17 years after its release, Team Fortress 2 still has a dedicated fan base. And today, through an online petition for the #Savetf2 campaign, more than 140,000 members of its fanbase have declared that they had enough. TF2 has a long-standing bot problem. The official matchmade servers stink with bots, not just headshots at the weight of the team with inhumane precision or flooding in-game chats with hate speech. According to the #Savetf2 site, they are also a means for doxing and targeted harassment. "A zero-tolerance policy is required for this type of conduct," the site states."Valve has to be responsible for persistently refusing to acknowledge it."This is not the first rodeo in #Savetf2. The campaign appeared in 2022 to demand that Valve address TF2's long-neglected bot problem. Valve responded to the ensuing wave of support and public outcry, implementing a series of anti-cheat fixes throughout the year, culminating in a biblical massive purge of bot hosting accounts. By 2023/7, TF2 was enjoying the Renaissance and broke the all-time record for simultaneous players. But the Renaissance will be short-lived. The bots slowly reappeared, and without ongoing anti-cheat support to fight them, they once again overwhelmed TF2's official servers. At the time of writing, the #Savetf2 site has collected more than 140,000 signatures through automated petition forms, each with a copy of the petition. According to the e-mail site sent to, it is currently sending emails every second. On the #Savetf2 site, details are also posted on the 3rd month (that's today!).Community-run for its public awareness campaign, TF2 urged players to use the #Fixtf2 hashtag on all social media platforms to do so of Bot Plague, highlighting the scale of the bot problem and "turning this perceived trifle drama into a scandal that defines the game at scale." It is expected that."The language may be a bit overzealous, but I admire that feeling. Realistically, developers can't support the game forever. In an ideal world, it will be after the efforts of archivists and community servers have all the tools they need to take over. But in the case of TF2, Valve still uses the game to sell cosmetics. If a player can still spend money on a product, they are right to expect it to work. I would say this for petitioners: they know how to use nostalgia. The petition site has been lovingly created in the style of the hype page that Valve will release ahead of the TF2 update. Reading it came back quickly in 2009, when I eagerly combed the writing of classless updates and dreamed of my own hat tower. If you're lucky, there will come a day when you can put on 3 hats at a time and return to 2fort without being threatened by the imbot.