Team Fortress 2 is now at a 15% review score due to the #FixTF2 movement

I don't really have any investment in TF2.

But if I were involved with the #FixTF2 movement, I'd want it to be careful not to make the big wigs at Valve want to just slap Valorent-like anti-cheat on TF2.

It does seem like the page for #FixTF2 talks about zero tolerance policies and basically manually banning people based on reports. But not explicitly saying in the petition to Valve that kernel-level anticheat is not the solution seems risky.

Edit: Ok, looked a little closer. It doesn't seem like #FixTF2 is really against invasive client-side anticheat measures. They talk about "updated anti-cheat measures" as something they want, but don't put any qualifiers on that. That's unfortunate.

I give Valve the benefit of the doubt and assume that they know that there's plenty of consumers that are heavily against a kernel level anticheat. Valve is not really known for anti-consumer bullshit like this.
I haven't played TF2 in 6 or 7 years but it sure as shit had anti-cheat measures back then, how'd it get this shitty? Dev neglect?
- Yep. It's a 17 year old game on a 20 year old engine, and most of the improvements made to more recent multiplayer source games were never backported.
  
  It only got a 64 bit release last fucking year, after the last big fixtf2 push, when valve hired a single contractor to work on things for a few months.

What's the story? What's wrong with tf2

Bots and cheaters have completely overtaken it and the small community that still plays has finally had enough
- the small community that still plays
  
  70k+ people playing daily
  
  You and I have very different concepts of small.
Botters have gone from aimbotting and afk item farming to basically crowding public lobbies with their bots, then using ai to voice spam slurs and "confessions of illegal activities" in the voice of people trying to bring attention to the bot problem. The botters have also done both doxxing (impersonating said people and spamming their personal info as well as using ai voice chat spam to get people to do vigilante action against innocent people), swatting (see previous), as well as using their majority in a server to kick anyone that tries to combat them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNxjTciIwig
- That's so grim.
- Valve just closing their eyes and ears like they do to all other shitty things being done by players on their platform.
- Some people just have too much free time huh
If you join an official public server, there's an extremely high chance you'll join with cheater bots that spawn endless, aimbotting snipers. It's less of a problem on community servers as they're actively moderated by players, but official servers have to rely on vote kicking a fresh cheater bot every few minutes.

This is all done by some script kiddy group who apparently want to highlight Valve's deprecated support. Basically ruin the game until Valve fixes the game. There's also some measure of farming ingame item drops to sell for money, I think.

Now we're truly competing with Overwatch 2 on review score

How have people not given TF2 a negative review long before this? It's been full of cheaters for YEARS AND YEARS at this point.

Cheaters with stupid hats and pointless alternative weapons. Game never should have lost its original focus.

I expect people have moved onto other and better games, and never bothered to update their review from years ago - I definitely fall into that category.
community servers are fine, and it's a great game. people were just holding out hope that valve would do something but they didn't.

Honestly, I don't believe save TF2 will get anywhere. Valve is clearly uninterested in supporting the game, and who could fault them? It's an old game, and games don't need to be supported just because people play them.

The real problem Valve is playing with is that TF2 is still monetized. They should not be selling microtransactions for a game this broken. If they weren't selling microtransactions, they would be entirely in their right to kill all official support and leave the game to community servers.

My main concern is that Valve will calculate this over the bad PR they're receiving, and rather than do anything to curb the bot problem, simply kill their support for TF2. I would be okay with this. I think most people wanting to #SaveTF2 won't be.

I wish they'd just open-source it. It'll keep falling off while they own it.
I can't imagine cheating being a huge problem I'm a game with only 5-10k players that doesn't have MTX. There's just no incentive there to buy cheats.

Maybe this is the fix they should do, rather than spend money developing a decent anticheat that they then also won't maintain. Cus money.