Over 200,000 People Sign The Petition To Fix 'Team Fortress 2' Bot Problem Following The '#FixTF2' Protest

The petition organized by the Team Fortress 2 community to get video game publisher Valve to fix the lasting problem with bots in the game has reached 200,000 signatures, and fans are review-bombing TF2 and posting artwork while waiting for Valve's response.

Two years ago, the #SaveTF2 campaign went viral on social media as Team Fortress 2's dedicated fan base shared posters, artwork, videos and other content with the hashtag in an attempt to bring Valve's attention to the bot infestation in the game. While Valve did react to the protest and promised to implement changes, everything that's been done since proved to be not enough.

Just like in 2021, the 17-year-old game has been suffering from bots who not only insta-kill players and spam hateful messages, but they are also used to scam money out of players and dox them, and players are once again trying to get Valve to do something about the issue.

This time, several prominent community members organized a new protest, inviting Team Fortress 2 fans to share artwork, memes, videos and other content with the old #SaveTF2 and new #FixTF2 hashtags, as well as to sign a petition to Valve.

The campaign was partly inspired by World of Warcraft players successfully managing to convince Blizzard to launch vanilla servers for World of Warcraft a few years back.

The online protest took place yesterday, June 3rd, with "Team Fortress 2" and both hashtags trending on social media as players posted art and made posts and videos demonstrating the current issues with the game.

On Steam, players wrote negative reviews (or changed their existing ones), as the game's rating dipped into the negative zone for the first time in its history.

And Valve's 2022 promise to fix the game even got a Community Note saying that Valve didn't do anything to resolve the issue. The note was later removed as Valve did in fact implement a few changes, they just weren't effective in putting an end to the lasting problem.

Now fans are hoping to push the petition above 270,000 signatures — the number the World of Warcraft fans managed to reach back when Blizzard was skeptical about launching the ultimately very successful World of Warcraft Classic.