Other theories about why the botting crisis has kicked off include a bizarre revenge plotline.
There’s no specific proof that this was the cause of the botting issue, and it may just be a coincidence, but several community members pointed to that period as a tipping point all the same. Incidentally, this was around the same time that the Team Fortress 2 source code was leaked. While it’s true that all online multiplayer games struggle with botting to some degree, most of the Team Fortress 2 community members I subsequently talked to seemed to think that things got aggressively bad around two years ago, in early to mid 2020. Head into a casual match on Valve’s servers, and you’ll find that the game is practically impossible to play. It’d be easy enough to dismiss the problem as the natural fate of a 15-year-old game, or point out that the vast majority of online games have botting problems – how bad could this one be? But as IGN discovered, Team Fortress 2’s botting problems are egregious when compared to other online multiplayer games. At the time this piece was written, the video had almost 150,000 views, 15,000 likes, and nearly 2,000 comments chiming in about their own frustrating experiences with bots. SquimJim offered an email template (which many of our tippers used, though others wrote their own messages) and a list of both media tiplines like our own, and publicly-available Valve employee emails. In it, he encourages his audience to reach out to both media and Valve employees in hopes that enough pressure will force the developer to take action.
The source of the flood is a community centered around Team Fortress 2 content creator SquimJim, who published a video on May 7 lamenting the rampant botting issues within Team Fortress 2. We weren’t the only site getting these messages, nor were they limited to just the media.