#SaveTF2, A Tweet and a Bucket of Salt

On May 26th 2022, the Team Fortress 2 community came together and peacefully protested about how the developers at Valve had basically abandoned Team Fortress 2. After all, vanilla Team Fortress 2 servers have been flooded with bots and cheaters, while community servers are having an arms race between hackers and script-writers, constantly trying to stop the flood of cheating from taking over. On top of that, Team Fortress 2 hasn’t had a proper update in a long, long time, and the only new content is crates and keys, little else.

A protest

All of this actually followed a mini event where some of the original voice actors got together and actually streamed, bringing up Team Fortress 2 and voice-acting the TF2 comics. That little event created a swirl in the community pool, and this helped popularize TF2 a bit more. The perfect time to start a protest. And all of the protests were being covered by a single hashtag, #SAVETF2.

Loads of people joined in on this little event. Many of the big-name players and streamers all made media saying how bad the game has gotten, that TF2 has a huge, rich history and that we desperately need help in getting rid of the bots and hackers. We both took part as well. Both aabicus and I have long histories with Team Fortress 2, to the point that it’s almost heartbreaking how far the game has fallen. So I ended up writing an article and aabicus made a video, both of us using the #SAVETF2 hashtag.

What happened?

When it was all over, nothing really happened. At least, not at first. Then we got an official message from Valve themselves. Kinda. All we got was a Twitter message saying that we’ve ‘been heard’.

It’s worth pointing out that this tweet is the first tweet the Team Fortress 2 account has posted in like 2 years. And it’s not exactly promising. they ‘hear us’? They’ve been ignoring us for years. Why? No idea. If they HAD actually been listening, we wouldn’t be here.

You know how people say that devs never play their own games? That’s EXACTLY what has happened here. The bot and hacker epidemic has been plaguing Team Fortress 2 for years now. And some lowly intern at Valve finally got round to launching TF2, played the game and saw it for themselves. If anyone actually did love TF2 at Valve HQ, then they wouldn’t have left the game abandoned for so long. Despite the fact that they still make plenty of money from TF2 items in the Mann Co store and the Steam Market.

Take EVERYTHING with a pinch of salt.

No, wait, take all of this with a bucket of salt. The tweet is so… bare bones and ignorant that I don’t think we’ll ever see any real change. We might get less bots or something, but that’s probably it. What I’m saying is, that tweet might just be… it. I doubt Valve would just do nothing at all, but it’s going to take forever.

I hate to be a negative person about this. Especially as Team Fortress 2 changed my life as a young adult. But when it comes to this single tweet? I really have very little confidence that anything good might happen. All we can do is wait and see, and we’ll probably be waiting for a while…