• Wxnzxn@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    Good. I didn’t join up yet because I have a lot of shit to do, but TF2 is still an excellent game, especially in an age of even more aggressively monetised class-based shooters with worse balancing.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      Ugh, while I agree games have too much monetization nowadays, please don’t give TF2 a free pass. It paved the way for so much of what we see today.

      • Wxnzxn@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        100% agree, that’s why I said “even more” aggressive monetisation. It’s only less in comparison now, but it did indeed do a lot of the work paving the way, although CS probably did even more when it comes to Valve properties.

  • verdigris@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    Pretty suspect about these numbers, given that before this ban wave about 78% of the steam player count for TF2 was bots (source). So this wouldn’t be a doubling of human players, but about a 10x increase. It’s possible… But to me this looks like a bunch more bots being spun up and evading the new ban measures.

    • PhatInferno@midwest.social
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      4 months ago

      As someone who has played casual the past few days, it is now hard to run into bots in games so i believe the player count; tho idk how long it will last/who knows when the bots would be back

  • ComplexLotus@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    50% of the player count are bots that do not cheat … maybe.

    I have been thinking about this: With the recent advancements in AI could you build a bot that pretends to be a human playing the game (with some intentional flaws in its gameplay – so no aimbot for example)?

    I would imagine player behavior – like movement around obstacles – in tf2 would be a valuable data mine to train AI further.

    • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Way back when TF2 was new, Valve put out heatmaps showing how their analytics tracked where players died in each level along with a bunch of other metrics. If that kind of data was public (or a major server collected their own data), I wonder what level of bots we’d have today.

      I miss the old days of playing against Foxbot in the original Team Fortress. It sucks that bots are only used by cheaters/drop farmers these days instead of as an official way to pad out lobbies, or to let you play matches entirely single player.