What just happened? Team Fortress 2 just got review-bombed so hard that its "recent review" ranking is now "mostly negative." Despite being 17 years old, the team shooter is still very popular, even more so with its recent update. It still ranks as one of the most-played games on Steam.
However, TF2 has suffered from a bot problem for at least the last five years. The situation has gotten so bad that the Team Fortress community rallied a review bomb to get Valve's attention, hoping it would take a break from counting its Steam dollars and address the problem. Almost 24,000 players chimed in with bad reviews starting as early as May 23.
"It's time Valve does something about the bots," one of the early reviews lamented. "The game has been overrun with people willing to doxx, DDOS, and SWAT anyone who takes action against the problem."
Many posts sport the hashtag "#SaveTF2" and note that they love the game but that Valve needs to do something about cheaters ruining the experience. Players who have invested thousands of hours in the game had the most useful feedback.
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"The game itself is wonderful. Hands down one of the best games ever made in the history of gaming, and it still holds up to this very day," wrote TotalChaos, who has logged over 1,500 hours in Team Fortress 2. "But the aimbot problem is getting so bad that not only is Casual literally unplayable (and the fact that people still play it in its state baffles me), real-world crimes are being committed."
The crimes he refers to are the same as those mentioned by other players. While it's hard to nail down the validity of the allegations, multiple players claim that when confronted about cheating, the bad actors have resorted to doxxing, DDoS attacks, and calling in fake bomb threats to get accusers in trouble with the law.
Aside from the dubious anecdotal claims of criminal activity, there is no argument that rampant cheating is ruining a game that hundreds of thousands of players love.
"I am joining in on the review bomb but not out of hate but out of love for this game," wrote a superfan with over 3,000 recorded hours. "Please fix Team Fortress 2 and try to do something instead of tweeting about the problem and go back to doing nothing."
It's not all active aimbots, either. Players complain that hundreds or even thousands of idle bots sit on servers raking up item drops. Even more frustrating is that it's a known problem that Valve has seemingly ignored for years.
The House That Steam Built continues to run the game as a live service, hosting events and patching bugs, but so far, the company has remained silent about the issue and has done nothing to address it.
One fed-up player built a #SaveTF2 website that includes a petition demanding Valve take action against TF2 cheaters. As of this writing, it has gathered over 211,000 signatures. The community hopes that the review bomb and some media attention will be enough to spur the Team Fortress development team into constructive action.