cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/24245730
Good. I didn’t join up yet because I have a lot of shit to do, but TF2 is still an excellent game, especially in an age of even more aggressively monetised class-based shooters with worse balancing.
The fact that a 17 year old game is still going after that kind of neglect is a true testament to how good it is.
17 years? That’s not even old enough to drink!
25 freaking years?! I need a nap. Jesus Christ. This hurts. That was the game of my senior year. Now, thanks to your post not only does my body hurt, my soul hurts as well.
I’m gonna go lie down. Fucking hell.
Ugh, while I agree games have too much monetization nowadays, please don’t give TF2 a free pass. It paved the way for so much of what we see today.
Pretty suspect about these numbers, given that before this ban wave about 78% of the steam player count for TF2 was bots (source). So this wouldn’t be a doubling of human players, but about a 10x increase. It’s possible… But to me this looks like a bunch more bots being spun up and evading the new ban measures.
Should have banned their entire accounts
50% of the player count are bots that do not cheat … maybe.
I have been thinking about this: With the recent advancements in AI could you build a bot that pretends to be a human playing the game (with some intentional flaws in its gameplay – so no aimbot for example)?
I would imagine player behavior – like movement around obstacles – in tf2 would be a valuable data mine to train AI further.
Way back when TF2 was new, Valve put out heatmaps showing how their analytics tracked where players died in each level along with a bunch of other metrics. If that kind of data was public (or a major server collected their own data), I wonder what level of bots we’d have today.
I miss the old days of playing against Foxbot in the original Team Fortress. It sucks that bots are only used by cheaters/drop farmers these days instead of as an official way to pad out lobbies, or to let you play matches entirely single player.
