- Joined
- Dec 13, 2023
I really don't, which is why this is all so absurd to me. The youtuber makes a bunch of claims that on a surface level appear ridiculous and demand evidence to come off as anything other than ridiculously unlikely. He doesn't provide any. I believe he doesn't provide any because the people invading this game's space to claim the sky is falling (and I haven't stopped meeting them since that video was posted) never cite any proof. I believe they don't cite proof because I don't think his video actually contains any.
You posted at least some data nobody else has while they were trying to convince me TF2 is dead, and you aren't a faggot who begged a question only to go "tl;dr", so I'll ask some honest questions that I've yet to receive answers for (that aren't obvious conjecture or "well I think maybe".) I don't expect either of us will have any answers and my skepticism should make a little more sense.
One: How does anyone bypass the manual verification required to receive case drops? As mentioned in one of those screenshots, ever since 2013 you've had to accept items before a new one will drop. This is a little button in the game menu. I'm not aware of any command script that accepts these items automatically (and if that existed, it would defeat the apparent purpose of it existing.) The ability to open a command prompt and tell Steam you are in-game was also patched back when the Cheater's Lament was released, because idling for hats (rather than actually playing the game) was seen as a big deal by Valve. You can increase Steam profile hours with a program, which is tied to some things such as trading card drops in certain games, but the cards for TF2 sell about 5 in total every day, for 1 penny each.
I've looked into possible methods across various large cheating/hacking/hustling forums like Nulled or Unknowncheats for software that does all this, but all anyone seems to know how to do is fake playtime, and there's absolutely no tools for auto-accepting in-game items. If you don't accept a drop you simply won't receive any more. I believe this would something a layman could actually find, as skids make up so much of anything annoying on the internet (and if you've ever come up with anything that even suggests making money, you are probably familiar with hundreds of third-worlders soliciting you for the details.)
Additionally I conducted a small, non-scientific experiment since posting earlier today, where I would wait for a case drop in TF2 and then leave my game client open on the main menu. I never received a new case. I re-opened the game client after idling for a long time and still didn't receive any. I entered a casual match, completed it, earned EXP... and received a case drop. So unless I did something wrong, these bot hosters would also need to have their thousands of accounts play casual. Is that what the Sniper bots do? Possibly, but they also appear to get banned in waves nowadays. And it's not 2010 where you could generate Steam accounts with unverified throwaway email addresses or without solving a captcha, so making these bots doesn't seem trivial. This guy tried for example, and it's not very effective.
Two: How would anyone make any money off this whatsoever? This topic was discussed in another screenshot, but for the youtuber's theory to make any sense you would need numerous things.
- You would need thousands of Steam accounts capable of trading to make even a few dollars on Steam. Trading is only possible if the accounts have spent $5 (and it has to be the equivalent to $5 American) in the Steam store (not community market), and have spent this within at least one year.
- You would need thousands of Steam accounts because everything you can get from TF2 on a regular basis without hitting the 10 items per week limit (cases, trading cards) will make you a grand total of one penny.
- You have to list them on the Steam community market for 3 cents, and there's a million of these items already there, so I don't imagine it sells quickly. The large third-party sites like Marketplace.tf don't accept crates because they just waste space on their dedicated inventory bots, never selling. This also tells me that generating thousands of storage robots isn't a simple task even when you are making tons of money off this game. You can't do anything without spending that five dollars in American dollars.
- You would need storage accounts for the items, as you can only have a maximum up 3500 items in a single account's TF2 inventory. These storage accounts would need to use 27 Backpack Extenders that cost $1.
The youtuber could also have used these repositories to make tens of thousands of bots and see if they budge the TF2 concurrent player count. That would have been worthy of a video. However I also acknowledge the Catbot guy was caught by Valve (which tells me they have some metric for detecting and linking these bots together, and could easily ban their source) so recreating this technique would only be possible if you were extremely careful or simply didn't care about using Steam ever.
Three: Who would even be buying these items if so much of the community is bots? Certain items such as nametags will always be desirable, because they are single-use and allow you to name your rocket launcher "Nigger Blaster 6 Million." Cases meanwhile are only desirable if they are a weird retired one or if the specific case contains some extremely desirable hat, but are virtually always worth less than class-specific crates. This all has to do with what sort of unusual hats you can get from them. The current case you can farm as of this moment caps off its sales at roughly 70 per day.
You also need to spend $2.50 per case-specific key, which would just be another expense to compound into my second point above if the cases were somehow being used by bots (and again, the cases don't appear to sell very much nor for very much money.) Additionally, there are already so many cases accumulated by players simply playing the game that ordinary TF2 fans would easily saturate the market listings for any actively-dropping case (335807 right now.)
There's also a Recent Activity tab on that page with usernames attached to the item listings, which are names you can search up and see these items don't appear to be added to the market by throwaway bot accounts (as they don't have the privilege to do that anyway, nor are they capable of trading at all without spending money.) These listings oblige very human patterns; there is virtually no activity at 1AM eastern standard time (except for like one Vietnamese man I happened to spot) but there is a lot of activity at 12PM. That might count as "bleating" to one of the dime-a-dozen doomers posting in this thread, though.
Four: this data repository the youtuber provided really sucks for determining anything. The Mastercomfigs screenshot explains my point better, but the gist of the table's problems can be summarized by Steam's concurrent player counter tallying player logins four times per hour while the Teamwork one uses god knows what metric to determine anything, as they won't tell anybody. He's using two different methodologies to compile this data, one of which is shaky on the best of days (Steam API) and the other of which is kept completely private. If he has some kind of degree in data science and can actually tell me why not knowing your methodology is actually good, please let me know.
He also singles out what he believes to be patterns that are identifiable as bots connecting or disconnecting (I haven't figured out why he believes that's what this is), but if we give him the benefit of the doubt, these spikes would imply there are times where there are 50k bots per 10k players, and times where there's 2k bots per 50k players, and everything in between. That's the sort of range the data table provides to us.
This doesn't make sense to me on a basic level. Why would there be two-thousand bots at some times of a weekday, then 50k of them some other day? Is it all bots? Should we be applying nuance to these sort of numbers? If so, what kind of nuance exactly? This can't be the Sniper bots since 50k of those would make the game completely unplayable, rather than their occasional annoying appearance in current matchmaking. This would have to be idling bots, but nobody has demonstrated how those can possibly make any money.
The data also doesn't really present any sort of pattern that we may draw a conclusion from. The data tells us large amounts of people disconnect and connect to TF2 at varying times every single day, to varying degrees, and it tells us "Something odd is happening sometimes" and that's all I can figure out. Maybe someone with god-tier pattern recognition can spot it, but I can't.
In short, we would have to simply believe the youtuber is totally correct (blindly) and decide these drastic spikes in player count are always all (or majority) bots that idle for items (which I've already explained are difficult to offload and would only yield a few dollars in profit at the highest possible level of efficiency.) This isn't really a good metric for the video's premise alongside all of the other perfectly logical questions that, thus far, I have not been provided any reasonable answers for.
However, I will throw this video's central theory a bone. Someone (not the youtuber) has been doing something slightly more scientific to try and figure out what's going on, and by "scientific" I mean a random 4chan user has been using Giftapult items to randomly award items to people currently playing TF2. He is doing this at 2AM when the game simply isn't alive, granted, and that suggests to me the chances of gifting an item to a bot is higher... but it's more than the youtuber did.
This is probably the most convincing test I've seen so far, and it arrived in the early morning on a weekday almost a full 48 hours after the totally useless youtuber's video on the topic. It does not answer the question of how these bot accounts manually accept the items they receive (and many of them indeed appear to never do so, judging by those unopened inventory items) nor how they would ever sell them, but it does confirm that TF2 has a lot of accounts that look like bots. Or the Giftapult item may be broken, as those accounts don't appear to have premium yet (you can tell by the low amount of inventory slots they possess) yet the Giftapult item description says only online players with premium may receive those gifts.
One would also think that such a huge quantity of bots created by some random jerkoff would yield a guide on how to recreate the process somewhere, but I haven't found it, nor has anyone else found it to show it to me. Again: when someone can actually recreate this entire scheme then I will believe it exists. As it stands, it's just some guy using really poor methodology to insist a game with perpetual internet memes, videos with thousands or millions of views, etc. is actually dead.
