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Team Fortress 2 is cracking down on racist bot invasionsThe “TF2 Hacker Police” are overwhelmed
The “TF2 Hacker Police” are overwhelmed
AI bots are technological marvels. To think! We’ve imbued blips and blops with a semblance of sentience, turning code into pseudo-autonomous agents that can chat as they run around a virtual world. Unfortunately, people have been using this power to spew racist bots intoTeam Fortress 2. Players report seeing these bots enter their games, deploy game-breaking hacks, and spam the chat with racist slurs.
Valve haven’t explicitly acknowledged the problem, but they have introduced some measures that might help.
Thereportsarewidespread, so it seems safe to say that yep, this is a big problem. Accordingto Kotaku, bots have been popping up since early this year, but they only went racist in the past few months.
Inthe patch notesfor an update that landed two days ago, Valve detail new restrictions on “certain new accounts”. It’s not clear exactly what makes this kick in, but targeted accounts will be prevented “from using chat in official matchmaking modes”. It does seem like there’s a risk that some free-to-play accounts will get lumped in with the bots, which sucks. But then so do swarms of racist robots. They also say “work is ongoing to mitigate the use of new and free accounts for abusive purposes”.
I do wish Valve would just come out and say ‘yep, racist bots, we’re on it’, and I wouldn’t say I’m grateful to them for recognising they’ve got a responsibility to deal with this crap. Valverecently confirmedthat “hardly anyone” is working on TF2 anymore, but still. Shutting down abusive, cheating, racist bots needs to be a company priority, even for a 12 year-old game.
