It's rough for everyone no matter what, but giving up isn't going to fix any of it.
If we give up on this game the script kiddies win, and specifically if we give up because of these bots in particular, bigoted people win. This is sorta about the Bot Crisis in general. This game has been a source of joy for me for a long time now, and I'm not gonna give up on it. So it's at least gonna be around for the rest of the month, and that really sucks. It's obvious this is because of pride month. Now they spam homophobic and transphobic messages (and one that has anti-semitism in it too).īeing a trans person this was rattling to see, to say the least. Here’s how that player described it (edited for clarity): One user noticed an uptick in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric among the bots on June 1st, the beginning of Pride month. TF2 forum posts on Steam carry titles like, “ Anti-LGBT bots, and not giving up hope,” “ why won't devs do anything?” and “ Encouraging Valve into action on abusive bots.” The posts offer advice on dealing with the bots in-game, and some even offer promising leads about the source of the swarm. TF2 players have been attempting to get Valve’s attention by reporting similar behavior by the bots, but nothing has worked so far. Recently, high-profile developers like Activision have made headlines by taking active measures to remove racism, sexism and homophobic speech from their online communities. I and many other people have sent messages to Steam Support and receive robotic responses asking us to post on the Steam Forums and report the individual accounts. (His name has been changed to protect against targeted in-game attacks.) “There have been literally hundreds of threads on the Steam forums and numerous YouTube videos about it. “I would describe it as disastrous,” longtime TF2 player Jason Hughes said. Valve, the company that created TF2 and Steam, has responded with silence. The bots appear in nearly every match, spewing hate speech in the chat, using cheats to automatically secure headshots, and taking advantage of cosmetic exploits to disrupt gameplay for all of the actual players.įrustrated fans have been posting about the invasion in the TF2 Steam forums, and on Reddit, Twitter and YouTube. Content warning: This story contains images and descriptions of hate speech.įor the past two months, Team Fortress 2 has been under attack by a horde of racist, homophobic, sexist, pornographic and generally bigoted robots.