This guy didn't do any experiments like generate a couple thousand bots to see if he can affect the concurrent player count. He's just recycling old /v/ bait trying to insist that TF2 only has a few thousand real players. If you go through that archive you can view the site he uses as an accomplice, teamwork.tf, adjusting the alleged player count to a believable number. Early on they claimed less than 2000 people played the game and were mocked.
To simulate that bot traffic, you would need to know how item farmers do it in the first place. Do you think they are just going to tell you or dump their solution in the open a la cathook? This is something that your YouTube comments screenshot is also confused about. Applying normal player logic to a modified game client is useless, simply take a look at how easy it is to modify TF2 with all the code leaks, especially if the purpose is just to sit in the main menu and accept drops. Bot swarms that you see in Casual matches don't even need a GPU to run.
Didn't Zesty say in the video that the Idle bots are farming crates and not items, and crates don't require you to be on a vac server, hell he even talked to a TF2 crate trader who talked about some people farming upwards of 2 Million crates a year.
I'm sure he asked someone and believed everything he was told, all without anyone recreating the process or providing proof. Because when you're a middling youtuber who can't break 100k views regularly you'll throw anything up there.
Did you even watch the video or are you just spewing inane shit all over this thread for no reason?
No. Did he get someone to sit and recreate the process of making bots and having them idle for cases to sell? Because I'm going to assume that didn't happen. I instead assume he was told a bunch of hearsay, which he embellished and over-edited. I assume nothing in the video is as in-depth in explaining, analyzing and verifying the problem as shounic for example. I don't believe anyone is going to verify any of this shit he claims either and just assume 99% of TF2 is actually robots.
Then why the fuck do you run your mouth like your opinion is worth a shit then?
Because I've been made to hear or read about this video everywhere else where TF2 is discussed. Through no will of my own, I've been provided "thorough" secondhand knowledge of this shit I would never click on. Why? Because some fag who is very late to the party decided he's a big deal on the internet, has decided that he's uncovered a grand conspiracy, and has also decided that he does not have to provide meaningful evidence it's even occurring. Not only did he decide those things but his retarded fanbase did as well. So now this game that hasn't changed in any substantial way in about 5 years is now "dying" per this moron and all the people desperate to parrot all the bullshit he didn't provide evidence for.
You didn't even provide any links to the screenshot drivel you posted. Try contributing first, brain damaged furry. You getting mad at /tf2g/ or whatever shitty Discord is spamming that video isn't anybody's problem but yours.
No, until someone goes through the task of providing proof of concept then I'll point out that claiming an overwhelming majority of TF2's playerbase is bots is retarded. You should be ashamed for believing a youtuber in the first place, let alone one who didn't provide any evidence.
If the video has any merit, this is a simple thing to do.
If ZestyJesus is wrong about the player counts then what is the actual "real" number of genuine human beings playing TF2? You seem to understand the situation better or at least have some hidden knowledge that isn't accounted for in the video. At least that's the claim you're making in the thread. This isn't a "gotcha" thing or anything I genuinely want to know what you think the true genuine number is because even if the man is a total charlatan, the analytics from Steam are still not accurate enough to get a definitive answer.
You stupid fucking nigger, open TF2 right now and chances are you are going to get a couple crates after booting to menu. Mystery solved, but you're still a stupid fucking nigger.
import requests
import os
import datetime
# https://steamcommunity.com/dev/apikey
# Put your api key in the "STEAM_API_KEY" environment variable
URL = "https://api.steampowered.com/IGameServersService/GetServerList/v1/?filter=\\appid\\440\\empty\\1&limit=10000&key=" + os.environ["STEAM_API_KEY"]
response = requests.get(URL)
print(response)
data = response.json()
servers = data["response"]["servers"]
print("Data timestamp:", datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc))
print("Server count (only non-empty servers):", len(servers))
valveMvM, valve, community, idle = 0, 0, 0, 0
unknownServers, allPlayers = 0, 0
for server in servers:
players = server["players"]
allPlayers += players
if "gametype" not in server:
unknownServers += 1
continue
gameType = server["gametype"]
if "valve" in gameType:
if "mvm" in gameType:
valveMvM += players
else:
valve += players
elif any(tag in gameType for tag in ["strange", "achievement"]):
idle += players
else:
community += players
print("Valve MvM:", valveMvM)
print("Valve:", valve)
print("Community:", community)
print("Idle:", idle)
print("Unknown servers (game type not present):", unknownServers)
print("All players (no filtering):", allPlayers)Data timestamp: 2024-05-02 03:00:45.612523+00:00
Server count (only non-empty servers): 1174
Valve MvM: 561
Valve: 5288
Community: 4078
Idle: 211
Unknown servers (game type not present): 256
All players (no filtering): 10393
He addresses this in the video you didn't bother watching. The bots are farming items that are dropped in the main menu, not while playing the game. This is because the resource consumption pretending to idle in the main menu is significantly lower than botting the game so it's more economical for people to farm crates than actual items.
