Yesterday,Team Fortress 2received an update in preparation for its Halloween event,Scream Fortress 13, and as a result the 13-year-old FPS has broken a new record for concurrent player counts. This particular Halloween event takes place in a year where multiplayer gaming, especially free games likeTeam Fortress 2, is one of the few good ways to engage with other people while still maintaining social distancing.
The surge in player activity centers around theScream Fortress XIIHalloween event, which comes with 4 community-created maps, as well as the opportunity to unlock frightful cosmetic items and spooky unusual effects all submitted by fans to the Steam workshop. Many players are logging in just to add this year’s items to their collection. Items fromHalloween events pastare also available if a player transmutes 3 items.
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Roughly 130 thousand players were logged in toTeam Fortress 2at the same time yesterday from 3-4 PM PST (11-12 PM UTC) according to SteamCharts, setting a new all-time record. The past two yearsTF2didn’t break 100k until November, which could mean a lot more activity this year. The catch is that the presence of bots, including ones thatspew racist messages, obfuscates true player counts, andTF2’s internal stats show closer to 25k non-bot players at peak.
TheTeam Fortress 2community has been contending with players who enter the game not with the intent to have fun, but with the intent to dominate other players through cheats or to flood the chat with abusive language. The community’sclever solution to program bots to kill cheaters inTF2has resulted in a higher than average bot count, but the bad players continue to seek ways to disrupt gameplay for their own benefit in an ongoing battle between fun and fear.
Some say thatTeam Fortress 2was one of themost innovative and influential first-person shooter games, so it is easy to see why the player base never dropped below 50k. Valve’s continued investment in the thirteen-year-old game is encouraging, but the developers continue to be challenged by the presence of cheaters and bots. The Valve Anti Cheat (VAC) system may be strong, but determined hackers continue to seek out ways to circumvent the precautions.
A word of advice for those who are planning to get back into the fray: it would be a good idea to brush up onhow to spot and remove hackers inTeam Fortress 2.
Team Fortress 2is available now for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.
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