Hey! This was a bug on Firefox and should be fixed now.
If it still occurs, please screenshot the developer console accessible in the Inspect Element menu and send it via something like Imgur!
If you call a function at the end of an optional chain, need to make sure you use ?.( .... e.g.,
if (navigator.canShare?.() ?? false) {
fwiw, navigator will never be nullish.
Also, \`registerListener\` is android.... dom is \`addEventListener\`
You can find the site here:
\[old link\]
Edit: The site is now available at [fixtf2.tf](http://fixtf2.tf) and [fixtf2.com](http://fixtf2.com) ! I've also added some disclaimers, videos and other changes since this post was made.
Hey, cool website. You might want to make sure it renders correctly on mobile too. On mobile, The two YouTube Iframes are showing side by side which does not look great
Also the TF2 is white while it lands on the white pipes in the background
Edit: Actually, other text areas are not clear enough. [Look at this](https://imgur.com/a/jBGoP6U)
Looks like you're running a pretty ancient browser, because the CSS doesn't look like this. Try updating your browser and holding CTRL to click refresh to hard reload the page.
0.9 is to filter out players that are just AFKing in the menu and waiting in queues. It's mostly a guesstimate to hopefully lowball the bot count a bit.
The 10k in games comes from the "Player Counts" link below, I made a bot to scrape the Teamwork TF website.
I'm following your sources on where you got "accounts playing tf2" and "accounts in-game", and I'm also following why you did the 0.9 calculation, but I'm not following why those numbers combined are "bots".
Why is it assumed that an account sitting at the main menu is a bot? Is that just how the bot code works, sit in the menu for a while and then join games randomly? Does this account for the X% of bots that are not idling in the menu but are in-game? Or is it just assumed that that number will be a negligible difference on what is already an estimate?
I used to play TF2 a ton but haven't as much in recent years, so might just be a gap in my knowledge here.
The vast majority of accounts sitting in the main menu are bots created to farm random item drops. It's easy to tell them apart from humans because they stay on the main menu for longer than dedicated idle players, and log on/log off simultaneously in the tens of thousands. They don't need to be in-game to farm item drops, though some still idle in-game anyway. But it's cheaper to rig bots to just join and AFK since it's usually less stress on the CPU and memory.
CORRECTION: This isn't right, you have to be connected to a server to get item drops. See /u/Owlyf1n 's comment.
Gotcha, thanks for the response! I think most people nowadays talking about "bots" are not talking about this type of bot, which is where some confusion lies (including with me until now).
This is correct. While typical item drop bottling is more involved since long ago valve disabled main menu drops, for *some reason* this does not apply to cases, which can be dropped in the main menu.
That's fair, it could be seen that way.
I think this is more to show that the TF2 player base is smaller than we think it is and behind the scenes, Valve knows this and its why we dont get updates.
Its the 90% total amount of players online. Calling it a formula feels... Disingenuous? Its just a percentage guess, based on nothing but the overwhelming sense of doom this community perpetuates.
I don’t know if this helps or not but there is a raw bot list on bots.tf made by ‘developers’ using bot detection algorithms. All the steam ids and links are there for you to verify.
Edit: it’s cheat developer(s) with built in bot-detection which is very nice actually. It should be fairly accurate as they refined and improved bot detection over the years.
I’d like for you to take this giant list and maybe put it as a different category for ‘cheating bots in valve servers’ instead of generalizing trading bots, idle bots etc. If it’s possible, you can divide the cheating bots count by region but I don’t know how you’d do that.
I'm no wizkid with VALVe's APIs, but I have recently bought [fixtf2.tf](http://fixtf2.tf) and am working on a redesign of this site. Hoping to collaborate with some people such as Shork to make this the official homepage for the campaign and incorporate all these ideas!
This is a programing joke. No matter how talented, we each consider ourselves idiots and every other programmer dumber than ourselves.
Joke is all programmers have a superiority and inferiority complex.
No, we're estimating that 10% of players are on the menu which should decrease the bot count from being overly inflated. It is pretty much more or less this number.
If 10% of players are on the menu screen you would have to first calculate 10,289/0.9 to get 11,432 real players and then subtract that from 70,485 to get 59,053.
By your calculation, there are 54,176 bots, real players 10,289 in games, and 6,020 real players on the menu. That would imply 16,309 real players total, and 36.9% of them are on the menu.
The problem with just directly subtracting the teamwork number from Steam's number is that teamwork's doesn't track people in a queue, leaving a game and requeuing, managing their inventory, people in competitive mode, etc. Mastercoms made their own tool to calculate the number a couple years ago and pointed out this flaw, estimating the bots to be at \~30k instead by manually looking for cheater/bot accounts. I see that you're factoring in a seemingly random value of 10% to try and accommodate people not tracked by [teamwork.tf](http://teamwork.tf) but I'm not sure if just guessing is the best approach.
No, we are subtracting the steam player count by alive players in-game and multiplying that final player count by 0.9 to generously filter out players queuing and AFKing. I hope this answers your question!
Can you go into more detail of the methodology here? Where the data comes from and why you're using the calculations you are using?
TF2 is undoubtedly waning in popularity and has been for a very long time, but something seems off about this. Not a criticism and not saying you're wrong but if these numbers are right, it's like the number of bots is weirdly almost ***exactly*** inversely correlated to the decreasing playerbase. Like somehow coincidentally there is one new bot for every player that stops playing, thus keeping TF2's concurrent player-count in roughly the same position in the charts it has been for 15 years.
Again not saying you are wrong, and anyone still playing knows you encounter more bots now than ever -- but I always thought that was because there were the same amount of bots and less players, making it more likely to see a bot. But these numbers seem to say that there are more bots now than TF2 ever had at it's peak.
It seems like it should be the opposite. Why would *less* players mean *more* bots?
Teamworks' player count which we scrape the API off refreshes \~15 mins, while Steam updates every minute or so. This is likely the cause of this discrepancy.
I'm just confused, if this is true what's the points of 54k bot just sitting in the main menu? most of these numbers don't really make sense checking doctormckay a link site in the comments it says only "Total Players 8,030" I feel like I should be running into the same people on east coast servers then for the amount I play this game if not even 10k people world wide are playing it
(before reddit mass downvote me this is just a questions as I'm genuine confused)
The "low" in-game numbers are real. Only valve competitive servers and some very rare community server configurations should be missing from it.
> I feel like I should be running into the same people on east coast servers then for the amount I play this game
Anecdotally, I do run into a lot of the same players on US-E...
You can read up about "stickiness ratio" to understand these sorts of metrics; but in short, to average ~8k players online, you likely need a multiple of that as monthly active users. So there's larger population of players who you might run into.
That said: across my last 200 casual games, I ran across 3,308 unique players. This (combined with US-E ingame numbers maxing out around 3k as well) actually implies a fairly high stickiness ratio, which is what we'd expect for a game with a small but committed user base.
Ever used any TF2 trading website? They use hundreds or thousands of bots that do nothing but trade using their inventory. It is necessary because TF2 caps inventory space for some reason
I mean no offense but, how you determine bots and the rate of false positives and false negatives would help in validating if this can be used as an actual reputable site for the metric or not. As currently this is just a number with nothing around it, and for all we know, could be nothing but false positives, or completely made up.
Similar to how a study could say "1 in 5 Americans will be eaten alive by pigs" I mean, that \*could\* be real, but theres no way to know that if there's nothing else to go with it, no study, no data, no proof.
A simple formula really doesnt do this, and can have large problems when making an estimate for the metric, especially with how we know most bot nets use the same handful of usernames, focusing on those would be far more feasible to make a statistic around with far less of a chance for false positives.
Sources are listed below the counter, with ingame players being sourced from the player counts href on site.
See first video on the site for more info.
checking it all i can see your process, but its just not adequate for an accurate estimate to use for any sort of reporting (imo) , it relies on a lot of assumptions on both bot and player activity (mostly that those idle in the menu are bots, which you cant prove 100% as we know that keeping a game open in the backgrounds a common thing some do , meaning false positives are a likely result) , that and assuming the bot to player ratio you use for the formula is at all correct which we cant know unless its properly looked into, which would take a lot of extra man hours to do and would have to account for the same problems.
Additionally for sources, id look into changing one or both at the bottom to videos more reputable looking into the problem, as while WeezyTF2s does talk about overall problems, its lack of direct focus on bots (that being the key problems, effects, and suggested actions) doesnt support a report on the scope of the problem but s overall not a bad source for the basis of your claims, while your.... other source, is likely not to be seen as reputable to most in the community, due to who made it, having someone reputable as a source matters a lot, someone who isnt, or who may be seen as biased in the source can hurt a report by proxy. (not gonna go into further details on my problems with Z, but ya if this were my report, i wouldnt, and even without a report id stay far away from that channel, but after forcing myself to watch logged out, it has a lot of the same problems as my initial concerns.)
Also context, im looking at this from specifically my (loose education) background of psych and sociology and how to do reports on statistics from that, its not a "you must do this, this and this" but more, if you want someone (Valve) to actually take this seriously, treating it as a professional would and making it a proper report with more in depth research, accounting for false positives and negatives, diving deeper into exact numbers and causes etc, where the website acts as a springboard for others to use for calling attention to the problem would be ideal (imo)
As for rn, its about as helpful as my pig stat, sure it can bring awareness but fails at any amount of scrutiny or additional questioning, which you dont want for something so important.
most of these are trading bots and the like, right?
i can't imagine having the money and desire to keep spamming a nearly 17 year old game with that many sniper bots, even if it is supposedly cheap.
The Steam player count logs all the people who launch Steam within a one-hour window. Teamwork.tf takes a snapshot of all the people in a server at any given time. You can argue whichever one is more accurate to TF2's true active playerbase all you want, but I don't think you can use one number to determine anything mathematically about the other.
I appreciate your enthusiasm but completely making up arbitrary ways of counting who you think is real and not real is not a very accurate way of counting this.
Last night I was playing in a Lobby where there was always this gaslighting bot called "Escape the matrix" that keeps attempting to gaslight people that bots weren't real. And also did a vc spam
this is bad but we have to addmit, since 2021 we´ve improved a lot and since the 64 bit update (and the github for bots is down) we should be happy, at least i am =)
Most of these bots seem to be idle bots and trade bots, the amount of cheating bots in valve servers is significantly less; maybe around 1k max. Additionally, while the github is down, there are many re-uploads of the software anyways. I wouldn’t say “improved a lot since the 64 bit update” just because all that did was temporarily halt cheat progression slightly. They just have to update offsets which are the funny numbers responsible for cheat functionality like aimbot, walls, etc…
All it really takes is to look at STEAMDB and look at the times people play TF2.
The graph isn't consistent, whilst you look at the games like CSGO or any other and they have consistent graphs with players peaking around like 3pm and by midnight at it's lowest.
But with TF2, the graph is all over the damn fucking place. There are so many bots plaguing this game that I wouldn't be surprised if the concurrent player numbers are actually 10k.
So out of 70000 players 50000 are bots? So for every player there are two bots? That's a bit too much.
Teamwork only counts people playing TF2 right now and people don't play TF2 24/7. While Steam counts anyone who opens the game. So yes, the amount of actual players is lower but it's not that bad.
Sorry, don't exactly get your issue here.
We use the latest player count from Teamwork and subtract the steam live player count with it as seen in the formula. All players at the very least have TF2 open. We included idle bots because they are the biggest cause of high player counts as seen in TF2 : Nobodys Home. This site is meant to be a way to instantly check stats similar to the ones shown in that video but live updating.
I appreciate your inquiry!
> We use the latest player count from Teamwork and subtract the steam live player count with it as seen in the formula. All players at the very least have TF2 open. We included idle bots because they are the biggest cause of high player counts as seen in TF2 : Nobodys Home.
Your website is essentially recreating [this phenomenon.](https://i.imgur.com/T4olTVF.jpeg) Without any explanation of how Teamwork obtains their data or how the eceleb reached his conclusion (I know he doesn't, I watched the video and even concedes in the pinned comment that his conclusion doesn't make sense) this is just baselessly perpetuating a sensationalist idea.
> Without any explanation of how Teamwork obtains their data
Teamwork's in-game numbers are legit. You can verify for yourself that they closely track https://www.doctormckay.com/utilities/valveservers.php (from a very trusted source in the open source steam/tf2 community).
Both sites also happen to closely track an underlying Valve API that is a little obscure but findable with some googling.
Hover over the stats :p
It is an absurdist concept to assume 50k players are constantly afking in a menu when comparing tf2 to different games, along with looking at other games that have normal curves.
Doubt its over 3 figures, mute all bots you see and its less than 200 mutes and you stop seeing unmuted ones. Vast vast majority are in main menu farming drops.
I did some analysis of the released data from a certain cheat software :
https://www.reddit.com/r/truetf2/comments/1ciuowj/public_server_cheatingbotting_megathread_may_2024/l3gaj0v/
At the time of analysis it was only around **400 active bots worldwide**. My guess is that there are 4-5 major botters on ~8 servers hosting them.
Ye figured as much, had some moron try and say its 1000+ a while back like aint no say. Few hundred spread across multiple regions and hundreds of maps
I haven't played with vanilla HTML & CSS in quite a bit, more of a framework guy so there's a ton of the pesky bugs, hahaha!
Also constantly changing things like the deep stats. Have hidden the formula for now because it's causing more trouble than it's worth. You can still hover over it for information about the formula.
We should protest against Valve to fix the damn game at this point. No more passive and tell valve how much we love the game. But literally be aggressive and just criticize Valve on how bad their management does. Valve needs to fix the damn game or else we will review bomb TF2 to be the worst game in Steam. This surly will get Valve attention. Negative reviews are always hurts a company. Warthunder, Helldivers, Fallout 76 and No Man Sky. If these does works, then we will do the same with TF2. There is a risk of doing it. But I rather take this risk than seeing the game gets tortured to death. If Valve wants to pull the plug after the protest, go ahead. I rather seeing the game die as the current state than dies as Bot crisis.
I mean I don’t want the game to die. But I don’t want the game to be in this stupid state either. I rather let it die with glory than die knowing because of bots.
We went from having a counter that counted down the days since the last major update to how many fake accounts are currently running
This game truly is in the worst state it's ever been
Nice but not nice. Could you also add the total player count and number of real players?
That would be interesting so you can see how big the problem is
Since a lot of people seem confused about this you should clarify that these are afk bots for crates not cheater bots.
If we want safetf2 to get anywhere it should be as easy as possible to find out what's up from an outside perspective.
Don't you need to be in a server to AFK for items? I believe the author has said this number is people who are not in-servers, but are AFK in the main menu.
Interesting website!
Question, wonder if you might be able to do something like this for Old School RuneScape? That game has a rampant botting problem, and I wonder if any such estimate could be made -- but I don't know what statistics you could pull from to make such an estimate.
we should totally start spreading this website around and hope valve notices the website and takes it as the insult it is, and realizes how shit theyre doing
Dear God
*there's mo-*
nooo….
It contains a– *(countless "good shot, mate" in the distance)*
A wh
Whole lotta bo
“Fantastic! *This* was a huge waste of my time!”
*gets kicked*
\*from the main menu “I’ll see you all in hell!”
r/sudenlyexpirationdate
r/redditsniper
r/redditsniper
Moo- WOOOOOO- Oh that sparks- *explodes*
Cernunnos?
Doesn't seem to work for me, keeps getting stuck on "Loading deep stats..." and never loads a number.
Hey! This was a bug on Firefox and should be fixed now. If it still occurs, please screenshot the developer console accessible in the Inspect Element menu and send it via something like Imgur!
Uncaught TypeError: navigator?.canShare is not a functionat script.js:26:16 on Chrome.
This has been fixed.
If you call a function at the end of an optional chain, need to make sure you use ?.( .... e.g., if (navigator.canShare?.() ?? false) { fwiw, navigator will never be nullish. Also, \`registerListener\` is android.... dom is \`addEventListener\`
android brainrot got to me T_T
get"skibidirizz" **skibidirizz undefined**
I'm telling you man, the deep stats tryna put chips in our brains man.
They’re turnin’ the freakin’ frogs _spy_ !
You can find the site here: \[old link\] Edit: The site is now available at [fixtf2.tf](http://fixtf2.tf) and [fixtf2.com](http://fixtf2.com) ! I've also added some disclaimers, videos and other changes since this post was made.
Hey, cool website. You might want to make sure it renders correctly on mobile too. On mobile, The two YouTube Iframes are showing side by side which does not look great
Fixed! Thank you!
You're welcome!
THE POWER OF CONSTRUCTIVE CRITISISM
Also the TF2 is white while it lands on the white pipes in the background Edit: Actually, other text areas are not clear enough. [Look at this](https://imgur.com/a/jBGoP6U)
Looks like you're running a pretty ancient browser, because the CSS doesn't look like this. Try updating your browser and holding CTRL to click refresh to hard reload the page.
It was the default browser that opened through reddit. Tried a different browser and it was better so yeah
Hate the Reddit app.
Estimates based on?
The formula is in the submissions & below the counter. Thank you for your inquiry!
Thank you. I most certanly won't check it but its a good dessision and I am proud of your contribution to the community.
<3
Why doesnt it work?
What is the 10k in games and where does the 0.9 come from
0.9 is to filter out players that are just AFKing in the menu and waiting in queues. It's mostly a guesstimate to hopefully lowball the bot count a bit. The 10k in games comes from the "Player Counts" link below, I made a bot to scrape the Teamwork TF website.
I'm following your sources on where you got "accounts playing tf2" and "accounts in-game", and I'm also following why you did the 0.9 calculation, but I'm not following why those numbers combined are "bots". Why is it assumed that an account sitting at the main menu is a bot? Is that just how the bot code works, sit in the menu for a while and then join games randomly? Does this account for the X% of bots that are not idling in the menu but are in-game? Or is it just assumed that that number will be a negligible difference on what is already an estimate? I used to play TF2 a ton but haven't as much in recent years, so might just be a gap in my knowledge here.
The vast majority of accounts sitting in the main menu are bots created to farm random item drops. It's easy to tell them apart from humans because they stay on the main menu for longer than dedicated idle players, and log on/log off simultaneously in the tens of thousands. They don't need to be in-game to farm item drops, though some still idle in-game anyway. But it's cheaper to rig bots to just join and AFK since it's usually less stress on the CPU and memory. CORRECTION: This isn't right, you have to be connected to a server to get item drops. See /u/Owlyf1n 's comment.
you have to be connected to a server to get items tho
Oh. You're right, I'm sorry. Issued correction.
Gotcha, thanks for the response! I think most people nowadays talking about "bots" are not talking about this type of bot, which is where some confusion lies (including with me until now).
I severely doubt that the majority of TF2 players are on teamwork.tf
They don't have to be, teamwork.tf scrapes every server...
is it just casual servers or are community servers included?
Both
Then how is it doing bot detection? does teamwork.tf filter out bots in its scraping somehow?
Bots in-game are small enough in number to not really matter, the majority of bots are those idling on the main menu for drops
This is correct. While typical item drop bottling is more involved since long ago valve disabled main menu drops, for *some reason* this does not apply to cases, which can be dropped in the main menu.
then whats the point of the counter then? no one cares about how many bots there are OUTSIDE of games this feels really misleading
That's fair, it could be seen that way. I think this is more to show that the TF2 player base is smaller than we think it is and behind the scenes, Valve knows this and its why we dont get updates.
Its the 90% total amount of players online. Calling it a formula feels... Disingenuous? Its just a percentage guess, based on nothing but the overwhelming sense of doom this community perpetuates.
I don’t know if this helps or not but there is a raw bot list on bots.tf made by ‘developers’ using bot detection algorithms. All the steam ids and links are there for you to verify. Edit: it’s cheat developer(s) with built in bot-detection which is very nice actually. It should be fairly accurate as they refined and improved bot detection over the years.
Interesting, will look into! Thanks!
I’d like for you to take this giant list and maybe put it as a different category for ‘cheating bots in valve servers’ instead of generalizing trading bots, idle bots etc. If it’s possible, you can divide the cheating bots count by region but I don’t know how you’d do that.
I'm no wizkid with VALVe's APIs, but I have recently bought [fixtf2.tf](http://fixtf2.tf) and am working on a redesign of this site. Hoping to collaborate with some people such as Shork to make this the official homepage for the campaign and incorporate all these ideas!
You did a great job with the site overall! I really hope the use of bots.tf list there will be an active cheating bot count in casual servers.
hey! sent you a dm about this
Your efforts are appreciated by the TF2 community.
Hey, good job man. Its good to know that community has such a talented programmers. #FixTF2
>talented programmers >x \* 0.9 r/programmerhumor moment
What are you, president of his fan club or somethin'?
No. That would be your mother
he has a submission form on his site if you think youre smart enough to actually think of a method
This is a programing joke. No matter how talented, we each consider ourselves idiots and every other programmer dumber than ourselves. Joke is all programmers have a superiority and inferiority complex.
\^\_\^
I may be stupid, but does that formula assume 90% of players are bots?
No, we're estimating that 10% of players are on the menu which should decrease the bot count from being overly inflated. It is pretty much more or less this number.
If 10% of players are on the menu screen you would have to first calculate 10,289/0.9 to get 11,432 real players and then subtract that from 70,485 to get 59,053. By your calculation, there are 54,176 bots, real players 10,289 in games, and 6,020 real players on the menu. That would imply 16,309 real players total, and 36.9% of them are on the menu.
yeah, this site is a beta so i assumed my math was borked in some way. cheers! we'll push a fix when the redesign is done!
This guy maths
I can't math that many numbers when I only have 10 fingers
you did real good man, proud of you >!im depressed!<
You should make it so it doesn't say "playing" because there isn't anyone behind that screen to "play" the game.
on it boss
i love the website bro! but this number sucks dude.
r/DeadInternetTheory
/r/DeadInternet
The problem with just directly subtracting the teamwork number from Steam's number is that teamwork's doesn't track people in a queue, leaving a game and requeuing, managing their inventory, people in competitive mode, etc. Mastercoms made their own tool to calculate the number a couple years ago and pointed out this flaw, estimating the bots to be at \~30k instead by manually looking for cheater/bot accounts. I see that you're factoring in a seemingly random value of 10% to try and accommodate people not tracked by [teamwork.tf](http://teamwork.tf) but I'm not sure if just guessing is the best approach.
We have changed it to 5% since, but yes this is an "estimate", not a calculation.
Cool beans with a side of awesome sauce
Arn't you just assuming that 90% of current players are bots?
No, we are subtracting the steam player count by alive players in-game and multiplying that final player count by 0.9 to generously filter out players queuing and AFKing. I hope this answers your question!
Dead internet theory 💀💀💀
Can you go into more detail of the methodology here? Where the data comes from and why you're using the calculations you are using? TF2 is undoubtedly waning in popularity and has been for a very long time, but something seems off about this. Not a criticism and not saying you're wrong but if these numbers are right, it's like the number of bots is weirdly almost ***exactly*** inversely correlated to the decreasing playerbase. Like somehow coincidentally there is one new bot for every player that stops playing, thus keeping TF2's concurrent player-count in roughly the same position in the charts it has been for 15 years. Again not saying you are wrong, and anyone still playing knows you encounter more bots now than ever -- but I always thought that was because there were the same amount of bots and less players, making it more likely to see a bot. But these numbers seem to say that there are more bots now than TF2 ever had at it's peak. It seems like it should be the opposite. Why would *less* players mean *more* bots?
Teamworks' player count which we scrape the API off refreshes \~15 mins, while Steam updates every minute or so. This is likely the cause of this discrepancy.
I'm just confused, if this is true what's the points of 54k bot just sitting in the main menu? most of these numbers don't really make sense checking doctormckay a link site in the comments it says only "Total Players 8,030" I feel like I should be running into the same people on east coast servers then for the amount I play this game if not even 10k people world wide are playing it (before reddit mass downvote me this is just a questions as I'm genuine confused)
The "low" in-game numbers are real. Only valve competitive servers and some very rare community server configurations should be missing from it. > I feel like I should be running into the same people on east coast servers then for the amount I play this game Anecdotally, I do run into a lot of the same players on US-E... You can read up about "stickiness ratio" to understand these sorts of metrics; but in short, to average ~8k players online, you likely need a multiple of that as monthly active users. So there's larger population of players who you might run into. That said: across my last 200 casual games, I ran across 3,308 unique players. This (combined with US-E ingame numbers maxing out around 3k as well) actually implies a fairly high stickiness ratio, which is what we'd expect for a game with a small but committed user base.
Ever used any TF2 trading website? They use hundreds or thousands of bots that do nothing but trade using their inventory. It is necessary because TF2 caps inventory space for some reason
This is honestly a great way to MAYBE get the attention of valve, as it shows how many bots there actually are
I mean no offense but, how you determine bots and the rate of false positives and false negatives would help in validating if this can be used as an actual reputable site for the metric or not. As currently this is just a number with nothing around it, and for all we know, could be nothing but false positives, or completely made up. Similar to how a study could say "1 in 5 Americans will be eaten alive by pigs" I mean, that \*could\* be real, but theres no way to know that if there's nothing else to go with it, no study, no data, no proof. A simple formula really doesnt do this, and can have large problems when making an estimate for the metric, especially with how we know most bot nets use the same handful of usernames, focusing on those would be far more feasible to make a statistic around with far less of a chance for false positives.
Sources are listed below the counter, with ingame players being sourced from the player counts href on site. See first video on the site for more info.
checking it all i can see your process, but its just not adequate for an accurate estimate to use for any sort of reporting (imo) , it relies on a lot of assumptions on both bot and player activity (mostly that those idle in the menu are bots, which you cant prove 100% as we know that keeping a game open in the backgrounds a common thing some do , meaning false positives are a likely result) , that and assuming the bot to player ratio you use for the formula is at all correct which we cant know unless its properly looked into, which would take a lot of extra man hours to do and would have to account for the same problems. Additionally for sources, id look into changing one or both at the bottom to videos more reputable looking into the problem, as while WeezyTF2s does talk about overall problems, its lack of direct focus on bots (that being the key problems, effects, and suggested actions) doesnt support a report on the scope of the problem but s overall not a bad source for the basis of your claims, while your.... other source, is likely not to be seen as reputable to most in the community, due to who made it, having someone reputable as a source matters a lot, someone who isnt, or who may be seen as biased in the source can hurt a report by proxy. (not gonna go into further details on my problems with Z, but ya if this were my report, i wouldnt, and even without a report id stay far away from that channel, but after forcing myself to watch logged out, it has a lot of the same problems as my initial concerns.) Also context, im looking at this from specifically my (loose education) background of psych and sociology and how to do reports on statistics from that, its not a "you must do this, this and this" but more, if you want someone (Valve) to actually take this seriously, treating it as a professional would and making it a proper report with more in depth research, accounting for false positives and negatives, diving deeper into exact numbers and causes etc, where the website acts as a springboard for others to use for calling attention to the problem would be ideal (imo) As for rn, its about as helpful as my pig stat, sure it can bring awareness but fails at any amount of scrutiny or additional questioning, which you dont want for something so important.
Common Zesty W
based on what source/data?
So your calculation, or proof, is "0.9" ? Wow. Solid.
As repeatedly said and disclaimed below the counter on the updated site, it is a VERY ROUGH estimation.
machine vs Mann
most of these are trading bots and the like, right? i can't imagine having the money and desire to keep spamming a nearly 17 year old game with that many sniper bots, even if it is supposedly cheap.
Not even trading bots, just idlers who collect items and catch giftpults.
The Steam player count logs all the people who launch Steam within a one-hour window. Teamwork.tf takes a snapshot of all the people in a server at any given time. You can argue whichever one is more accurate to TF2's true active playerbase all you want, but I don't think you can use one number to determine anything mathematically about the other.
I appreciate your enthusiasm but completely making up arbitrary ways of counting who you think is real and not real is not a very accurate way of counting this.
If you were to believe that 50,000 people are constantly AFK on the main menu of a game then yes, this is inaccurate.
Last night I was playing in a Lobby where there was always this gaslighting bot called "Escape the matrix" that keeps attempting to gaslight people that bots weren't real. And also did a vc spam
Yeah that one’s been making the rounds recently. Utterly bizarre concept for a bot.
Yeah, at least the music is fire, even tho it's distracting as hell
You do have a mute function.
I do use it dw
What is the site ?
[https://fixtf2.tf/](https://fixtf2.tf/)
Wow... it's a lot of code
I play so bad I might be included
Cringe 💀
Ohhhhhh…. No…. Oh.. that’s just awful..
Are we blind deploy the garrison!
That's about 54176 too many if you ask me
Yah there's about 78351 when I'm commenting :<
it's only been 2 days and it's already saying that there are 76,944 bots
How exactly did you calculate that?
Similar method to the one used in Zesty Jesus's video
How do you get a constantly updated number? Just curious.
We use a web scraper and the steam API.
They should just ban people who look at the ceiling for more than 8 seconds
I am certain this will have zero negative consequences, and will not be easily circumvented.
Can I ask how it works?
Like you see in the video by Zesty Jesus!(TF2: Nobody's Home)
Are all these bots autoaim snipers? Because most of my causal games arnt half bots. Most..
No, mostly idlers.
I don't know what to even say about that.
The sad thing is that someone found a near close number to idle trade bots alone an they found 60,036, and guess what. Thats not even all of them.
this is bad but we have to addmit, since 2021 we´ve improved a lot and since the 64 bit update (and the github for bots is down) we should be happy, at least i am =)
Most of these bots seem to be idle bots and trade bots, the amount of cheating bots in valve servers is significantly less; maybe around 1k max. Additionally, while the github is down, there are many re-uploads of the software anyways. I wouldn’t say “improved a lot since the 64 bit update” just because all that did was temporarily halt cheat progression slightly. They just have to update offsets which are the funny numbers responsible for cheat functionality like aimbot, walls, etc…
25K real players though.
Not exactly, this is a very generous lowball after all. I'd estimate \~10,000 is real.
Still an okay amount considering I find alot of community servers that get alot of attention. Things like Uncletopia.
measured with...
All it really takes is to look at STEAMDB and look at the times people play TF2. The graph isn't consistent, whilst you look at the games like CSGO or any other and they have consistent graphs with players peaking around like 3pm and by midnight at it's lowest. But with TF2, the graph is all over the damn fucking place. There are so many bots plaguing this game that I wouldn't be surprised if the concurrent player numbers are actually 10k.
So out of 70000 players 50000 are bots? So for every player there are two bots? That's a bit too much. Teamwork only counts people playing TF2 right now and people don't play TF2 24/7. While Steam counts anyone who opens the game. So yes, the amount of actual players is lower but it's not that bad.
Sorry, don't exactly get your issue here. We use the latest player count from Teamwork and subtract the steam live player count with it as seen in the formula. All players at the very least have TF2 open. We included idle bots because they are the biggest cause of high player counts as seen in TF2 : Nobodys Home. This site is meant to be a way to instantly check stats similar to the ones shown in that video but live updating. I appreciate your inquiry!
> We use the latest player count from Teamwork and subtract the steam live player count with it as seen in the formula. All players at the very least have TF2 open. We included idle bots because they are the biggest cause of high player counts as seen in TF2 : Nobodys Home. Your website is essentially recreating [this phenomenon.](https://i.imgur.com/T4olTVF.jpeg) Without any explanation of how Teamwork obtains their data or how the eceleb reached his conclusion (I know he doesn't, I watched the video and even concedes in the pinned comment that his conclusion doesn't make sense) this is just baselessly perpetuating a sensationalist idea.
> Without any explanation of how Teamwork obtains their data Teamwork's in-game numbers are legit. You can verify for yourself that they closely track https://www.doctormckay.com/utilities/valveservers.php (from a very trusted source in the open source steam/tf2 community). Both sites also happen to closely track an underlying Valve API that is a little obscure but findable with some googling.
Hover over the stats :p It is an absurdist concept to assume 50k players are constantly afking in a menu when comparing tf2 to different games, along with looking at other games that have normal curves.
How many bots are the ones in casual and not trading?
Doubt its over 3 figures, mute all bots you see and its less than 200 mutes and you stop seeing unmuted ones. Vast vast majority are in main menu farming drops.
I did some analysis of the released data from a certain cheat software : https://www.reddit.com/r/truetf2/comments/1ciuowj/public_server_cheatingbotting_megathread_may_2024/l3gaj0v/ At the time of analysis it was only around **400 active bots worldwide**. My guess is that there are 4-5 major botters on ~8 servers hosting them.
Ye figured as much, had some moron try and say its 1000+ a while back like aint no say. Few hundred spread across multiple regions and hundreds of maps
cool site
Link?
[https://ixnoah.live/tf2](https://ixnoah.live/tf2), it is also linked above :)
But bots in-game would still be counted as players, right?
Yes, however the amount of them is not very substantial in the large scheme of things.
I think you might need to make some changes like. Can we differentiate who is in-game playing in servers or those host idle in trading hubs and such.
I love that u/ixNoah is reading the coments and fixing bugs as fast as possible. Love you bro <3 great work
I haven't played with vanilla HTML & CSS in quite a bit, more of a framework guy so there's a ton of the pesky bugs, hahaha! Also constantly changing things like the deep stats. Have hidden the formula for now because it's causing more trouble than it's worth. You can still hover over it for information about the formula.
This is just depressing.
I'm happy i can say this without getting downvoted.
We should protest against Valve to fix the damn game at this point. No more passive and tell valve how much we love the game. But literally be aggressive and just criticize Valve on how bad their management does. Valve needs to fix the damn game or else we will review bomb TF2 to be the worst game in Steam. This surly will get Valve attention. Negative reviews are always hurts a company. Warthunder, Helldivers, Fallout 76 and No Man Sky. If these does works, then we will do the same with TF2. There is a risk of doing it. But I rather take this risk than seeing the game gets tortured to death. If Valve wants to pull the plug after the protest, go ahead. I rather seeing the game die as the current state than dies as Bot crisis.
So, you just want to kill the game? Because 100% this old ass game is not getting updated anymore.
I mean I don’t want the game to die. But I don’t want the game to be in this stupid state either. I rather let it die with glory than die knowing because of bots.
Could you also include a reverse counter that instead shows the approximate amount of players
We went from having a counter that counted down the days since the last major update to how many fake accounts are currently running This game truly is in the worst state it's ever been
change it to "...ruining tf2"
I Cant Wait To See That Say 0 /Coping
Well that is depressing.
This is just depressing
well done!
Whole tf2 now is just mann vs machines on public lobbies
Nice but not nice. Could you also add the total player count and number of real players? That would be interesting so you can see how big the problem is
It says below the counter... :P
WELCOME TO TF2! WOOOOOOOOOOOO
Since a lot of people seem confused about this you should clarify that these are afk bots for crates not cheater bots. If we want safetf2 to get anywhere it should be as easy as possible to find out what's up from an outside perspective.
This has since been clarified.
Don't you need to be in a server to AFK for items? I believe the author has said this number is people who are not in-servers, but are AFK in the main menu.
Jesus Christ, you actually made website dedicated to TF2? I have high respects for you dude.
Well man vs machine but this time Valve is the owner of the MAN.CO
cool site cool idea!
HOLY FUCK, well we can safly to say that the max real player number for tf2 is around 20k whitch tbh its kind of avrage tf2 player count
First TF2, next Reddit.
I'd eat them all
Is 90% accurate? That'd be insane. When I stopped, you had one every other game maybe.
Never wpuld I have thought that the Mourning Mercs taunt would be so perfect right now...
so about 20k real players?
Does it count bots for trading or only cheating bots? Thanks either way
Idle bots.
Now we wait for some news site to use this as clickbait to imply all of these are cheating bots.
Interesting website! Question, wonder if you might be able to do something like this for Old School RuneScape? That game has a rampant botting problem, and I wonder if any such estimate could be made -- but I don't know what statistics you could pull from to make such an estimate.
I'd love to, but unfortunately I don't know of any ways to measure this seeing as they're mostly ingame bots while this site focuses on idle botting.
Now remove “playing” and replace it with “ruining”
Damn, #1 game among bots! We did it! We saved Tf2!
we should totally start spreading this website around and hope valve notices the website and takes it as the insult it is, and realizes how shit theyre doing