completely radio silent, they want the tf2 community to know they're working on the problem (even *if* it's just a dozen people) and went through with a ban wave for a very temporary solution for casual

but like we know, they have so much more data than engineers to work with the data, so even if another ban wave happens, it won't be for at least a few months since a very small portion of hours will be set aside to do that