Valve: " *TF2 community, we hear you! We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things.* " -May 27th 2022
🤓 As a russian myself, i can find several reasons, why there's plenty botfarmers over here: 1. Government doesn't care about this "gray market" (so far, at least) 2. Electricity is quite cheap even by local standards, especially in regions, where huge Soviet-built hydroelectric powerplants are. As well, there is a lot of cheap used server equipment from neighbouring China, so overall maintenance of botfarms should be way cheaper than in western countries. 3. Average salaries in Russia in dollar equivalent is way less than is EU/North America, so same 1000 dollars are more valuable over here (just like was said in a video). 4. Due to recent sanctions, Russia was detached from SWIFT banking system, which made buying games or even adding money to Steam account by normal means - impossible. So, there appeared dozens of "middle man companies" (basically automated tradebots, connected to local banking system), that allows to buy in-game items for rubles, so you could sell them and purchase whatever you want in Steam. That is definitely increases demand for in-game items, that could be practically turned into roubles with minimum losses, which is quite huge...
So the war starting also has an effect in exacerbating the bot issues from Russia. I would have never thought that the Russia-Ukraine war would end up having an effect on TF2 of all fucking things.
I wanted to mention bots using stolen accounts in my video but lacked the proof to back it up. The rabbit hole goes even further with these degens. Shoot...
@@PreeSpunkyHe has no choice but to do that sadly, else RUclips will come in and white knight for objectively terrible people as always. Now if the TF2 mercs were real and we could bribe them with money/women/guns/Australium, it'd be a different story.
The achievement one's aren't exactly a good proof since tons of ganes have bizarro achievement rates but this just so happened to actually point to something distressing
@@danielsurvivor1372 the most common acheivement out of 520 total acheivements has only 51.4% total. for a game as big as tf2 with that many acheivements the most common one should be like 90%+
"Uhhm, uhh he- hello g- guys I, I wanted to play Team F- F- F- Fortress 2 for 6 years now I am so so so sorry I just... I jusct " duck what the f7ck am i even doign
The thing you gotta look into aswell is, why should they care? Tf2's revenue is insignificant compared to how much they make with their other products and platforms :(
The entire bot situation around TF2 can be summarized with one quote from the Russian movie DMB: -You see the gopher? -No. -I don't see one either, but he's there.
Man, with the dead internet theory, this hits even harder after watching your two videos. If there's this many bots for an old game like TF2, then imagine what the rest of the internet looks like...
Its been proven that games like COD use bots to fill up matches to determine the win or loss outcome of a players match in SBMM. Its also been proven companies buy bot farms and use them to shill products. TF2 is the tip of the iceberg
Its not even necessarily just one guy. Given with how vast this is I would not be surprised if this is a branch of a bigger criminal org or just a couple dudes in a shed somewhere.
@@Ludwig_Perpenhente they probably arent very physically able besides why putt yourself at risk doing physical sales when you can just host bots with zero risk?
17:02 "A US Dollar goes a lot further in other countries" -Hey, like what some of my friends back in venezuela are doing with ru... "This is why wee see venezuelans farming gold in runescape" **Rick Dalton Pointing**
Realistically its not the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. Game micro-economies are as lucrative as you can make them, if you'll sink the time. There's no hard limit to supply of such items so it makes it into a steady money-farm. I actually used to trade items on the Diablo 2 auction house that I'd buy off people with gift cards and stuff that I got online for free surveys and stuff. I actually paid my car payment one month solely from w33d sales and Diablo 2 items.
The fact that you're not even a Valve employee, you have none of the tools they have, but were so easily able to find scores of bot networks shows how embarrassingly incompetent Valve has been at combatting these. Like you said, these are just sitting out in the open. It's insane how bad Valve has handled this that it's hard not to think they've just done nothing at all.
Think of it this way. You own a game that's over a decade old and it only has ~20,000 real players. This puts the whole conversation into question. I love TF2, but now I can't say Valve has a duty to serve its players because that is simply such a small amount to continue operating a game for. Maybe it's passed the point of no return, and diminishing return for valve.
it's hilarious how this guy is showing straight facts for a 2nd video but a large chunk of the tf2 community outside this video (tf2 subreddit) will still deny and downplay the information cause zesty posted it, i don’t think fixtf2 is going to work with people pulling the wool over their own eyes
@@jeanivanjohnson A good chunk of the TF2 community (like r/tf2) are left leaning, and those kinds of people are REALLY attatched to their ideology to the point where they will slander and harrass you if you don't have the same views as them.
Doubt it's a noticable amount. Remember, these idle-bots are after tradable items given as random rewards for waiting. Most games don't have that, and a good bunch that do have random drops like that also still require playing on official servers and finish games. Not something these idle-bots can do. So, that narrows it down to a few games in the first place. And TF2 is probably the most prolific game where this is happening, inflating its number relative to the rest. Increasing both the amount of people aware of the game and interested in its items. So if there are, say 80k idle-bots in TF2, then that's maybe 100k across all of Steam. And Steam itself probably hits the hundred million people mark here and there in terms of active players.
It's the fact that people would say shit like "You just noticed?" But when you think about it, WHY they aren't informing more people about the information? Just messed up smh
We went from saying: "The Blue Moon Update killed TF2!" Then to saying "The Meet Your Match Update actually killed TF2!" Now I'm starting to think that the "Mann-conomy" update of 2010 was the beginning of the slow rot. It revolutionized gaming microtransactions, and now we're all suffering for it a decade later.
It's beyond embarrassing that one guy can scrub 1.4k accounts for bot activity in 5 days while Valve with their vast wealth and data couldn't do that in 5 years.
I think valve used to do this occasionally. In the Uncle Dane video on what the TF team was doing they said that they "manually banned [thousands] of bots", which probably were idle bots. I'm pretty sure they aren't doing anything about this now, though.
Oh no they absolutely can and probably have, they just won't do anything about it because it's not profitable to get rid of them and the player count makes their game look good. They'd only get rid of them if it negatively impacted them in some way, but they're so fucking lazy that their apparent incompetance on display isn't enough to make them care.
Hey turk here just wanted to tell you that at 11:40 'Bereketlik' means fruitful or plentyfull in englisch but in this context it means more that as a hive like spawner
This video makes me feel so vindicated. I remember a few years ago I got into a little debate with someone about the health of the game. They pointed out that the player count is "higher than ever!", and that clearly the game is doing alright in spite of the bot problem. I countered back that a lot of that player count was probably bot activity. I didn't have any evidence, but my intuition was based on the server browser. I remember in 2011/2012 that many many more community servers had players on them, but now TF2 feels like a ghosttown outside of a few holdouts like Skial and Uncletopia. This video basically confirms my suspicions. The game is super dead compared to where it was in 2012 or even 2017. The playercount on Steam charts is next to useless.
Midly unrelated, but I love the use of Metroid music to really nail the theming and tone of this video. Samus's adventures always had that sort of isolating and investigative "wha happun" sort of vibe.
The fact you could find all of this manually by trading some penny items is insane. Valve's negligence is thicker than peanut butter sludge. #fixtf2 #fixvalve
@@Calvin_Coolage thank you Spurdo, I guess we need one of those few guys who giftapult'd an unusual to get Saul Goodman on retainer to sue Valve to force them to change
Hey Zesty, First of all, this is not meant to be an inflammatory comment, it’s the opposite actually. Honestly, for the longest time I disliked you as a RUclipsr, especially as a TFtuber, it always felt like you had a needlessly negative attitude about the situation for a long time. But no, you were being realistic, and it hurt me as someone who loved this game to admit that you were right. Thankyou for sticking to your guns, and congrats on 100k! You deserve it
Our past convictions can injure the receptivity of our minds. I feel absolutely empty after these two videos of his. I am a veritable snowflake, if a matter such as this induces such horror in me, but the copium I was inhaling prior was all the more terrible and stultifying. Oh what gruesome irony - it was one with "Jesus" in their name to utter truth that most neglected!
Maybe see it for youself in that video 's comment section or their discord if you somehow get in. Or they start making fake Zesty Jesus or other youtuber accounts (which is an act of impersonation that is illegal in most country) and framing (also illegal in most country) them so the youtubers seem they are pedophiles or other horrible thing when they aren't. At this point, if Valve or the literal police officers won't stop the bots or the crimes then TF2 might be unplayable forever in the main mode (casual) which is 99% of players play at least once and those poor youtuber targeted by them.
@@dogecursor5190If it's like their other responses to ecelebs calling them out, it's naming their bots after the eceleb in question and making an AI of their voice say all the slurs.
The farming bots and the cheating bots are not from the same people, the first are doing it for money, the others are pure degenerates. Both should be removed but just saying that they're separate people.
@@Mavis847 I agree, but considering the money idlers usually do a lot of shady and often illegal shit just to start up their "business" in the first place they're also degenerates if you ask me and even if they aren't, neither should be allowed to exist
17:00 I'm REALLY glad you mentioned Runescape. Runescape has a VERY similar bot problem to TF2s, with Jagex not doing really anything of value to stop botting long term. The problem is so ubiquitous that most players seem to think Jagex not only keeps them around to boost player numbers, but they actually profit off of them existing. I would LOVE to run an experiment like you did these last two videos on both RS3 and OSRS. A lot of people seem to think OSRS is 20% bots, but I have reason to believe it's way, way, WAY more than that, just like TF2.
anecdotal evidence here, but: from my experience playing both games, despite OSRS having way more players than RS3, it *feels* like they both have the same amount of real human players online at any given time
The issue with runescape is that it lacks any sort of player facing stat tracking like what Zesty uses here in the video. I too would love to see how the problem is between the two games, but I don't see any reliable method players could use to expose the botters like this.
The whole "Jagex keeps them around to profit / to boos player numbers" is at best conspiratory conjecture and is a poor starting point to unraveling the bot issues. They have always cared about the bot issues despite the profits, see ClusterFlutterer as an update over a decade ago, it hit bots HARD. This is also one of the reasons why RS3 doesn't have custom clients. But as they've said, it's an arms race. Once they pop some out, more pop back in. Would you give up RuneLite etc. if it meant Jagex would be able to more effectively fight against bots? Easy to say yes, yet people also say they wouldn't even play the game if it weren't for RuneLite plugins. Granted, Jagex can implement more of the plugins into the official client to off-set this, but would it be enough? Either way, there's such a dedicated bot making community where people pay hundreds for the more advanced code that could lead them to profit even with such high costs. I am not saying Jagex couldn't be doing better, of course they could, but they're not absolutely complacent about the problem like Valve is. Valve simply doesn't care one single tiny bit.
The SaveTF2 discussion should be centered around the fact that there's actually only 30k human players when TF2 videos easily break through 100k views. Probably unique viewers on each video, too. What do we have to do to get those extra 70k non-players to play this game? I think Valve's best move here would be to make community servers as obvious to new players as they can. It would be very unrealistic to assume Valve would put in any significant effort to deal with this issue. It really feels like no one plays TF2 less than TF2 fans.
Maybe people would play more often if Valve was fixing the inherent problems that make the game less enjoyable? I have hundreds of hours in the game, but rarely boot it up anymore because it takes more effort to enjoy TF2 than it does for games without horrific bot problems.
Valve should just remove the ability to get weapons and scrap for just being idle in the game. Close the money flow and there is no longer any reason to bot outside of just being a general annoyance.
@@thatguyzach7599 literally, I would actually play it and probably even throw money their way for funnee hats and epic skins if I wasn't forced into the same community maps
7:00 omfg I guessed 992. That random ass number popped into my mind because it was approximately 70% I have done estimations and percentages since I was a kid, even before I knew how. It still blows my mind how accurate I was, and what that frickin means. I commend all of the work you've done, and what this could potentially do for the community at large. I couldn't imagine how much work and effort this took.
@@RighteousBryan Yeah it's true, Jerma has been captured and replaced by Albanian Goverment long ago to secretly force Albanian propaganda in order to destroy Serbia
combined with the weird shit going on with empty servers in source games being creepy asf, and the dead internet theory with all the bots, i think we're cooked
I think you attracted trader mains' attention when you mentioned that the idlers are the reason why key prices are so high. In a good way. They might've been more or less indifferent to the whole botting situation otherwise.
At least he brought it up this time. By farming out items like this, you're effectively "printing" the currency that TF2's economy is based around, Refined. Even if a Scrap is worth a shilling, and a Refined is basically a penny compared to a key, it's still printing money, and driving the value of Refined down and inflating the price of keys in terms of Refined. A single key will go a lot farther these days, even compared to when I started and the highest price I saw was in the mid-30s for refined. These botnets are the reason why trading is so much harder to get into, and it's astonishing to see Refined go from even a dime to 1:1 with a United States penny. Basically, these bots are making counterfeit money, actually. They're printing it, and pumping it into an economy, but there's no need to even physically print it!
@@llmkursk8254 Yep, these bots ruined trading pretty much, you used to be able to manually trade your way up and stuff like that, they made it incredibly hard.
Always confused me how refs are worth so little. There are 2 million mannco keys, let's say 3 counting all the others. Yet there are "just" 12 million refs. Theorically, you could buy all the refs for just 150k keys.
@@ByNextus it’s literally what he said, if you’re gonna quote someone do it right. Also what you said makes no sense, suggestion is a much better usage in the context, as suggestion implies you just have the option of cheating and can choose to cheat, rather than recommendation which advises you to not do it for your own good.
@@LadZeroUltra DAYS? like, days of the week? like the bot net? is this a tuetwo02gubd64 reference from the hit video TF2: I Found 60,000 bots by Zezty Jesus minute 13:10
imagine being a bot hoster, going under valves nose for possibly years just for a geologist to not only showcase your steam profile, but also most of your botnet
Pretty clear this isn’t under anybody’s nose. Valve knows who these people are and they don’t try to hide. They get their cut and allow it to happen. Nobody shown in this video will face any consequences, even temporarily.
I feel like we should go beyond FixTF2, this is happening to Unturned, CS2, any other game with free item drops. I'm sure more people would get behind that.
If you’re presenting this to any kind of government then you need to speak their language. They won’t give a shit about “bots in video games”, but they will care about “printing money”.
It doesn’t happen as much in CS2 for anyone to care, people are only concerned about cheaters and Valve works to fix that. Bots getting some free cases doesn’t really affect anyone in there because of the system they implemented.
@@soop7349 The stolen gift cards can be a trace, but the problem is that those aren't serialized and documented on who they're sold to for retail and who bought them. The gift cards are the closest thing to catching bot hosters with such a massive net of bots and gift cards are still nowhere close to being traceable. The government won't give a shit and they likely wouldn't be able to catch a bot hoster if they even cared in the first place. Valve has much more information to trace and crack down on these hosters, but they likely wouldn't have solid grounds with legal action, so in the end they'll just ban the user accounts and the bots and it'll become a treadmill problem. It's fucked...
What a shame, Valve used to be one of the most respectable companies in the gaming scene, only for them to plummet this low. Which reminds me, half a year ago Valve released the Half-Life documentary, and in it; Gabe said "Late is for a little while, suck is forever" and yet they aren't really preventing this "suck" now are they?
Zesty just made two videos about literal russian people hosting bots with stolen accounts in order to… print money. That’s right, print money. What does this remind you of? Yeah… stay safe Zesty.
One of the biggest items that makes my account human, is my cherished "The Spirit of Giving," which it has 1 Gifts Given on its counter. I got it way back in the day when Yogscast was doing a charity co-op event with TF2 as well as Humble Bundle. Oh, and I guess my Level 69 Tux Mascot.
@@mohammadmojtabafaghih1323 And therein lies one of the big problems with this. The bots who outnumbers the players 70-30 at LEAST, are actively providing Valve with a profit. Why would Valve remove 70% of the income of this game?
It's not just TF2 that has this problem, CSGO(and now 2) has been suffering from the same problem of massive bot farms and account stealing for years. Valve needs to get their shit together.
from my tiny research cs2 seemt to have 50& of players that never leave the game. so 50& of the cs2 playerbase might be bots. for example in roughly 1.500.000 players, roughly 800.000 - 850.000 players never leave the game
Im SO happy the Metroid Prime Trilogy OST has made it to the commentary community. It's always such a wonderful treat to hear them again in the wild! The Sanctuary Fortress theme too!!! Ooh so lovely
The giftapult strat to track down the bots was really smart, props to the folks that thought of that. Its quite satisfying to know that most of the TF2 player base has been bots, I've been guessing that for the last couple of years, as I always felt queuing up for servers became noticeably longer and longer as the years went on after Jungle Inferno, even though steam charts said the amount of players were consistent. I'am half-worried that if you could somehow get rid of these idle bots alone, you could almost push TF2 into a death spiral as it becomes apparent to the few who thought the game was somewhat popular abandon it due to the actual player numbers being shown, as well as losing advertising to new players as a top played steam game. Valve could probably just turn off item drops for a month after banning all the bots + their owners if possible to prevent financial incentive for these bot owners to stick around, and you'd might never see TF2 recover. But this also sets a dreadful precedent for any game that has an real money/steam wallet-based economy that bots can profit from so blatantly, that games long abandoned and may have no modern relevance, despite 'apparently' being popular to some degree, will be held in some sort of zombie state. Even if that might technically effect no one negatively, it will give false impressions on how popular some games are, and arguably steal away advertising and a growing playerbase from games (hence the death spiral mentioned above) that could use something like a single space on the steam charts top 10 played games leaderboard. Even now, Team Fortress 2 is 9th place on that list, and it really does not own that position at all. But...maybe the other thing to be worried about is the TF2 economy bursting due to some problematic elements brought about by these bots (too much scrap or cases yielded, or maybe actual player demand collapsing as more real players leave the game?), causing the hosters to just cut ties and suddenly Team Fortress 2 just doesn't have a player base any more overnight, triggering that death spiral. I dunno, while I would like to see something happen because of all this bot nonsense, I just don't feel like anything is coming soon. I don't want to be negative, but I have yet to see any new changes to the TF2 situation in the last couple of years, I don't know why it would change now all of a sudden.
I don't think idle bot death spiral anytime soon. Even if keys start costing 100 ref, idle bots will still exist to farm it. It's hacker bots that are an issue, a ticking timebomb that if it becomes modernized, we might never get to experience bot free lobby
@@danielsurvivor1372they're the bigger problem for actively disruptive the basic games yes. But here's the upside if say every bot and type are gone including the economy ones. Valve has never changed their prices of in game items on their store. It's seriously cheaper than trading itself nowadays.
Great video! And I just want to point out the irony of this naming system 14:10 to 14:12 - there is a Julikov bot name, 'Julik' (Жулик) means 'cheater' in Russia.
what if this isnt exclusive to tf2? has anyone ever investigated csgo, dota, lol? what if bots are the reason gaming has been pushed as popular? is valve actually profiting of this? has all of gaming culture just been an illusion?
It's a good point, what if... in fact, all this time, Valve has gotten to where it is because they know it and have multiple Steam accounts, which could just be bots buying games to move their market and bring in billions of money all the years, months and days in his pockets? What if these games really were never that popular but only got where they are because someone artificially made it happen?
Definitely not, but I think idle bots are very much dependent on whether or not you're rewarded for idling. I can't see anyone making these types of networks in a game like Valorant or Overwatch since there's really no monetary incentive.
To be fair, dota and cs2 don't have profitable item drops right? Those games have cheater programs sure but they probably wouldn't have tens of thousands of idlers like we do.
Recently I’ve noticed an uptick of bot accounts trying to friend me, idk if I got some item they consider desirable, but I’ve noticed they share most of these same traits. Generic name, image, incomplete setup, and the same friends list.
I got three unusuals and I get friend requests from compromised accounts and bot accounts every couple days. Its so easy to tell for me now. I report the accounts but I know nothing will happen.
I've been looking into ways to make their operations far more expensive. These phish sites proxy login data to steam servers so traditional methods such as overloading their storage doesn't really work. There's this one operating under Cloudflare's DNS service that is basically impossible to ddos, nor do I have the resources to make that phish site preform a ddos on steam servers by proxy. I essentially need entire networks racks of enterprise grade servers scattered randomly about to shove as much large packets into the phishers in order to have a hope for them to inadvertently ddos steam servers. Which only leaves somehow acquiring login details of millions, maybe billions of dummy steam accounts and attempting to run them out of storage space Option 2 as part of the #FixTF2 movement is to convince Valve to blacklist all known VPS and VPN providers from accessing Steam services
Same, almost 2 or 3 each day comment on my account with emoji spam and a friend request. I threw in the towel just yesterday and took my profile private
Would be interesting but In reality doesn't matter since Bot accounts don't do anything for the store or against the store. Since Valve is a private company they don't need to attract investors with big useless numbers. The only thing that matters is the actual game sales. Not Investor capital
@@simplysmiley4670 I really despise Valve at this point but I still prefer them to be this way. I miss TF2 being updated but if Valve becomes stock company, not only TF2 and other Valve games could be shut down or plagued with more microtransactions... they would slash a lot of Steam functions.
@@cloudynguyen6527 Not saying they should become yet another triple A publisher that wants to suck all your money out of you for lackluster, barely functional service(s). No one with the movement wants that either lmao. And as long as Steam's a money printing machine with Gabe at the lead of Valve, or at least someone likeminded, they won't change into something like that, they literally have no reason to.
It kinda is. This plaques all games where you can earn real money. Especially with f2ps. So this basically plaques cs2, dota2 and later on deadlock too
@@enor9379deadlocks 100% going to have the same issue, and since anticheat is apparently not “fun” enough for Valve employees they’ll let that game be infested too
What a monumental discovery. Truly bringing forward the issues that we as a fan base have grown ignorant to and sparking new discussion and outcry in an organized fashion has been long sought. Hats off to you my good sir.
On you point about "There's probably zero human players in private servers" I'll just drop an anecdote and yes, the plural of anecdote is not data. I belong to a couple of PGS groups who do exactly that. We chill in a discord and wait for enough people to get on to set up pick up games, then using a discord bot we sign up, vote on maps/game mode, get sorted into teams, and it spins up a private server for that game only with the voted on parameters. We join the server with the link and password, play, and it saves some stats and then closes the server till the next game. We do this for a few other steam games too. Why do it this way instead of having a persistent server we can just join and go? It's easier, and bit cheaper as one of our members just has a dedicated machine that can serve as the host when needed, and it removes any issues with being able to be targeted with DDOS or hacks since the server is never the same each time. It's not the usual way of doing things, but there's at least a small population of players doing this. Is it a statistically relevant amount of people? Who knows, probably not. But I just wanted to give an answer to "why" human players might be in private servers.
@@ghhn4505 the main problem with nfts is how every single transaction involving them uses up about as much energy as a years worth of energy for a normal household. go back to hearts of iron and stop making low quality bait
This really just highlights a huge problem with the bot crisis, which is steam itself. Imagine if when you had a steam account, you actually had to set it up, provide information that you are a human, link a bank or debit card, etc. That would cut out 99.99% of scammers and bots immediately, both in TF2 and CS2. But that means valve wouldn't be taking a cut.
The fact these are all easily found via Steam search results seriously speaks to how much Steam has neglected the issue. Thank you for your investigative reporting as always o7
Steam doesn't really have an incentive to go after them because most of the people doing this will just start again, at worst its an inconvienence for them. You'd think they'd stop after the 3rd or 4th time but these people are lazy scumbags, they'll do it potentially dozens more times.
Imagine turning a first person shooter into a "crypto" mine, I'm calling it a crypto mine because this is what it reminds me of. People set up bots to farm items, then they sell what they get and it all creates this.. "passive income" for bot hosters. Why does VALVᴇ allow this? Why is my childhood game being farmed and botted for cold profit? Dude, I just wanna build a dispenser and backstab an incompetent sniper on 2fort. Why are people trying to capitalize on everything fun and enjoyable? It's fucking aggravating. #fixtf2
The exploitative nature of humans is entirely inevitable. The multi billion dollars corporation didn't add microtransactions and battle passes, someone's gotta quench the thirst.
You feel guilty for wanting to be nice and send a gift to a random person? Very few people knew it was this bad until now; it isn't you who should feel guilty for sending a gift, it's those who run these bot accounts who should be ashamed of stealing it away from someone else.
@@hookfancy9879maybe he is under the philosophy that the intents don't matter, the results do and this result was a negative one, no matter the intention, and that's all that matters.
The problem with the "SaveTF2" movement is that you get people that don't understand what is going on and aren't pragmatic enough to admit what they likely suspect. TF2 will not be saved, 70% of it's player base at given time aren't even real people. Valve knows this, they have likely known this for years. TF2 internally at Valve is likely not considered worth the investment. It's dated, old and people aren't going to come back. They wont admit the bot crisis either because if they did that then you could see what is left of the real players panic and pull out of the game all together, which would lead to the bots also pulling out. The bots make them Money in their own way, actual players sadly don't. Or at least not nearly as much. Valve makes some money off the market place, sure. But, chances are not much. People generally don't buy the super high dollar stuff off it and even then it's only 10-15%. Versus Keys, which Valve makes 100% off of. Even if they are just 5 bucks. In their indirect Way, the Bots are crucial to the key trade. Get rid of them and profits for the game drop significantly... as would the player numbers.
@@SpinosaurusStudios_ Nah anywhere after a few weapons were added to right before it was given quickplay, which destroyed the hell out of nicher community servers.
The alleged "golden age" is personalised for every player, but the majors ones are pre-meet your match and post-mym. The introduction of casual really shook the community and even though I wasn't there to witness it, the echoes were still felt right up until jungle inferno. My own golden age was the years following jungle inferno right up until COVID. The community morale was expectedly high, and the content creation side of things was thriving, inviting more and more new players into the game. I remember trying to queue up for hightower and getting into banana bay over and over again (I hadn't figured out the menu). Banana bay nowadays requires hours of waiting, and even when you do get in, there are 5 identical snipers in both teams.
@@Joe-dy7bbgatekeeping wouldn’t get you anywhere my dude You have every right to be upset over paying for something that went free but the people who joined after are definitely not at fault that’s just a retarded take
Well, at least we have a preview now of what a dead internet looks like... I'm pretty sure finding and reporting these bot handlers would at least be a step towards fixing the game, but in the end that's up to Valve to act on the info.
The only way to really fix that is if valve stops people from earning real money from their games. But we all know that valve, traders and bot owners won't let that happen
I’m convinced that there’s even less people playing this game than you estimate, and that’s there’s probably over a hundred and fifty thousand bots out there or more that are on at different times of the day. from my recent experience in tf2 casual, I’ve been waiting forever to get into games and seeing the same 15-20 people over and over again, even in entirely different server regions. There haven’t been enough people online on Virginia (EST) servers like half of the time, and I’ve been sent as far as Germany in matchmaking, in servers that are only half-full. I hadn’t played it for a long time before i picked it up in March, and the state of the game was shocking and really depressing to me for something the online world had said was thriving. Great job on the video, and i think that with more digging you’ll find the situation is somehow even worse than the findings across your two videos about the bot crisis.
Technically nothing. Supply and demand affect pricing, but consent affects the market as well. If trading platforms consent to buying botted items that cause inflation and players (unsuspecting or aware) consent to buying and owning said botted items, there shouldn't be any legal implications besides breakig ToS which are defined by the service providers as they are consenting (either actively or through negligence). The thing is that digital items really only have fictional rarity and will only affect the game's economy. All of this can only be affected by the playerbase, the entity hosting the game, and in cases such as Marketplace, the entities hosting trading platforms. You generally don't see people suing companies for having bad luck with lootboxes/gacha after the first waves of games since they are now obligated to show players rarities for items, and for competition have included customer-friendly systems such as guaranteeing the jackpot with enough attempts. In other words, as long as you are a consenting adult, you can earn and spend money on digital goods pretty freely, and as long as there is no backlash there will be no change, so this is something that should be addressed to pressure Valve.
The Hosters live inside of an isolationist dictatorship, even if VALVə had an actual crime they could sue the bot owners for, they aint gonna be able to reach them on Russian soil
Laundry is laundry. If this washing machine shuts down, there's plenty more. As for trying to deal with the washers, it's a matter of international legal action (complicating the matters tenfold) with no direct links to any one person or legal entity (complicating the matters a bit) and lots of room for plausible deniability (complicating blah blah blah). Before you finish calculating the result, remember to add the ultra rich and ultra-er lazy corporation hosting the platform for this, as well as the legal loopholes, and you'll get an irrelevant number, because you also need to multiply by the chance that our economic systems were NOT set up for things like this to work well. Zero.
The list of my giftapult recipients can be found here: github.com/megascatterbomb/tf2PlayerCount
Yes, I enjoy fempyro
remove sniper: problem fixed
Sorry I couldn't contribute.
Do edit on your earlier video's pinned comment that you most likely know now how the costs are handled for running the bots.
@@TF2ConscientiousObjector The only real fix.
thanks for going through all that shit manually to provide evidence sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh
Realising that my giftapults had a 70% chance of going to a bot broke my heart
I didn't even realize oof ;_; but maybe not
it doesn't surprise me at all, every smissmas I send out a giftapult and without fail it ends up going to a guy named something like "174295282940"
Probably even higher actually, since major botfarms booted up for the holiday event
Dead game stop playing dead game the dead game gave you bad memory so stop playing it Play something Happy F U
I once got some junk from giftapult. I'm alive!
“Past 5 to 6 years” holy fuck it really has been that long we have had to deal with this
Nice pfp
I have only even known TF2 with bots, I’ve been playing for years, and to me it’s just a part of playing the game
@@BismuthPTMnot fun being dominated by them every time trying to get out of spawn.
@@BismuthPTMas a 2012 veteran, God bless you
I’m mad
Valve: " *TF2 community, we hear you! We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things.* "
-May 27th 2022
"Valve Software's BIGGEST LIES"
(Thumbnail contains the text "SMALL INDIE COMPANY" and "YEARS-LONG NEGLECT," as well as a shocked Engineer image)
If they really cared this woulda never happened
"TF2 is the very core of our dna"
I always hear the narrator's voice from the Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe. "Gamers, we hear you!"
When you will learn that the tf2 social account is run by the last developer and the company never wrote that tweet?
🤓 As a russian myself, i can find several reasons, why there's plenty botfarmers over here:
1. Government doesn't care about this "gray market" (so far, at least)
2. Electricity is quite cheap even by local standards, especially in regions, where huge Soviet-built hydroelectric powerplants are. As well, there is a lot of cheap used server equipment from neighbouring China, so overall maintenance of botfarms should be way cheaper than in western countries.
3. Average salaries in Russia in dollar equivalent is way less than is EU/North America, so same 1000 dollars are more valuable over here (just like was said in a video).
4. Due to recent sanctions, Russia was detached from SWIFT banking system, which made buying games or even adding money to Steam account by normal means - impossible. So, there appeared dozens of "middle man companies" (basically automated tradebots, connected to local banking system), that allows to buy in-game items for rubles, so you could sell them and purchase whatever you want in Steam. That is definitely increases demand for in-game items, that could be practically turned into roubles with minimum losses, which is quite huge...
putin gonna be buying missiles from kim jong un using tf2 keys lmao
какая чушь ) никто от SWIFT, не отключал
4. most bot accounts existed before 2022
So the war starting also has an effect in exacerbating the bot issues from Russia. I would have never thought that the Russia-Ukraine war would end up having an effect on TF2 of all fucking things.
@@darkySp That's why nobody of sane mind likes ru, they ruined EVERYTHING for EVERYONE. And the people who still support ru are just coping.
I wanted to mention bots using stolen accounts in my video but lacked the proof to back it up. The rabbit hole goes even further with these degens. Shoot...
just finished the video when you did. are we meant to be??
The bots have been using an ai voice of you to say disgusting things in game…. You were right when you predicted that they would do that to you.
>clicks on your video
"Please do not harass anyone mentioned--"
>clicks off your video
can back it up, my account got hacked, and i was used as a bot account for a while, till i got it back
@@PreeSpunkyHe has no choice but to do that sadly, else RUclips will come in and white knight for objectively terrible people as always. Now if the TF2 mercs were real and we could bribe them with money/women/guns/Australium, it'd be a different story.
this also explains why just a tiny % of ppl have the most common achievements
JEEZ, YOU ARE RIGHT
Damn, Wish I noticed that sooner. This is depressing
This always had me confused
The achievement one's aren't exactly a good proof since tons of ganes have bizarro achievement rates but this just so happened to actually point to something distressing
@@danielsurvivor1372 the most common acheivement out of 520 total acheivements has only 51.4% total. for a game as big as tf2 with that many acheivements the most common one should be like 90%+
Sorry Zest we forgot to invite you to the 100,000,000 player strong underground private server mafia
I think you’re onto something
Can I be invited please? 🥺🥺 btw is that Ham mafia you’re talking about? Seen them on mannco
@@darthberserk I wasn't talking about them, but thank you for introducing me to these masterpieces
no wonder refined metal is completely fucking worthless, Wow
Those are just really, really shy players taking years to build up the courage to join an official server.
While doing absolutely nothing else on their account.
Don’t worry, they’re all just getting enlightened in the middle of nowhere.
"Uhhm, uhh he- hello g- guys I, I wanted to play Team F- F- F- Fortress 2 for 6 years now I am so so so sorry I just... I jusct " duck what the f7ck am i even doign
add uwu @@ThatKidBobo
@@ThatKidBobo lmao
@@ThatKidBobo "Pomni, stop swearing and join us in Playing Team Fortress 2!"
imagine being a billionare dollar company and your game gets dominated by like 10 basement dwellers 💀
honestly, that`s humiliating
It happens a lot more than you know, ask Sony.
Humiliation ritual
The thing you gotta look into aswell is, why should they care? Tf2's revenue is insignificant compared to how much they make with their other products and platforms
:(
@@MelonRafaelthis fr. There's so little worth in maintaining tf2 compared to their other games and steam client as a whole
The entire bot situation around TF2 can be summarized with one quote from the Russian movie DMB:
-You see the gopher?
-No.
-I don't see one either, but he's there.
Man, with the dead internet theory, this hits even harder after watching your two videos. If there's this many bots for an old game like TF2, then imagine what the rest of the internet looks like...
Reel it back in.
@@J_Marv and the first reply is just a bot.
No one actually believes dead internet theory.. right?
Literally everybody you speak to uses the internet, calm down.
Its been proven that games like COD use bots to fill up matches to determine the win or loss outcome of a players match in SBMM. Its also been proven companies buy bot farms and use them to shill products.
TF2 is the tip of the iceberg
Yeah bro an aimbot is totally the same as passing the Turing test.
The fact that one guy can make 20000 bots is really concerning.
Its not even necessarily just one guy. Given with how vast this is I would not be surprised if this is a branch of a bigger criminal org or just a couple dudes in a shed somewhere.
@@eccomi21 y'know if it was a couple dudes in a shed they really should just make a gun, I heard guys in sheds are on demand lately
@@Ludwig_Perpenhente they probably arent very physically able besides why putt yourself at risk doing physical sales when you can just host bots with zero risk?
@@eccomi21you all give these guys WAY too much credit. they quite literally are losers with too much time. nothing more.
@@sanctum2fan they are kids in their 16-20's. bunch of losers with some laptops.
VAC = Valve Allows Cheaters
Lmao
Valve Assistance of Cheaters
Lol
Underrated comment
It all makes sense now...
17:02
"A US Dollar goes a lot further in other countries"
-Hey, like what some of my friends back in venezuela are doing with ru...
"This is why wee see venezuelans farming gold in runescape"
**Rick Dalton Pointing**
Realistically its not the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. Game micro-economies are as lucrative as you can make them, if you'll sink the time. There's no hard limit to supply of such items so it makes it into a steady money-farm.
I actually used to trade items on the Diablo 2 auction house that I'd buy off people with gift cards and stuff that I got online for free surveys and stuff.
I actually paid my car payment one month solely from w33d sales and Diablo 2 items.
The fact that you're not even a Valve employee, you have none of the tools they have, but were so easily able to find scores of bot networks shows how embarrassingly incompetent Valve has been at combatting these. Like you said, these are just sitting out in the open. It's insane how bad Valve has handled this that it's hard not to think they've just done nothing at all.
you act as if valve is combatting this at all
It's not incompetence if you're not trying, it's negligence.
@@Thompson8200which is great, because negligence isn’t protected by law.
@@Thompson8200 Or, differently worded, laziness. Bro, everyone is profiting, why should Valve care??
Think of it this way. You own a game that's over a decade old and it only has ~20,000 real players. This puts the whole conversation into question. I love TF2, but now I can't say Valve has a duty to serve its players because that is simply such a small amount to continue operating a game for. Maybe it's passed the point of no return, and diminishing return for valve.
So bot farms lowered the price of the refined metal from 0.5key to a 0.000000001 of a key
Pretty much, yeah.
Metal is worthless now
Still can't belive that Valve filled TF2 with 60000 bots to promote MvM
And I STILL don't have the Metal Massacre achievement.
Bravo vince
@@fiendish9474 brabo bince
And i still have no aussie after 130 tours :(
@@UNUSUALstrangeVINTAGEgenuine I'll pray for you (unrionically) 🙏 I am a 2012 vet
Thank you for sharing your research. This clearly took countless hours and sparked an important conversation.
it's hilarious how this guy is showing straight facts for a 2nd video but a large chunk of the tf2 community outside this video (tf2 subreddit) will still deny and downplay the information cause zesty posted it, i don’t think fixtf2 is going to work with people pulling the wool over their own eyes
And all over some politics.
The “tolerant” left at work, guys
Is only wanting aimbots gone, wrong? They are the bigger enemy according to savetf2
@@solarflare9078 lol what? what are you talking about????? how is this a left thing or a politics thing?
@@jeanivanjohnson A good chunk of the TF2 community (like r/tf2) are left leaning, and those kinds of people are REALLY attatched to their ideology to the point where they will slander and harrass you if you don't have the same views as them.
I don't like zesty, but I still watch him because he makes extremely solid content.
this also implies that steams active userbase is also inflated... you might be opening a crazy can of worms here man
*this*
Oh shit that’s terrifying
Abx thus, "Dead Internet Theory" continues to assert itself, even into spaces not originally intended for the idea.
damn ... how insidious a business practice would that be? 😟😟
Doubt it's a noticable amount. Remember, these idle-bots are after tradable items given as random rewards for waiting. Most games don't have that, and a good bunch that do have random drops like that also still require playing on official servers and finish games. Not something these idle-bots can do.
So, that narrows it down to a few games in the first place.
And TF2 is probably the most prolific game where this is happening, inflating its number relative to the rest. Increasing both the amount of people aware of the game and interested in its items.
So if there are, say 80k idle-bots in TF2, then that's maybe 100k across all of Steam. And Steam itself probably hits the hundred million people mark here and there in terms of active players.
78.94 REFINED FOR A KEY?!
Back in my day they were worth 2 holy FUCK
You sound like a TF2 boomer haha
i quit trading when keys hit 38 ref wtf happened lol
Yuuup. It cost me half a key a few years ago to buy every single normal weapon in the game and it has only gotten worse
I remember when keys were 2.33 ref, Christ
@@MikeBison_ Good luck scrapping now!
So Valve earns money, the bot hosters earn money, and the common player suffers. Sounds familiar.
How do Valve earn money? The gift cards are stolen and the goods sold directly for cash outside the marketplace.
How common player suffers?
are you an idiot?
@@oza_lupthe omegatronic snipers
@@thomasgamer4000 video are not about omegatronic snipers
It's the fact that people would say shit like "You just noticed?" But when you think about it, WHY they aren't informing more people about the information? Just messed up smh
We went from saying:
"The Blue Moon Update killed TF2!"
Then to saying
"The Meet Your Match Update actually killed TF2!"
Now I'm starting to think that the "Mann-conomy" update of 2010 was the beginning of the slow rot.
It revolutionized gaming microtransactions, and now we're all suffering for it a decade later.
The release of the game back in 2007 killed the game
@@Jasonwithadot
"Every minute that passes in Africa, a 60 seconds go by."
It's sad but true. TF2 helped normalize micro-transactions (but it was probably inevitable) when it should have been very restrained at best.
Who has ever said Blue Moon killed TF2? That update was generally well received. Meet Your Match was a trainwreck at launch.
Nah bru it was Goldrush update.
It's beyond embarrassing that one guy can scrub 1.4k accounts for bot activity in 5 days while Valve with their vast wealth and data couldn't do that in 5 years.
I think valve used to do this occasionally. In the Uncle Dane video on what the TF team was doing they said that they "manually banned [thousands] of bots", which probably were idle bots. I'm pretty sure they aren't doing anything about this now, though.
They can. It just wouldn't matter.
Couldn't.... or wouldn't?
Oh no they absolutely can and probably have, they just won't do anything about it because it's not profitable to get rid of them and the player count makes their game look good. They'd only get rid of them if it negatively impacted them in some way, but they're so fucking lazy that their apparent incompetance on display isn't enough to make them care.
Perhaps they just didn't care because they get a percentage of each sale. They'll lose money by fixing the problem.
Hey turk here just wanted to tell you that at 11:40 'Bereketlik' means fruitful or plentyfull in englisch but in this context it means more that as a hive like spawner
Extremely fitting for a botnet.
Demek türkbothostercılarda varmış......
Tf2 is the only game where people would celebrate if the player count dropped down 50,000 players
At least man won.
@@ralphdary7050 Mann*
"they hated him because he told them the truth"
fr
Bro's named Jesus for a reason
@@LucarioredLRand he's *zesty* some may even say a lil *freaky*
No we don't
r/tf2 was coping when the first video came out, can't wait to check it today.
7:10 this information is false or misleading, jerma is not human
Remember the hallway video
i was questioning if he was meant to represent the bots
Hes not a bot. He's one of The Old Ones.
I would rather my giftapult item go to a bot than a mass murderer
This video makes me feel so vindicated. I remember a few years ago I got into a little debate with someone about the health of the game. They pointed out that the player count is "higher than ever!", and that clearly the game is doing alright in spite of the bot problem. I countered back that a lot of that player count was probably bot activity. I didn't have any evidence, but my intuition was based on the server browser. I remember in 2011/2012 that many many more community servers had players on them, but now TF2 feels like a ghosttown outside of a few holdouts like Skial and Uncletopia.
This video basically confirms my suspicions. The game is super dead compared to where it was in 2012 or even 2017. The playercount on Steam charts is next to useless.
Midly unrelated, but I love the use of Metroid music to really nail the theming and tone of this video. Samus's adventures always had that sort of isolating and investigative "wha happun" sort of vibe.
That music is also associated with a destructive robot, so that's a plus as well.
The fact you could find all of this manually by trading some penny items is insane. Valve's negligence is thicker than peanut butter sludge. #fixtf2 #fixvalve
I see you Azure - Red
The hashtag should just be #fuckvalve
@@lipschitzlyapunov yes
@@Traxlar With how much money it makes them, they have a responsibility to help. Grow up.
@@Traxlarwhen they are generating revenue and actively adding micro transactions it is.
Also try to be a more positive person my brotha ❤
the fact that 70% of my gift-tapults went to bots is saddening.
And I've always chosen nice items like hats or paints for those things. It's such a shame.
@@Calvin_CoolageI just realized that too. Lord have mercy. Isn't this literally like lawsuit material?
@@seronymus Maybe? I don't recall ever actually buying Giftapults and the items I sent out were ultimately worth peanuts.
@@Calvin_Coolage thank you Spurdo, I guess we need one of those few guys who giftapult'd an unusual to get Saul Goodman on retainer to sue Valve to force them to change
@@seronymus If only it were that easy lol. I certainly wish it was.
Hey Zesty,
First of all, this is not meant to be an inflammatory comment, it’s the opposite actually.
Honestly, for the longest time I disliked you as a RUclipsr, especially as a TFtuber, it always felt like you had a needlessly negative attitude about the situation for a long time.
But no, you were being realistic, and it hurt me as someone who loved this game to admit that you were right.
Thankyou for sticking to your guns, and congrats on 100k! You deserve it
Character development spotted in the wild!
If only everyone could be like this guy.
Our past convictions can injure the receptivity of our minds. I feel absolutely empty after these two videos of his. I am a veritable snowflake, if a matter such as this induces such horror in me, but the copium I was inhaling prior was all the more terrible and stultifying.
Oh what gruesome irony - it was one with "Jesus" in their name to utter truth that most neglected!
A classic lab experiment with a decent sample size. You should be proud, going through this ordeal.
The fact that after the Nobody’s home video the bot creators resorted to using playground insults is hilarious.
wait what? really??? what did they say?
Maybe see it for youself in that video 's comment section or their discord if you somehow get in. Or they start making fake Zesty Jesus or other youtuber accounts (which is an act of impersonation that is illegal in most country) and framing (also illegal in most country) them so the youtubers seem they are pedophiles or other horrible thing when they aren't. At this point, if Valve or the literal police officers won't stop the bots or the crimes then TF2 might be unplayable forever in the main mode (casual) which is 99% of players play at least once and those poor youtuber targeted by them.
@@dogecursor5190If it's like their other responses to ecelebs calling them out, it's naming their bots after the eceleb in question and making an AI of their voice say all the slurs.
The farming bots and the cheating bots are not from the same people, the first are doing it for money, the others are pure degenerates.
Both should be removed but just saying that they're separate people.
@@Mavis847 I agree, but considering the money idlers usually do a lot of shady and often illegal shit just to start up their "business" in the first place they're also degenerates if you ask me
and even if they aren't, neither should be allowed to exist
17:00 I'm REALLY glad you mentioned Runescape. Runescape has a VERY similar bot problem to TF2s, with Jagex not doing really anything of value to stop botting long term. The problem is so ubiquitous that most players seem to think Jagex not only keeps them around to boost player numbers, but they actually profit off of them existing.
I would LOVE to run an experiment like you did these last two videos on both RS3 and OSRS. A lot of people seem to think OSRS is 20% bots, but I have reason to believe it's way, way, WAY more than that, just like TF2.
anecdotal evidence here, but:
from my experience playing both games, despite OSRS having way more players than RS3, it *feels* like they both have the same amount of real human players online at any given time
The issue with runescape is that it lacks any sort of player facing stat tracking like what Zesty uses here in the video. I too would love to see how the problem is between the two games, but I don't see any reliable method players could use to expose the botters like this.
Considering the clusterflutterer (the OG bot nuke) dropped the playercount by ~60%, I'd say OSRS has to be at least close to that.
@@ChronoSquare There is a literal player counter on the front page of the website.
The whole "Jagex keeps them around to profit / to boos player numbers" is at best conspiratory conjecture and is a poor starting point to unraveling the bot issues. They have always cared about the bot issues despite the profits, see ClusterFlutterer as an update over a decade ago, it hit bots HARD. This is also one of the reasons why RS3 doesn't have custom clients. But as they've said, it's an arms race. Once they pop some out, more pop back in. Would you give up RuneLite etc. if it meant Jagex would be able to more effectively fight against bots? Easy to say yes, yet people also say they wouldn't even play the game if it weren't for RuneLite plugins. Granted, Jagex can implement more of the plugins into the official client to off-set this, but would it be enough? Either way, there's such a dedicated bot making community where people pay hundreds for the more advanced code that could lead them to profit even with such high costs.
I am not saying Jagex couldn't be doing better, of course they could, but they're not absolutely complacent about the problem like Valve is. Valve simply doesn't care one single tiny bit.
The SaveTF2 discussion should be centered around the fact that there's actually only 30k human players when TF2 videos easily break through 100k views. Probably unique viewers on each video, too. What do we have to do to get those extra 70k non-players to play this game? I think Valve's best move here would be to make community servers as obvious to new players as they can. It would be very unrealistic to assume Valve would put in any significant effort to deal with this issue.
It really feels like no one plays TF2 less than TF2 fans.
Maybe people would play more often if Valve was fixing the inherent problems that make the game less enjoyable? I have hundreds of hours in the game, but rarely boot it up anymore because it takes more effort to enjoy TF2 than it does for games without horrific bot problems.
trash casual and reinstate quickplay
Valve should just remove the ability to get weapons and scrap for just being idle in the game.
Close the money flow and there is no longer any reason to bot outside of just being a general annoyance.
@@thatguyzach7599 literally, I would actually play it and probably even throw money their way for funnee hats and epic skins if I wasn't forced into the same community maps
7:00 omfg I guessed 992. That random ass number popped into my mind because it was approximately 70%
I have done estimations and percentages since I was a kid, even before I knew how.
It still blows my mind how accurate I was, and what that frickin means.
I commend all of the work you've done, and what this could potentially do for the community at large. I couldn't imagine how much work and effort this took.
I like how he used a photo of jerma as the human photo, but we all know jerma died and was replaced long ago
What....??
@@RighteousBryan Yeah it's true, Jerma has been captured and replaced by Albanian Goverment long ago to secretly force Albanian propaganda in order to destroy Serbia
@Defractalization it's a jeema inside joke
@@M.C.unofficiallyOfficial It's a Jerma
@@RighteousBryan jerma has been dead for years but a skinwalker is pretending to be him
Marasmus was not lying about the Russian mafia lol
That Pumpkin wasn't kidding...
Merasmus deals with the Japanese mafia, not the Russians.
@@evdestroy4121 There were a few Japanese names, we're onto something
you do know the russian mafia did use tf2 to launder money right? that is why the 1 week delay exist
@@evdestroy4121 He did deal with them in a comic.
combined with the weird shit going on with empty servers in source games being creepy asf, and the dead internet theory with all the bots, i think we're cooked
Looks like the 'mentats' from Dune will be the way
"unless theres an underground society of private tf2 servers"
please please please god let the .00000000000001% chance be real it would be so funny
I think you attracted trader mains' attention when you mentioned that the idlers are the reason why key prices are so high. In a good way. They might've been more or less indifferent to the whole botting situation otherwise.
At least he brought it up this time.
By farming out items like this, you're effectively "printing" the currency that TF2's economy is based around, Refined. Even if a Scrap is worth a shilling, and a Refined is basically a penny compared to a key, it's still printing money, and driving the value of Refined down and inflating the price of keys in terms of Refined. A single key will go a lot farther these days, even compared to when I started and the highest price I saw was in the mid-30s for refined.
These botnets are the reason why trading is so much harder to get into, and it's astonishing to see Refined go from even a dime to 1:1 with a United States penny.
Basically, these bots are making counterfeit money, actually. They're printing it, and pumping it into an economy, but there's no need to even physically print it!
@@llmkursk8254 Yep, these bots ruined trading pretty much, you used to be able to manually trade your way up and stuff like that, they made it incredibly hard.
As a long time high tier trader, I never understood how keys inflated so much in ref prices, I started at 6 refs, now we got 80.
I miss the good old days of keys being 2.66 refined
@@jonashormann5700 back in my day 2 refined was the highest
This does explain why TF2 items are at higher prices than ever, even though Steam's trading card economy has crashed hard.
Wouldn't bot nets massively lower the price of items instead, due to much higher supply, but the same demand?
@@Nagato292nah, if you hold onto the entire supply you can control the price.
Uh… No? There’s tangible demand for TF2 items, I’ve yet to meet someone that wants steam trading cards beyond using a bot for cheap cards to level up.
@@PotatoPatatoVonSpudsworth That's what monopolies are. Welcome to the capitalism
Always confused me how refs are worth so little. There are 2 million mannco keys, let's say 3 counting all the others. Yet there are "just" 12 million refs. Theorically, you could buy all the refs for just 150k keys.
Zesty casually dropping the 2nd and last part of the most extensive documentary about Team Fortress 2's biggest problem. Hats off, Jesus.
Hats off, i get it
“VAC isn’t a system, it’s a suggestion”
-TheWhatShow
Suggestion*
@@LARA-sg4bt Nah, recommendation sounds better and just makes more sense. Suggestion is just vague af.
@@ByNextus it’s literally what he said, if you’re gonna quote someone do it right. Also what you said makes no sense, suggestion is a much better usage in the context, as suggestion implies you just have the option of cheating and can choose to cheat, rather than recommendation which advises you to not do it for your own good.
"Dear god..."
"There's more"
"Nooo..."
lol
“Three days! To most men, no time at all! But we are mercena-“ *gets headshot by catbot*
@@LadZeroUltra Wake up the spy is steeling the brief case oh i hope it was like that
@@LadZeroUltra DAYS? like, days of the week? like the bot net? is this a tuetwo02gubd64 reference from the hit video TF2: I Found 60,000 bots by Zezty Jesus minute 13:10
@@LadZeroUltra "Alright maggots start getting the sentry guns ready!"
7:14 I hate how this makes the erroneous assumption that "Jerma" is a human
I'm just glad to see someone else acknowledge Jerma exists and is not, indeed, a hallucination
Sir, a second video has hit the TF2 community
imagine being a bot hoster, going under valves nose for possibly years
just for a geologist to not only showcase your steam profile, but also most of your botnet
Geologists. The experts of digging up dirt.
@@blasterman1000 I think it's being used as a metaphor.
@@humanbeing9946he's digging up dirt on the botnets.
@@humanbeing9946 Yes, congratulations. I am indeed the person using a metaphor. I know.
Pretty clear this isn’t under anybody’s nose. Valve knows who these people are and they don’t try to hide. They get their cut and allow it to happen. Nobody shown in this video will face any consequences, even temporarily.
I feel like we should go beyond FixTF2, this is happening to Unturned, CS2, any other game with free item drops. I'm sure more people would get behind that.
Why stop at just video games? we could go the way to real-life government overthrow at this point
im not sure how governments would deal with this stuff, but there's probably some kind of legal things that could be done
If you’re presenting this to any kind of government then you need to speak their language. They won’t give a shit about “bots in video games”, but they will care about “printing money”.
It doesn’t happen as much in CS2 for anyone to care, people are only concerned about cheaters and Valve works to fix that. Bots getting some free cases doesn’t really affect anyone in there because of the system they implemented.
@@soop7349 The stolen gift cards can be a trace, but the problem is that those aren't serialized and documented on who they're sold to for retail and who bought them.
The gift cards are the closest thing to catching bot hosters with such a massive net of bots and gift cards are still nowhere close to being traceable. The government won't give a shit and they likely wouldn't be able to catch a bot hoster if they even cared in the first place. Valve has much more information to trace and crack down on these hosters, but they likely wouldn't have solid grounds with legal action, so in the end they'll just ban the user accounts and the bots and it'll become a treadmill problem. It's fucked...
What a shame, Valve used to be one of the most respectable companies in the gaming scene, only for them to plummet this low.
Which reminds me, half a year ago Valve released the Half-Life documentary, and in it; Gabe said "Late is for a little while, suck is forever" and yet they aren't really preventing this "suck" now are they?
Χρήστος Ανέστης, ο Θεός να σας ευλογεί
jerma got 406 giftapults all to himself, what a jerk
Totally in character tbh
Remember this when he eventually goes missing after this, ZestyJesus is not mentally ill, nor is he suffering from any kind of disease.
Genuelly worried they hire a hitman to kill him lol
Zesty just made two videos about literal russian people hosting bots with stolen accounts in order to… print money.
That’s right, print money.
What does this remind you of?
Yeah… stay safe Zesty.
@@TrintellixLeGauloisif I'm not mistaken he's in Texas or some other heat-filled place, and he mentioned that he carries. I'm sure he'll be all right
hes not going against the FBI or anything on that level, its propably just some russian dudes in a shed
I mean, he might be a little bit mentally ill, but not suicidal
This is an insanely satisfying video
It's him, vorobey
vore obey😢
Literally just came from your uncarriable team video. Nice to see you here too.
@@joeser6666bruh
hello voro
One of the biggest items that makes my account human, is my cherished "The Spirit of Giving," which it has 1 Gifts Given on its counter. I got it way back in the day when Yogscast was doing a charity co-op event with TF2 as well as Humble Bundle. Oh, and I guess my Level 69 Tux Mascot.
fucking unbelieveable, you actually saved TF2 LOL
Ngl it be funny if Valve just took all these names and manual banned them
Confiscate their items, and gifts them to human owned accounts. Destroying the entire TF2 Economy and giving at end to TF2
You very much know valve won't do that.@@Another_El_User
Funny? Absolutely. Likely? Not even slightly
It makes them money why would they do it?
@@mohammadmojtabafaghih1323 And therein lies one of the big problems with this.
The bots who outnumbers the players 70-30 at LEAST, are actively providing Valve with a profit. Why would Valve remove 70% of the income of this game?
It's not just TF2 that has this problem, CSGO(and now 2) has been suffering from the same problem of massive bot farms and account stealing for years. Valve needs to get their shit together.
from my tiny research cs2 seemt to have 50& of players that never leave the game. so 50& of the cs2 playerbase might be bots. for example in roughly 1.500.000 players, roughly 800.000 - 850.000 players never leave the game
So, FixValve? LET'S FRAKING GOOOOOOO!
Im SO happy the Metroid Prime Trilogy OST has made it to the commentary community. It's always such a wonderful treat to hear them again in the wild!
The Sanctuary Fortress theme too!!! Ooh so lovely
Awww hell naw Zesty about to be assassinated by the fucking tf2 bot mafia lmao
Zesty: *Releases nobody's home.
The TF2 community: Dear god...
Zesty: There's more.
TF2 community: No...
Zesty: It contains every bots in one bot hoster
- "Question!"
- "Yes Zesty?"
- "I have done nothing but manually review my trade history to find bots for the last 5 days"
@@GJDZ02
“What?”
“You told me to.”
“How much?”
vhere... VHERE ARE YOU BEEN SENDING IT
redditor
The giftapult strat to track down the bots was really smart, props to the folks that thought of that.
Its quite satisfying to know that most of the TF2 player base has been bots, I've been guessing that for the last couple of years, as I always felt queuing up for servers became noticeably longer and longer as the years went on after Jungle Inferno, even though steam charts said the amount of players were consistent.
I'am half-worried that if you could somehow get rid of these idle bots alone, you could almost push TF2 into a death spiral as it becomes apparent to the few who thought the game was somewhat popular abandon it due to the actual player numbers being shown, as well as losing advertising to new players as a top played steam game. Valve could probably just turn off item drops for a month after banning all the bots + their owners if possible to prevent financial incentive for these bot owners to stick around, and you'd might never see TF2 recover.
But this also sets a dreadful precedent for any game that has an real money/steam wallet-based economy that bots can profit from so blatantly, that games long abandoned and may have no modern relevance, despite 'apparently' being popular to some degree, will be held in some sort of zombie state. Even if that might technically effect no one negatively, it will give false impressions on how popular some games are, and arguably steal away advertising and a growing playerbase from games (hence the death spiral mentioned above) that could use something like a single space on the steam charts top 10 played games leaderboard. Even now, Team Fortress 2 is 9th place on that list, and it really does not own that position at all.
But...maybe the other thing to be worried about is the TF2 economy bursting due to some problematic elements brought about by these bots (too much scrap or cases yielded, or maybe actual player demand collapsing as more real players leave the game?), causing the hosters to just cut ties and suddenly Team Fortress 2 just doesn't have a player base any more overnight, triggering that death spiral.
I dunno, while I would like to see something happen because of all this bot nonsense, I just don't feel like anything is coming soon. I don't want to be negative, but I have yet to see any new changes to the TF2 situation in the last couple of years, I don't know why it would change now all of a sudden.
it's a real blue pill / red pill situation in regards to Valve and the playerbase.
I don't think idle bot death spiral anytime soon. Even if keys start costing 100 ref, idle bots will still exist to farm it. It's hacker bots that are an issue, a ticking timebomb that if it becomes modernized, we might never get to experience bot free lobby
@@danielsurvivor1372they're the bigger problem for actively disruptive the basic games yes. But here's the upside if say every bot and type are gone including the economy ones. Valve has never changed their prices of in game items on their store. It's seriously cheaper than trading itself nowadays.
Great video! And I just want to point out the irony of this naming system 14:10 to 14:12 - there is a Julikov bot name, 'Julik' (Жулик) means 'cheater' in Russia.
Keys used to be as low as 2.33-2.66 ref, WAYYY back in the day. So the inflation rate is even worse.
so back in april 55 ref is a key and now its close to 80
what if this isnt exclusive to tf2?
has anyone ever investigated csgo, dota, lol?
what if bots are the reason gaming has been pushed as popular?
is valve actually profiting of this?
has all of gaming culture just been an illusion?
yes, its happening. In cs2, recently, they found a massive bot net. Not clear on the number, but they found it. Theres like dozens of vids on it
It's a good point, what if... in fact, all this time, Valve has gotten to where it is because they know it and have multiple Steam accounts, which could just be bots buying games to move their market and bring in billions of money all the years, months and days in his pockets? What if these games really were never that popular but only got where they are because someone artificially made it happen?
@@juliocezarcosmedasilva8749 That's a very interesting theory
Definitely not, but I think idle bots are very much dependent on whether or not you're rewarded for idling. I can't see anyone making these types of networks in a game like Valorant or Overwatch since there's really no monetary incentive.
To be fair, dota and cs2 don't have profitable item drops right? Those games have cheater programs sure but they probably wouldn't have tens of thousands of idlers like we do.
Recently I’ve noticed an uptick of bot accounts trying to friend me, idk if I got some item they consider desirable, but I’ve noticed they share most of these same traits. Generic name, image, incomplete setup, and the same friends list.
Same, i got more scamer this year than all the other years combine
I got three unusuals and I get friend requests from compromised accounts and bot accounts every couple days. Its so easy to tell for me now. I report the accounts but I know nothing will happen.
I've been looking into ways to make their operations far more expensive. These phish sites proxy login data to steam servers so traditional methods such as overloading their storage doesn't really work. There's this one operating under Cloudflare's DNS service that is basically impossible to ddos, nor do I have the resources to make that phish site preform a ddos on steam servers by proxy. I essentially need entire networks racks of enterprise grade servers scattered randomly about to shove as much large packets into the phishers in order to have a hope for them to inadvertently ddos steam servers.
Which only leaves somehow acquiring login details of millions, maybe billions of dummy steam accounts and attempting to run them out of storage space
Option 2 as part of the #FixTF2 movement is to convince Valve to blacklist all known VPS and VPN providers from accessing Steam services
Same, almost 2 or 3 each day comment on my account with emoji spam and a friend request. I threw in the towel just yesterday and took my profile private
@@MasterChaokoI did the same and they only care if you private everything. Making your inventory private isn’t enough😢
And people wonder why refined metal became so devalued. Lol.
I still remember days of "STOUT SHAKO FOR 2 REFINED"
@@caav56 demo demo pan demo demo pan
bro valve probably has a 10 year old laptop labeled "TF2" in the corner that hasn't been touched since 2022
With all these bots on just TF2, one has to question the true number of actual Steam users, and how many of them are just bot puppets
Would be interesting but In reality doesn't matter since Bot accounts don't do anything for the store or against the store.
Since Valve is a private company they don't need to attract investors with big useless numbers. The only thing that matters is the actual game sales. Not Investor capital
@@BlueBD Pretty much.
The blessing and a curse of valve being a privately owned company.
@@simplysmiley4670 I really despise Valve at this point but I still prefer them to be this way. I miss TF2 being updated but if Valve becomes stock company, not only TF2 and other Valve games could be shut down or plagued with more microtransactions... they would slash a lot of Steam functions.
@@cloudynguyen6527 Not saying they should become yet another triple A publisher that wants to suck all your money out of you for lackluster, barely functional service(s).
No one with the movement wants that either lmao.
And as long as Steam's a money printing machine with Gabe at the lead of Valve, or at least someone likeminded, they won't change into something like that, they literally have no reason to.
I'd Honestly look to see If Botting is not Just a TF2 Problem but a Problem that Plagues all of Steam.
It kinda is. This plaques all games where you can earn real money. Especially with f2ps.
So this basically plaques cs2, dota2 and later on deadlock too
Dead internet theory, it plagues all internet activity
@@tim14022000 wait deadlock is gonna be f2p? oh god
@@enor9379deadlocks 100% going to have the same issue, and since anticheat is apparently not “fun” enough for Valve employees they’ll let that game be infested too
@@enor9379 well it's based by leaked footage and their other liveservice games. if it will actually be f2p is up in the air but it's very likely
I didn't even realise but that Strange Candycane I got from a giftapult only had a 30% chance to go to a real player? Damn.
The Man vs Machine gamemode didn't die out, it simply evolved.
Spending 5 whole days just sifting through stream accounts is a fate I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Thank you for the sacrifice Jesty Zesus
What a monumental discovery. Truly bringing forward the issues that we as a fan base have grown ignorant to and sparking new discussion and outcry in an organized fashion has been long sought. Hats off to you my good sir.
As of now, multiple people are already trying to deny/downplay this extensive video, purely because the one who made the video was Zesty lmao
On you point about "There's probably zero human players in private servers" I'll just drop an anecdote and yes, the plural of anecdote is not data.
I belong to a couple of PGS groups who do exactly that. We chill in a discord and wait for enough people to get on to set up pick up games, then using a discord bot we sign up, vote on maps/game mode, get sorted into teams, and it spins up a private server for that game only with the voted on parameters. We join the server with the link and password, play, and it saves some stats and then closes the server till the next game. We do this for a few other steam games too. Why do it this way instead of having a persistent server we can just join and go? It's easier, and bit cheaper as one of our members just has a dedicated machine that can serve as the host when needed, and it removes any issues with being able to be targeted with DDOS or hacks since the server is never the same each time. It's not the usual way of doing things, but there's at least a small population of players doing this. Is it a statistically relevant amount of people? Who knows, probably not. But I just wanted to give an answer to "why" human players might be in private servers.
NFT Bots, one of the worst robots gray man has ever made.🐱
They don't even have weapons, they just try to be smug and annoying until you'd rather leave the MvM server than bother to keep shooting them.
Rumors have it gray mann's bank account is still screaming for Mercy to this day
Uhhh actshullay it’s pronounced Gray Mann 🤓
oh no people selling pngs, however will you sleep at night over this 🥱
@@ghhn4505 the main problem with nfts is how every single transaction involving them uses up about as much energy as a years worth of energy for a normal household. go back to hearts of iron and stop making low quality bait
Zesty's inner Texan is revealing itself strongly today
Inside of every Texan there lies the spirit of a tweaked out Engineer main.
@@Calvin_Coolage Yes.
This really just highlights a huge problem with the bot crisis, which is steam itself. Imagine if when you had a steam account, you actually had to set it up, provide information that you are a human, link a bank or debit card, etc. That would cut out 99.99% of scammers and bots immediately, both in TF2 and CS2. But that means valve wouldn't be taking a cut.
High production video essay with metroid prime music? Subbed
The fact these are all easily found via Steam search results seriously speaks to how much Steam has neglected the issue. Thank you for your investigative reporting as always o7
Steam doesn't really have an incentive to go after them because most of the people doing this will just start again, at worst its an inconvienence for them. You'd think they'd stop after the 3rd or 4th time but these people are lazy scumbags, they'll do it potentially dozens more times.
Imagine turning a first person shooter into a "crypto" mine, I'm calling it a crypto mine because this is what it reminds me of.
People set up bots to farm items, then they sell what they get and it all creates this.. "passive income" for bot hosters. Why does VALVᴇ allow this?
Why is my childhood game being farmed and botted for cold profit? Dude, I just wanna build a dispenser and backstab an incompetent sniper on 2fort. Why are people trying to capitalize on everything fun and enjoyable? It's fucking aggravating. #fixtf2
Man seeing turkish names makes my blood boil.
The exploitative nature of humans is entirely inevitable.
The multi billion dollars corporation didn't add microtransactions and battle passes, someone's gotta quench the thirst.
nah
How does this affect your ability to do those things?
The bots take dopamine (or the fun chemical) and attention that you get from backstab or whatever you in TF2 even you can still do that thing.
Great news: many bots and bots hosters accounts were banned/deleted.IT's a step in the right direction but it's not over yet
hey man, i didnt even know i was in this till someone commented on my profile haha. appreciate the giftipult i didnt even know i received
This is fucking grim. I feel guilty for ever sending out a giftapult.
You feel guilty for wanting to be nice and send a gift to a random person? Very few people knew it was this bad until now; it isn't you who should feel guilty for sending a gift, it's those who run these bot accounts who should be ashamed of stealing it away from someone else.
@@hookfancy9879maybe he is under the philosophy that the intents don't matter, the results do and this result was a negative one, no matter the intention, and that's all that matters.
Wow! I thought your previous video was proof enough, but you really went the extra mile! Nice work!
15:07 Those aren't traders, they're scammers. I don't trade and I get these bot comments all the time.
The problem with the "SaveTF2" movement is that you get people that don't understand what is going on and aren't pragmatic enough to admit what they likely suspect. TF2 will not be saved, 70% of it's player base at given time aren't even real people. Valve knows this, they have likely known this for years. TF2 internally at Valve is likely not considered worth the investment. It's dated, old and people aren't going to come back. They wont admit the bot crisis either because if they did that then you could see what is left of the real players panic and pull out of the game all together, which would lead to the bots also pulling out. The bots make them Money in their own way, actual players sadly don't. Or at least not nearly as much.
Valve makes some money off the market place, sure. But, chances are not much. People generally don't buy the super high dollar stuff off it and even then it's only 10-15%. Versus Keys, which Valve makes 100% off of. Even if they are just 5 bucks. In their indirect Way, the Bots are crucial to the key trade. Get rid of them and profits for the game drop significantly... as would the player numbers.
I'm glad I got to enjoy TF2 during it's 2007-2011 golden age.
2007-2011? Nah its real golden age was 2012-2015.
@@SpinosaurusStudios_ Nah anywhere after a few weapons were added to right before it was given quickplay, which destroyed the hell out of nicher community servers.
The alleged "golden age" is personalised for every player, but the majors ones are pre-meet your match and post-mym. The introduction of casual really shook the community and even though I wasn't there to witness it, the echoes were still felt right up until jungle inferno.
My own golden age was the years following jungle inferno right up until COVID. The community morale was expectedly high, and the content creation side of things was thriving, inviting more and more new players into the game. I remember trying to queue up for hightower and getting into banana bay over and over again (I hadn't figured out the menu). Banana bay nowadays requires hours of waiting, and even when you do get in, there are 5 identical snipers in both teams.
Nah. The golden age was before F2Ps (you) ruined the community. Before 2011.
@@Joe-dy7bbgatekeeping wouldn’t get you anywhere my dude
You have every right to be upset over paying for something that went free but the people who joined after are definitely not at fault that’s just a retarded take
13:23 Isnt anybody going to talk about that 8 rockets air surf?
Huge props for using the Metroid prime trilogy ost. Love those games and its music.
Well, at least we have a preview now of what a dead internet looks like...
I'm pretty sure finding and reporting these bot handlers would at least be a step towards fixing the game, but in the end that's up to Valve to act on the info.
The only way to really fix that is if valve stops people from earning real money from their games. But we all know that valve, traders and bot owners won't let that happen
@@tim14022000 True, Valve makes money off of them as much as the traders since the bot network still has to go through the Steam trade system.
@@tim14022000valve should be sued
60,000 bots and valves idea of a fix is muting new players and turning on sv_pure
What really sticks out a bot is seeing a lot of hours on TF2 but no hours on any class
I’m convinced that there’s even less people playing this game than you estimate, and that’s there’s probably over a hundred and fifty thousand bots out there or more that are on at different times of the day. from my recent experience in tf2 casual, I’ve been waiting forever to get into games and seeing the same 15-20 people over and over again, even in entirely different server regions. There haven’t been enough people online on Virginia (EST) servers like half of the time, and I’ve been sent as far as Germany in matchmaking, in servers that are only half-full. I hadn’t played it for a long time before i picked it up in March, and the state of the game was shocking and really depressing to me for something the online world had said was thriving. Great job on the video, and i think that with more digging you’ll find the situation is somehow even worse than the findings across your two videos about the bot crisis.
what're the legal ramifications on TF2 being used to launder money, outside of dropping the price of keys even further?
Nothing
As far as the system is concerned, everything is working perfectly fine.
Technically nothing.
Supply and demand affect pricing, but consent affects the market as well.
If trading platforms consent to buying botted items that cause inflation and players (unsuspecting or aware) consent to buying and owning said botted items, there shouldn't be any legal implications besides breakig ToS which are defined by the service providers as they are consenting (either actively or through negligence).
The thing is that digital items really only have fictional rarity and will only affect the game's economy.
All of this can only be affected by the playerbase, the entity hosting the game, and in cases such as Marketplace, the entities hosting trading platforms.
You generally don't see people suing companies for having bad luck with lootboxes/gacha after the first waves of games since they are now obligated to show players rarities for items, and for competition have included customer-friendly systems such as guaranteeing the jackpot with enough attempts.
In other words, as long as you are a consenting adult, you can earn and spend money on digital goods pretty freely, and as long as there is no backlash there will be no change, so this is something that should be addressed to pressure Valve.
The Hosters live inside of an isolationist dictatorship, even if VALVə had an actual crime they could sue the bot owners for, they aint gonna be able to reach them on Russian soil
Laundry is laundry. If this washing machine shuts down, there's plenty more. As for trying to deal with the washers, it's a matter of international legal action (complicating the matters tenfold) with no direct links to any one person or legal entity (complicating the matters a bit) and lots of room for plausible deniability (complicating blah blah blah). Before you finish calculating the result, remember to add the ultra rich and ultra-er lazy corporation hosting the platform for this, as well as the legal loopholes, and you'll get an irrelevant number, because you also need to multiply by the chance that our economic systems were NOT set up for things like this to work well.
Zero.