Speculation has been mounting that Valve has quietly issued a massive ban against bots in its popular shooter, Team Fortress 2. While the company hasn’t confirmed it, a prominent creator claims the Seattle-based developer removed nearly 20,000 bots in one night, effectively wiping out their presence in Casual matches.
All bots have been banned
Well-known Team Fortress 2 YouTuber shounic posted a video on June 27 claiming that “all bots were banned.” He said that on the evening of June 25, at least 16,000 bots were quietly removed from the game by Valve. The company didn’t say a word about ban waves or bot targeting, leaving the situation completely ambiguous, which is in line with the developer’s MO. Shounic added that he explored the Casual game mode, where bots were mostly present, and said that after dozens of matches, he only found one bot.
The creator substantiated these claims by going into live Casual mode games and asking the community if they had seen bot activity in the past two days. Most who responded said no, which is strange in itself considering bots have been a prevalent problem in Team Fortress 2 for years. Despite previous attempts to fix the issue, it was the norm to encounter one in every Casual match, so seeing countless players claiming they haven’t encountered a bot in days could mean something happened on June 25th.
Valve has yet to confirm these claims and likely never will. By hiding actual statistics and methods, Valve is only helping itself, as bot makers and hosters will have a harder time figuring out how their services became obsolete. The developer has taken a similar approach when banning cheaters in CS2 and other games, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see Valve act in such a manner. If shounic’s claims that finding bots in TF2 is “really impossible at the moment” are true, then the popular shooter might get a second chance at life.
