Team Fortress 2 Steam Rating Drops to 'Mostly Negative' Amid Petition To Address 'Bot Crisis'

Team Fortress 2 is experiencing yet another unprecedented issue in the form of a review bomb shortly after facing a petition demanding Valve to fix the game's "Bot Crisis."

The situation comes after the relatively quick spread of the #SaveTF2 movement's latest campaign that mobilized players who are furious about the game's bot problem. The latest petition has already been signed by more than 200,000 people, with each one sending an email to Valve.

Team Fortress 2 Review Bombed

Team Fortress 2 Steam Rating Drops to 'Mostly Negative' Amid Petition To Address 'Bot Crisis' — Team Fortress 2 players review bomb the game, dragging it down to a "Mostly Negative" recent review rating amid a petition asking Valve to address an ongoing "Bot Crisis."
(Photo : Valve / Screenshot taken from Steam)

There is also a public awareness campaign that is using the #FixTF2 hashtag to show people just how rotten with bots Team Fortress 2 has become. Fortunately, for players anyway, it seems that the public is now well aware of the issue and this can be seen clearly on the game's Steam page.

The recent review rating for the game has dropped to "Mostly Negative" following a review-bombing effort by players. Judging from publicly available graphs, the incident started just as the #FixTF2 campaign spun up on June 3, 2024, according to PCGamer.

The surge of negative reviews is so big, with more than 14,000 coming in just the last 24 hours, that it has warped the scale of the chart. This has rendered any positive sentiment for Team Fortress 2 becoming barely noticeable blue nubs.

When you look at the game's overall review history, there has never been a time when players have left anywhere near this many negative reviews.

If you also mouse over the individual months on the graph, you would see that not even in 2022, which was when the #SaveTF2 first surfaced, was there ever a time that the game received even 10% of what was seen recently.

Based on recent reviews on Team Fortress 2's Steam page, it seems that the majority of players who commented are those who have dozens of hours of playtime if not hundreds of thousands. So far, however, Valve has not yet responded to either the recent petition or the negative reviews.

Ongoing Bot Crisis

One of the reviews was made by a user who had more than 630 hours on Team Fortress 2 and read, "It's time Valve does something about the bots." He added that the game has been overrun by people who were willing to doxx, DDOS, and SWAT anyone who tries to fix the issue, said IGN.

Another player who had nearly 1,000 hours on the game said that the current state of Team Fortress 2 is "borderline unplayable." He argued that it was "criminal" that Valve had not done anything to address the ongoing problem while still profiting off of it.

These come contrary to years-old reviews of the game, with one from 2014 saying that Team Fortress 2 is "A must-own game for your Steam collection, next to games like Counter-Strike Go and Terraria."

However, that particular review was recently updated, saying that a decade later, the game has become a shell of its former self. The user who made the review was found to have logged more than 2,200 hours in the game, according to ReadWrite.