Valve updated Team Fortress 2, but didn’t fix the bot issue

Team Fortress 2 is kind of ancient, at least in internet time. Valve’s irreverent shooter is almost 15 years old, and despite the fact that the game probably qualifies for some kind of pension, it still sees the occasional update.

They aren’t exactly frequent, mind you, and they’re normally just small fixes and tweaks. But they exist. It might have something to do with the fact that the game is still pretty popular. Team Fortress 2 still draws somewhere around 100,000 players, and those players notice issues which require fixing.

Some of those fixes are kind of important. For example, Valve’s fix solved an exploit where the Spy could create a bullet blocking shield. It solved a trick where players could force a circumstance that teleported them from the enemy’s base back to their own. It even fixed a (kind of ridiculous) exploit which allowed players to activate cheats while playing on secure servers.

In total the latest Team Fortress 2 update fixed, patched, and reworked 20 or so exploits, bugs, and other problems. But it didn’t address the biggest issue plaguing the game as a whole: bots.

As of the time of this writing, players of the game on the Steam forums seem to think the bot presence in public servers is lower than before the update. But they also point out the number of bots isn’t zero, so the rest can’t be far behind. The popular ‘How high can we count before valve gets rid of bots?’ thread is still counting upwards, which is a good indicator of how the player base feels.

To paraphrase an old man familiar with bots, “The Sand People Bots are easily startled, but they’ll soon be back, and in greater numbers.”