AI bots are technological marvels. To assume! We’ve imbued blips and blops with a semblance of sentience, turning code into pseudo-autonomous brokers that may chat as they run round a digital world. Unfortunately, individuals have been utilizing this energy to spew racist bots into Team 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 issue, however they’ve launched some measures that may assist.
The reports are widespread, so it appears secure to say that yep, it is a massive drawback. According to Kotaku, bots have been popping up since early this 12 months, however they solely went racist up to now few months.
In the patch notes for an replace that landed two days in the past, Valve element new restrictions on “certain new accounts”. It’s not clear precisely what makes this kick in, however focused accounts shall be prevented “from using chat in official matchmaking modes”. It does look like there’s a danger that some free-to-play accounts will get lumped in with the bots, which sucks. But then so do swarms of racist robots. They additionally say “work is ongoing to mitigate the use of new and free accounts for abusive purposes”.
Some gamers have even banded collectively to type the “TF2 Hacker Police”, although their influence is doubtful. They’re apparently attempting to fight the bots by selling the usage of weapons which can be notably efficient towards them, which is kooky however doesn’t do something towards chat spam. More efficient measures embrace an autokick config, however the the racist bot propagators responded to that by creating a workaround and actively targeting the autokick’s creator. The notion appears to be that the Hacker Police had been doing little, and that interference from Valve was overdue. From the sounds of it: sure. Yes it was.
I do want Valve would simply 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 received a accountability to take care of this crap. Valve recently confirmed that “hardly anyone” is engaged on TF2 anymore, however nonetheless. Shutting down abusive, dishonest, racist bots must be an organization precedence, even for a 12 year-old game.
