it's still p bad

i havent been keeping up so correct me if im wrong but the only outcome of savetf2 was like a tweet from valve and now every minor bugfix that skirts around the issue is lauded as the precursor to the giant botkilling update, no?

wheres my million dollar major

Queue casual and let us know because I certainly am not gonna get my hopes up.

And apparently, that wasn't even a tweet done by someone on the TF2 team. Plus, there's TFClassic's response in trying to get the mod back up and they were unable to get anyone at Valve to respond to them after getting a random request-to-takedown that further confirms they're mostly just ignoring the game and probably it's community outside of workshop submissions.

I'm a bit confused by what the article is claiming. Is it trying to say that the #saveTF2 tag is somehow responsible for getting thousands of bots banned due to increase player awareness or something? Because it feels more like to me that the cheaters got bored and started dwindling in numbers on their own, not because of an increase in reports and moderation.

I queued up the last couple of weeks and pre-Scream Fortress, you would get maybe one or two bots every 8 - 10 minutes. During Scream Fortress. there's been a consistent bot playing Michael Jackson songs every 5 - 7 minutes.

very difficult to enjoy the new Halloween maps where there are 7 aimbot snipers on each team

In Europe at least, casual is still completely infested with the hacking bots. When we've had an upswell in legit players after #SaveTF2 and now with ScreamFortress their effect is diluted, but they are definitely still around.

The PC Gamer article is a shame. The first 2/3rds are fairly well researched, but his conclusion doesn't match with my experience at all.

bots are still frequently around on casual servers, valve competitive has been a corpse for years, the item servers are constantly on life support, and valve literally did not test the maps they added to the game in the latest update.

#savetf2 sure helped a lot

computers don’t get bored

we can sit and moan about how the shitty dev company didnt fix all the bugs and exploits people were campaigning for them to fix, and how this is the 486th final confirmation that the state of the game will never tangibly improve, but at the end of the day this is still an objectively good thing to happen to the game

honestly, if there is a huge influx of new or returning players, but the casual experience is still dogshit, it seems like this would be a prime time for more competitive evangelization

we all know what'll actually happen is they'll either quit or suffer in those dogshit uncletopia server

does anyone know if this is accurate?

https://youtu.be/2LB7iU_P6OU?t=906

whats the point of this mentality? of being dismissive of stuff thats good?
more ppl playing = more ppl that will hear of competitive = longer life for the scene
theres already enough to complain and moan about just let the good thing be good

because it's not good? if the casual experience is hackers and grotesquely offensive chatspam or a community server full of comp haters who only vote payload and aren't even sentient enough to recognize that the server they're playing on is effectively doubling their ping it's only going to do more harm than good

people aren't going to want to continue playing this game if their first impression is either the shittiest quickplay matchmaking ever or really bad barebones youtuber servers that have worse hardware than you can get for free and have a community of terminal pubstompers

so u think the healthier alternative for the sustained longevity of the 6s scene is to just not ever have any new players install the game?
i know the new player experience is unwelcoming and has not and will not been improved, but again, the more players who play the game the more people that fall into the tiny % that make it thru to competitive is
it’s baffling to me that u want to be so needlessly cynical over a 2x growth in the playerbase

I decided to just look at the numbers myself and I'm not sure where the author of the article got "68k in May" from. The average for Jan - May 2022 was around 90k. The average count in 2019 was 68k and has been steadily climbing ever since. But if we change the numbers to what they are:
= May with 90k average
+ June and July with 140k average
- Aug and Sept with 115k average

I didn't include October because of Scream Fortress and since we don't have November yet, it's hard to know if that slight increase in players is purely for the event or if some plan to stick around afterwards. Regardless, we can say there was a definite and consistent increase from May 2022 by at least 25k players. The biggest problem when talking about any of these numbers is that we still don't know how many of the numbers include bots, traders or idlers which always make it really, really hard to refer to Steam Charts when talking about if TF2 is thriving or dying.

TF2 could've gotten a boost because of an update around May that made it harder for bots. TF2 could've also gotten a boost because it was summer and school was out and those numbers were going to rise regardless of an update. Those numbers could also be because 11 new unusual effects were released in summer and a bunch of traders unleashed their idle bots so they could farm and trade for keys and unlock crates. It could be all three, I don't know.

https://i.ibb.co/8M42d6X/Untitled.png

yes