There’s nothing worse than cheaters in online games. For players, it sucks to get head-shotted every time you peek out from cover by someone using an aimbot. For developers, it sucks to lose revenue as players leave your game for greener pastures. That’s why developers like Bungie, Riot, and Take-Two are starting to take legal action against cheat makers.
But not Valve. Bots and cheaters have long been a huge problem in Team Fortress 2, but Valve doesn’t seem to care. A recent thread on ResetEra notes that Team Fortress 2 “has been overrun by bots that are ‘playing’ to farm the random item drops” and then sell them on the game’s open market.
These bots are usually Snipers that have such perfect aim that it’s impossible for regular players to compete. Worse, some of these bots have gotten clever enough to actually start using Team Fortress 2’s server vote feature to boot legitimate players. ResetEra user “brandnewcardock” said that they were kicked from two recent games when bots ganged together to start booting legitimate players.
The replies are full of players that lament Valve's inaction to tackle Team Fortress 2's massive bot problem. However, there seems to be little incentive for Valve to fix the problem as Team Fortress 2 remains a hugely popular game on Steam despite its age, consistently landing on the platform's top 10 list. Just last October, Team Fortress 2 hit 130,000 concurrent players despite the heavy prevalence of bots and cheaters.
That said, players are definitely unhappy and are starting to take matters into their own hands. At least one TF2 player founded "Bot Extermination Services," an organization that uses bots designed to kill other bots. It's definitely fighting fire with fire, but without any emergency services from Valve, fire is all anyone has.