In a gaming world dominated by constantly evolving battle royales and innovative multiplayer shooters, it's hard to believe that a game like Team Fortress 2 sits at the top of any players' game list. Granted, Team Fortress 2 is a multiplayer FPS itself, though it's also been 14 years since release. While receiving updates here and there, Team Fortress 2 gradually lost its player count, though it has spiked on occasion. Such a thing occurred this weekend when the competitive shooter broke its Steam record for all-time concurrent players.
To be fair, Team Fortress 2 is arguably the progenitor for a lot of multiplayer games seen today. That Valve has supported the FPS with updates and cosmetics speaks to its longevity as an entertaining experience. That's not to mention the fact that Team Fortress 2 has an abundance of mods and player-made servers that vastly enhance the number of activities players can involve themselves in. All of these serve as credible reasons as to why the player count spiked, though, on the other hand, Team Fortress 2 has been dealing with a bot problem for quite some time as well.
Over the weekend, it was reported that Team Fortress 2 was hitting an all-time high in concurrent player count on Steam. The multiplayer shooter reached a grand total of 151,253 players, topping last December's record of 147,360. Although the bot issues have been one many players have dealt with, Valve's recently released Summer 2021 Cosmetic Case may also explain the sudden surge in players.
Additionally, the Team Fortress 2 Snakewater map saw a few tweaks that improved general movement and prevented clipping. Despite also tackling the bot problem, it's clear that the update hardly made a dent in that regard. In fact, Team Fortress 2 bots returned one day after the update, making it virtually moot. Even if Valve continues to update the game after this, one thing is for sure: it'll need a more permanent solution to address the growing number of bots.
This wouldn't be the first time that Team Fortress 2 saw a massive spike in players that could possibly be tied to bots. Back in October 2020 during the Scream Fortress XII Halloween event, the game spiked to roughly 130,000 concurrent players. However, it was later revealed that only 25,000 were non-bot players. The bot controversy has only grown since then and while it would seem that Valve has made some headway in implementing a fix, it still has a long way to go.
Team Fortress 2 is available now on PC.
Source: Eurogamer