Save TF2 / Fix TF2

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Part of a series on Team Fortress 2. [View Related Entries]

Overview

Save TF2 is a Team Fortress 2 community movement aimed at attracting Valve's attention to the long-running bot problem within the video game. Started by Team Fortress 2 YouTuber SquimJim in early May 2022, the campaign has pursued the goals of Valve recognizing and addressing the bot issue and ultimately fixing it. In June 2024, another protest was organized by the game's community and took place under #FixTF2 hashtag due to Valve failing to resolve the problem.

Background

2019 – 2022 TF2 Bot Crisis

In late 2019, the multiplayer video game Team Fortress 2 experienced a massive infestation of bots, mostly playing as Sniper class with perfect aim. The bots would join official Valve servers, copy other player's names so it would create confusion and make it harder for them to be kicked, spam slurs and ruin the gaming experience for players in other ways.

On January 10th and February 7th, 2020, YouTuber^[1]^[2] Toofty posted two videos about the infestation, both of which gained over 1 million views (shown below, left and right).

The bot problem persisted in 2021 and 2022, with multiple content creators highlighting the issue in their videos (example^[3] shown below, left). On March 11th, 2022, Toofty posted another video^[4] about the bot problem, criticizing Valve over its purported unwillingness to fix the problem despite the game maintaining a sizable fanbase (shown below, right).

Why does Valve not do anything about this? If there is one thing that we know for certain from all this chaos is that Valve doesn't care. Sure, there are a couple of absolutely legendary devs continuing to work on the game, but in general, the 12 billion dollar company, which probably has it within its capacity to put a stop to this, clearly doesn't care.

2022 "Save TF2" Campaign

On May 7th, 2022, Team Fortress 2 YouTuber^[5] SquimJim posted a video in which he expressed his frustration with Valve letting the issue persist and proposed to organize and send multiple emails to Valve employees and to gaming news websites in hopes of drawing Valve's attention and getting a response. The video gained over 190,000 views in three weeks (shown below).

Is [one] email going to make a difference? Absolutely not. But what happens if they start receiving hundreds or even thousands of similar emails? […] And at this point, what do we have to lose. They already do nothing, they can't do any less, so we might as well try.

Following the release of the video, SquimJim posted a mailing list containing work emails of multiple Valve employees and gaming news websites to his Discord server SquimJim's After Breakfast Club.^[6]

On March 13th, 2022, IGN,^[7] prompted by multiple email suggestions, published an article about the Team Fortress 2 bot problem. On the same day, IGN shared a tweet^[8] linking the article that gained over 6,000 retweets and 31,400 likes in 10 days (shown below).

On March 13th, Redditor^[9] Kubsons07 posted a screenshot of the tweet to /r/tf2, where it gained over 18,900 upvotes in 10 days.

On May 15th, 2022, Robin Atkin Downes, the actor who voices Medic in the game, posted two tweets in which he pledged community his support in attracting Valve's attention to the problem. The tweets^[10]^[11] (shown below, left and center) gained over 2,200 retweets and 19,300 likes and 6,000 retweets and 39,300 likes in 10 days. On March 22nd, 2022, Downes posted a thread in which he reported reaching out to several employees at Valve, urged them to continue the peaceful protest and promised to continue to lend his support (shown below, right).^[12]

On May 24th, 2022, a group of Team Fortress 2 content creators announced #SaveTF2 peaceful protest scheduled to take place on May 26th. The organizers urged the Team Fortress 2 community to post about how much the game means to them on social media with the #savetf2 hashtag (announcement poster shown below). The announcement posts gained over 9,600 retweets and 34,000 likes on Twitter^[13] and over 19,400 upvotes on Reddit^[14] in several hours.

May 26th, 2022 "Save TF2" Protest

On March 26th, 2022, the scheduled peaceful social media protest took place, with both current and past Team Fortress 2 players and content creators sharing posts, artworks, videos and other content with #saveTF2 hashtag. On that day, #saveTF2 became trending on Twitter, peaking at #2 rank worldwide with over 159,800 tweets with the hashtag shared as of 1:20 PM EST.^[15] "Valve" and "Please Valve" also trended on Twitter worldwide.

Multiple posts with the hashtag went viral on Twitter. For example, a SFM image shared by Twitter^[16] user @sansation122 gained over 2,400 retweets and 11,400 likes (shown below, top left). An artwork tweeted^[17] by user @constantinnenn gained over 1,900 retweets and 7,500 likes (shown below, top center). A Breaking Bad meme posted by Twitter^[18] user @zemithvx gained over 3,300 retweets and 19,100 likes (shown below, top right).

Valve's Response

On May 26th, after over 250,000 tweets with the #saveTF2 hashtag were posted, the official Team Fortress 2 account tweeted^[19] that they hear the community and had been working on improving things (tweet shown below). The tweet gained over 10,000 retweets and 31,600 likes in forty minutes.

Following in the month following the campaign, Valve implemented a number of updates which incrementally but temporarily improved the bot crisis in the game.

2024 "Fix TF2" Campaign

On May 18th, 2024, Team Fortress 2 content creator WeezyTF2 uploaded a video titled "How We Can ACTUALLY Save TF2" to YouTube^[20] in which he rallied for another campaign similar to "Save TF2" to once again bring Valve's attention to the bot problem in the game.

Following the video, on May 26th, 2024, a group of prominent Team Fortress 2 community members announced "Fix TF2", a petition campaign aiming to again to bring Valve's attention to the bot issue and for the company to implement continuous support to prevent the problem resurfacing (announcement posts^[21]^[22] shown below).

The campaign invited users to share artworks, video game clips, and make other posts about the bot issue in Team Fortress 2 with the hashtags #FixTF2 and #SaveTF2 on June 3rd, 2024 (examples shown below). On June 3rd, 2024, Team Fortress 2 and the hashtags trended on X / Twitter as users made posts^[23]^[24]^[25] about the game.

On safe.tf,^[26] an online petition was launched, which garnered nearly 200,000 votes as of June 4th, 2024.

On Steam, the game's "Recent reviews" rating changed from "Mostly positive" to "Mostly negative" as users posted^[27]^[28] negative reviews, or changed their existing reviews, en masse.