Gremlin's Team Fortress Shrine
#SaveTF2/#FixTF2
Made on 6/10/2024
Updated on 6/27/2024
The highly divisive tf2 community has come together in an attempt to save their game. Will it work? Why should we bother? And what in the world has Valve Software been up to? This page is dedicated to acting as a more content rich and accurate way to depict the issues + also act as a platform for the community's voices. I will keep adding content to this page until this movement wraps up. This page has gifs, you might need to wait a moment or refresh the page for them to load.
Want something added? Send me an email at:
gremlin6482@protonmail.com
Protest Updates
- lots of Bots dissapeared overnight on June 26th
This does not mean the protest is over, there is still lots of work to do!
A Community Comes Together
Despite our differences, the people that enjoy Team Fortress 2 for it's gameplay can all agree on one thing. That thing is that the game is currently unplayable for new players and anyone looking to play the casual gamemodes. While community servers are still playable, they are not a good environment for new players since they tend to host veteran players that WILL stomp new players or anyone messing around aka not playing "meta". Valve makes money from in game microtransactions and hosts their own servers via casual mode, so why does the community view these servers as unplayable?
The Bot Crisis
One of the main issues is that there are bad actors within the tf2 community that are straight up criminal and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Not only do these people host aimbots that join servers, spams nasty things in voice chat and text chat, and kick out real players... but they also harass, dox, and swat (Swatting is the act of calling the police and falsly reporting a crime in attempt to scare or potentially kill someone) anyone that attempts to document the situation or otherwise do something to try to stop them. These people are not the only group to blame in this, Valve bares responsibility for allowing these groups to form on their platform and games in the first place. Valve has always been hands off towards hate speech and vac simply does not work in it's current state. They view actively maintaining anti-cheat as "treadmill work". If Valve used some of the money they earned from microtransactions to update vac every now and then, we would not be in this situation.
Why should we care?
This is a situation that bleeds out into other games. Counter Strike fans are also painfully aware of how Valve treats cheaters. CS2 is worse off when it comes to cheaters now then CS:GO was at it's worst. Making bots for it would take a bit more effort then the tf2 ones but it is by no means impossible, it's only a matter of time. This is already an issue within other games, it's just not as clear or visible as things are with tf2. This is a issue that effects everyone that plays online video games eventually.
What in the World has Valve Software been up to?
Valve has been busy developing a new class based moba shooter that everyone that I know seems to hate the concept of. My personal take on it is that it's trying to be a edgy version of overwatch. Despite Valve already having a popular "class based shooter" they have decided to give it nothing but a skeleton crew for the sake of adding more community made taunts, cosmetics, and skins in order to keep a flow of money coming in. Despite the game being in such a state, they continue to turn a blind eye. They could use some of this cash flow to at least attempt to fix this issue but they don't. This bot problem has been a issue since 2016, in two years it will be a decade since it started.
How can we help?
Doing one or more of the things below can help the cause.
Sign the petition: https://save.tf/
The petition now has more signatures then World of Warcraft's Classic Servers petititon had when Blizzard responded to them!
Negatively review TF2 on Steam
If you want to give them feedback in the review then make sure to mention the issues. Some people have taken to negatively reviewing other Valve games but I personally don't like that conceptually.
Boycott tf2 and other Valve games.
This seems simple on paper but is easier said then done if you are an active tf2, cs, or dota player. It is however one of the best ways to drive the point home
DON'T SHUT UP!!!
Bot hosts and certain individuals will go out of their way to try to shut down any conversation on this topic in an attempt to kill the movement's momentum, don't let them do that!
Don't say the protest is over until Valve fixes the issue!
The last time that the community attempted this, we were easily told off with a single tweet from Valve. Two years later this feels silly and wont be repeated.