TF2: Nobody's Home

We will be making the data used in this video public soon! Edit: here it is github.com/megascatterbomb/tf2PlayerCount Edit #2: A criticism I'm seeing is "it isn't profitable to harvest cases/items, therefore there can't be tens of thousand of idle bots." You're right. On paper, it isn't profitable, but for some reason they still do it. I don't know why, nor do I have the full picture. There's some element/elements to this I couldn't find. It could be part of something grander, or bot hosters could being doing this simply because they can, who knows. I don't know the reason, all I know is that it's happening.

Sorry guys I accidentally left my 50 thousand computers idling on the main menu of TF2

2012: Mann vs Machine 2024: Machine

Never ask... ... a man, his salary. ... a woman, her age. ... a TF2 player, to select all squares with bicycles.

The idea that roughly 2/3s of my gift-a-pult gifts have gone to bots is the saddest thing I learned by watching this video. That’s just not fair.

I have "voice communication is not avaliable for this account" and i must scream

i cant believe tf2 predicted tf2 being overrun with bots thats crazy man

got banned from r/tf2 for pointing it out a year ago lol

A microcosm of the dead internet theory, shit’s chilling

in just 9 hours, twice as many people have watched this video as there are people concurrently playing tf2.

Name one other game community where ranking virtual skins is toxic and problematic behaviour lmao

All those jokes about TF2 being on life support is true after all. TF2 activity graph indeed looks like constant cardiac arrest...

"no one talks about the bots!" there is no war in ba sing se

No wonder Pyrocynical comes back to TF2 on streams, the player numbers there are VERY inflated...

People called me crazy when i pointed this out a few years ago

Good job, well researched, written and edited. Made a video on this myself a while back, I don’t know why people don’t care more about this. Also, every article online about TF2 talks about its player count and record highs, goes to show how little research is done most the time.

Guess machine won, Mann lost

"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue Sandvich— the story ends, you queue up for another match and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red Sandvich—you stay in cp_hydro and I show you how much of Valve has neglected this game."

So. The true of the matter is... Whenever we celebrate TF2's immortality, we have a king's parade with TF2 at the throne. But the king is dead, and the bots puppet the rotten corpse.

POP QUIZ: An entity that was beloved by millions, led a golden age, went through a civil war, crippled by an event, forced on life support, constantly suffering from incursions from an outside force and has a deranged cult following that will attack anyone that so much as disagrees or points out a flaw in the system. Now, did I just describe the Emperor of Mankind or Team Fortress 2?