TF2's Player Stats Are a Lie

[@Casperr]

Sources for everything are in the video description. I encourage other people to check, verify or indeed invalidate what I've shown in this video. I cut *a lot* out to try and keep the video to-the-point and consumable. Here is some more evidence and exposition on the points made. Feel free to ask any questions (ideally in a new top-level comment as KZbin does not make easy for channels to find replies to comments like this one): - *If* these conclusions are right, TF2 actually sits somewhere around position 25 - 50 of Steam's most played games, not consistently top 10 like it appears. - Using the in-server vs in-game numbers for other games on Steam (CS:GO and L4D1/2), we can estimate how many accounts we expect in-game in TF2 based on the in-server numbers from teamwork.tf. As this ratio averaged around 50%, we can ballpark TF2's number by saying the in-game numbers are roughly double the in-server numbers. That means, when Teamwork.tf says there are about 15,000 players in-server we estimate around 30,000 are in-game total. But Steam Charts would say maybe 105,000... That means Steam Charts is showing *70,000* unexplained accounts. - Similarly, if we look at the daily peaks and troughs of the other games (of which we have a lot more data so can make these assumptions with more confidence) we know that peaks should also be around 50% of troughs. If we assume that these "unexplained accounts" are constant for 24 hours, then to adjust TF2's peak and trough numbers for the example day used in the video (28th December 2021, peak: 124,245, trough: 107,177) we would have to take away *90,000 accounts*. I.e. 124,245 - 90,000 and 107,177 - 90,000 = adjusted peak and trough of 34,245 and 17,177 respectively, resulting in the trough being roughly 50% of the peak which is what we expect based on other games. In other words, there are 90,000 accounts unexplained on this particular day. - Steam's own stats page has a 48 hour concurrent active users chart. The trends seen on this chart follow all the example games shown in the video, except of course TF2. Why do comparable games follow Steam as-a-whole's daily trends, but TF2 does not? store.steampowered.com/stats/ - If you filter a Steam Charts page for a comparable game (such as CS:GO - steamcharts.com/app/730) to a range including December 22nd (e.g. 2021-12-20 to 2021-12-30) you will see that players resume normal pattern so rapidly that the outage might not even be noticeable. Now do the same date range for TF2. - There are plenty more examples of TF2's player numbers going down by ~20,000 players over the course of 1-2 hours, staying that way for a random number of hours, before rocketing back up by ~20,000 again in just 1-2 hours. Steam Charts only holds hourly data for 30 days so I can't link anything in this comment that will be long lasting, but if you go look at steamcharts.com/app/440 you will likely find these patterns relatively easily throughout the last 30 days of data (you can adjust the range of dates shown at the top of the chart or using the sliders underneath - making the date range shorter should make these patterns easier to identify). - Rapid and extreme player number changes aren't limited to hourly/daily trends, but also monthly ones. Multiple times over TF2's history, player numbers have shot up over 40% for a month or two and then dramatically fallen off a month later. Obviously games often have peak months associated with updates or events (e.g. Scream Fortress), but comparing TF2's historic peaks to other games again just looks weird as these player number changes are more severe, and don't appear to fit into the game's general growth trend. In fact, TF2 was trending downwards until mid 2019, yet in June 2021 (where nothing happened except an unexceptional cosmetic case being released) TF2 hit it's all time player peak of 150,000 despite peaking at around 60,000 for most of 2018-19. - *If* there are case idling farms, these might explain rapid ups and downs in player number as a bot farm is "powered up" and "powered down". We would also expect to see the most activity from these farms around the new cases are released such Scream Fortresses... And June 2021. *But*, as I said in the video, the case idling farm is just a hypothesis with no tangible evidence to support it being the explanation for these numbers. - Google Trends (for search and KZbin search) are a great place to get an idea of the general popularity of a thing. TF'2s popularity peaked in 2012 (MvM and Pyromania updates) and in recent months/years has only reached 10-20% of its peak search activity. If TF2 apparently just had the most players its ever had in-game at one time, why are so few people searching for topics related to it on Google and so few watching content for it on KZbin? If the game is more popular than ever and growing in popularity year-on-year, surely at least KZbin popularity would reflect that, even just a little bit? Search: trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2007-01-01%202022-01-06&q=%2Fm%2F060phy KZbin Search: trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all_2008&gprop=youtube&q=%2Fm%2F060phy

[@barbarosbozkurt758]

Its been a while Casperr

[@mihailgeceski4945]

does bots accounts also counts?

[@frimnpi7473]

your arguments too good

[@fiend-off-the-grid]

I've just had a thought about this, could it be that Steam's player count is based on how many TF2 clients are running? If that were the case, could Source Filmmaker and the Hammer editor be affecting the numbers when they use TF2 assets? Additionally, would the active servers sites count offline listen servers or modded ones? Alternate gamemodes?

[@z.i.p.w9467]

Casperr you probably want to pin this comment

[@Peterscraps]

In a game I'm TF2 has always had the idle crowd and idiots like me 6 years ago who just left TF2 open overnight AFK on the menu for no other reason than opening the game was slow.

[@BLRtactics]

Hi boss, love your videos. :-)

[@nervousdog6907]

I had a stroke trying to read this.

[@Casperr]

Hey Peter 👋 I've definitely seen some of my friends list leaving TF2 open practically all the time too, probably for the same reason. I guess my question would be is there any reason TF2 players would do this at such a significantly higher frequency than players of other games? Maybe there IS a reason for that, but nothing comes to mind

[@Traveler_202]

But unless you still have it open then wouldn’t the in game player numbers hit the same highs when those people wake up to play

[@securecontainpikachu6718]

@@Casperr maybe it's because of the soundtrack i think?or maybe trading?

[@MowseChao]

I always just assumed it's bot shenanigans, but it seems so much more complicated than that now... hm. Interesting video!

[@GiRR007]

Also idlers

[@jackmack4181]

@riley bots are being counted as players

[@low_bo]

@riley yeah, I was thinking it had something yo do with the absurdly large amount of trade bots

[@Lathburn]

@@jackmack4181 have you seen the way bots leave and come back at complete random, that might have something to do with it but I really don't know

[@Big_Kahuna]

@@low_bo trade bots don't need to be playing the game to trade

[@Toofty]

Thank you for the shoutout kind sir! And good job looking into this further :)

[@igorborlase]

Hello toofty.

[@Casperr]

Thanks for your great video that prompted me to start digging, and for your help making sense of it :)

[@somerandomguyintheinternet]

Are ye winnin toof

[@weirdaliscool3224]

tof

[@aeyde]

ㅤ

[@JustForks]

Alternative hypothesis; there may be an excess of bots broken by, or not updated to, the latest versions of the game, leaving them stuck in menu doing... nothing. And overall, realistically, it's probably not the fault of a single cause; drop farming bots, broken bots, people playing the game on local/private servers that are unlisted; the list goes on for what may account for the defecit.

[@JustForks]

@@kreuner11 not necessarily, and that's one of my points. But I don't think it's out of the question that bot runners account for a large portion of it, given how many instances of rhe game could be occurring at once per operation with the min spec of the game in comparison to modern hardware.

[@ovencore2549]

@@JustForks still i highly doubt there are 70k bots idling on the main menu

[@JustForks]

@@ovencore2549 read beyond the first sentence.

[@nathangamble125]

@@kreuner11 In some servers I join... yes.

[@long_chin_man]

1 man usually owns like a thousand trading bots. when that outage happened and they didnt come online they probably didnt care until they heard about the outage a couple days later when their irl money ran out. lets be real these trade bot dudes 100% make money off real-money-trading

[@faceless2302]

Theory: there's a massive underground business built upon tf2 consisting of tens of thousands of machines that run tf2 or a modified version of tf2 that doesn't use the servers, but still launch the application from Steam. Maybe something like a singleplayer tf2 mod built for an elite, hidden society.

[@haja.]

the illuminati on their way to operate using tf2 or some shit

[@LukeProduciones]

woke

[@skeletonking2501]

Feels like the set up to some urban legend, like there’s a hidden server for only the elite of the elite.

[@slyseal2091]

The heavy main underground society was built on strong roots.

[@tras500]

People are using TF2 to mine crypto

[@stormi8029]

It's likely due to Trading bots, as a lot of the programs used to run them will keep tf2 open just for aesthetics

[@kiiwikiori7542]

To outnumber players 9 to 1 is absurd

[@ansonburgdorf3940]

@@kiiwikiori7542 exactly, i think its valve trying to make people lose faith in tf2 so they dont have to pull the plug and lose thousands of paying players

[@puppieslovies]

Setting a game to be played idle is free and there's no reason not to do it 24/7

[@puppieslovies]

@danse en rouge you don't need to run the game though, you just tell steam you are and it believes you

[@bobograndman]

@@ansonburgdorf3940 that doesn’t make sense. Valve doesn’t care, if Tf2 lives or dies is inconsequential to valve. The vast majority of their profit comes from steam, even with Dota 2, the game that produces 10s of millions of dollars in prize money for tournaments from one in game event alone is barely anything to valve’s profits from steam. A thousand players buying keys wouldn’t even pay a single employee salary, valve would have stopped even releasing cosmetic updates or bug fixes long ago if you were right

[@GermaphobeMusic]

This video aged well

[@unfunniestman]

as a tf2 fan, it's funny to see ledditors desperately trying to convince themselves that tf2's playercount isn't 87% abandoned bots

[@kayoh9364]

If it's due to idlebots, you could expect those daily pattern of numbers to be more "normal" before such items were added to the game. But I dunno if the data was even tracked that far back.

[@cybeawa]

I have a minor theory, tf2 is a bizarre game in the sense that on Microsoft if you’re playing tf2, it says you are playing half life, and discord thinks it’s gmod, and steam even sometimes messes that up, also when you open the steam menu sometimes steam starts to believe that you actually aren’t in tf2 servers, so the websites looking at servers might not always know, because steam themselves might not know, I know it’s bizarre, and by no means I am saying I’m right, it just seems more probable for 50,000-70,000 players…

[@Mr_Owoc]

Source spaghetti moment

[@nadernad_]

this makes a TON of sense

[@Overposting]

that kinda makes sense but if you think about it then the weird charts should be happening to those games too, not just tf2

[@pulaskiatnight_]

Any game run in source has hl2 in the executable name, it's just because current source was first built for hl2 and they haven't bothered to rename it

[@cybeawa]

@@pulaskiatnight_ I understand that half life is a build, the issue is that since that’s the case, every game like that is fine, except for tf2, and that’s why it’s very messy when calculating player counts

[@LuckyStarTF2]

You made a really nice research with good points. Please make another video if somebody reaches you with the answer what are these odd "players". Good job!

[@Casperr]

Thanks! Yes, I will absolutely follow this up if anything clarifying what's happening comes up

[@SuperNuketown2025]

@@Casperr Perhaps they turn them into premium accounts by buying keys or MvM tickets, then reselling those, and then farming drops? All it’d take to turn a profit is a single item descriptor, really. I think it’d be obvious, had they dumped tens/hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions of ref on the market, so they must be doing something with that ref they almost surely must be generating. Perhaps they craft it in a bid to not skyrocket the key-to-ref ratio, while at the same time making some sort of profit? I imagine they don’t just delete it, as it’s still worth crafting and building up. Maybe they sell large amounts of new cases to savvy individuals the second they come out for a set fee?

[@gamering149]

0:40 pulled the sickest transition and expected me not to notice

[@vakkius]

Dunno if there was an update to the vid but it's obvious it's when omegatronic goes to sleep

[@levelfoursentrygun3944]

Would case idling actually be profitable, though? Because aside from the first few hours after a new one is released, any case that still drops is worth next to nothing and is obtained pretty slowly. Even assuming you could have thousands of instances of tf2 open at the same time, given some ridiculous optimizations and amazing hardware, would profits from cases even cover your electricity bill? Unless, of course, I've missed something. But I'm curious! Does anyone know the answer?

[@bobbyferg9173]

I could see why back in the day idling bots would be profitable, as weapon and especially hat drops could be worth a key in a reasonable amount of time. But today any free drop is basically worthless since it take a whole 70 ref to make a key, and as such even a bunch of bots wouldn’t generate much value at all. Also when it comes to energy needs, I assume people are running them on stuff like virtual machines and make them as minimally energy consuming as possible. But still probably isn’t too profitable

[@睷]

who said you need the actual tf2 game open instead of a custom made program that takes almost no resources to run

[@levelfoursentrygun3944]

@@睷 I thought they patched that ages ago. "The Hatless update"

[@eresoup7229]

@@bobbyferg9173 i remember tryna trade in 2016, with “inflated” 25-30 ref keys lol

[@SuperNuketown2025]

@@bobbyferg9173 I believe you can run console generated instances of TF2 so that it doesn’t consume practically any resources for these kinds of farms, but idk how profitable even that would be.

[@pierrebegley2746]

I always sort of suspected that TF2's player count isn't as high as everyone thought.

[@Thornskade]

Something to keep in mind is that TF2 receives the "Silver" award on Steam for Valve's revenue. While I don't know what's going on with the numbers, I doubt it's accounts that are "fake" (i.e. bots, cheaters, traders) because somebody must be spending all that money. Personally I highly doubt that a small percentage of players keeps buying keys for hundreds or thousands of dollars from the Mann Co. Store or something, but in the end, we're still at "we just don't know"

[@sirpretzel822]

Could also be transaction fees for the steam marketplace, not direct hat sales, but still people must be spending money one way or another.

[@MB-yn5iu]

This past week I have encountered more bots than ever before. About 90% of the casual matches I am in end up getting bots and more than half of the matches are unplayable because there are multiple bots on one or both teams. It often takes me 15 minutes just to get into a good game that isn't infested.

[@Helperbot-2000]

Thats so bizarre to me, only about 4% of all my matches have bots in them and like 8 times out of 10 its just one and theyre instantly kicked

[@thedrain9328]

@@Helperbot-2000 Region? I'm in Eastern US and had the same experience as M B just this past week.

[@Helperbot-2000]

@@thedrain9328 northern europe, almost no bots

[@thedrain9328]

@@Helperbot-2000 Interesting, maybe region does have something to do with it.

[@Helperbot-2000]

@@thedrain9328 perhaps

[@uhrguhrguhrg]

I remember some ban waves causing (or at least being assumed to cause) a large drop in player numbers, maybe that's a direction worth investigating? Compare player numbers before and after different known ban waves and anti-bot changes.

[@mentlegen1632]

Back in 2018 Valve banned around 15k-20k bots, which caused a drop in the playerbase from 55k to 35k active users (the last ban wave was in 2020/2021).

[@_ikako_]

that doesn't affect these statistics since bots are still connected to valve servers when they cheat in casual

[@davymachinegun5130]

The other day I alt tabbed out of TF2 to look at something. Then I got distracted and forgot the game is still open in the background. Like 5 hours later, I finally notice it and realize I've been kicked from server a long time ago and the game was running on main menu for all that time.

[@sythrus]

heres a potentially wholesome theory, someone or some group made a massive amount of accounts whos sole purpose is to inflate the player count, to try and convince valve that it is worth it to update the game

[@FortworthYT]

Yeah, it's the bot creators but with a different purpose.

[@darkconch5244]

Its definitely doing the opposite, valve is only going to do something when the game starts to die.

[@seriamon]

i did some math assuming the csgo numbers are accurate with 860k peak and 360k low every day the difference being 500k which is 59%of it's peak so 59% of 860k the difference between what i assume to be the tf2 peak and tf2 low on some days that look somewhat normal are 127k and 109k the difference being 18k so converting those 18k being 59% of tf2's actual peak into the peak tf2 should have we get right around 31 k soooo assuming csgo numbers are right tf2 has right around 3.2 % of csgo players rip

[@seriamon]

no wonder it get's 0 updates

[@mentlegen1632]

@@seriamon I remember mastercom saying that there were around 20k-30k bots on the day of tf2's peak players numbers. So we still have around 90k "bots".

[@Casperr]

Yep that's pretty much the conclusions I drew too (see the pinned comment if you want to read more). Honestly, as much as I hate to be negative about the game I live so dearly... it's nearly 15 years old, with no major updates for nearly 5 years, with MANY newer and flashier free-to-play hero shooters being released and actively supported all the time, and an on-going and intense hacker crises... Can we honestly say to ourselves we believe TF2 had it's most popular period EVER just a few months ago? Maybe, but I wouldn't put my money on it.

[@solaireofastora6173]

once i met a very chill pyro in 2fort and added him to my friends list to continue playing with him… that never happened since he would connect and stay inactive in the menu for hours later I removed him from my friends list but that does not remove how weird that account was

[@Casperr]

Very odd, I wonder what he was doing and if others are doing the same thing?

[@solaireofastora6173]

we will never know…

[@catminttcgu207]

Since other games have around 50% of players just being in the menu, maybe we can assume that only around 30 - 15 percent are idle bots.

[@Thornskade]

And what are those idle bots doing? Did they think to themselves "hm, let's do the crypto mining thing but the version where you just lose money on electricity because TF2 drops are worth peanuts"? And if they exist, it must be some kind of secret society because I never hear anyone say "yeah I idle for items in TF2"

[@danieleziaco7092]

@@Thornskade might be just broken bots (not updated to the last game version, bad coded etc) that just can't leave the menu and jusf idle there

[@The_Rising_Dragon]

I'd like to point out, that I spent my first 400-500 hrs, first against expeet bots on training servers, then created my own local server, to get achievements. This was due to multiple reasons, including but not limited to:- a) Crappy laptop b) Lack of servers near me, the closest being 7000km from me, in Singapore c) Just getting owned on Casual servers

[@taureon_]

does a player count as "in a server" if they are on a local server or in a private server?

[@The_Rising_Dragon]

@@taureon_ Yes, kinda. It varies, but it's a split when you check out the Friend's List, between Main Menu, or Community Server, although I remember seeing Community Server only a few times, usually on Workshop Maps. :) Another thing to mention is, TF2 used to take such a long boot time for me on my old laptop, upwards of 30 min, although average was about a quarter, so if I were planning to play it again later in the day, I used to just leave it open, and press Windows+D. I remember one time leaving it like that for three days continuous, becausey vacations were going on, so I just never ended the hl2 Launcher...

[@8stormy5]

Even debunking the "cumulative number" myth does a lot. For a while I was convinced that the discrepancy could be explained by rampant cheating, both bot accounts and manual cheaters, simply spamming new accounts with no consequence after getting VAC banned within 10-15 minutes. Now it's clear that even if that is happening, it wouldn't explain the discrepancy at all.

[@fireblade696]

FINALLY!! You said this forever ago but no one noticed, and now people know this.

[@goldbuttertheminecra]

Hmm, I’m wondering as well why the pattern looks so irregular. Then I remember times when TF2 would randomly crash and servers would close without warning. It doesn’t happen so often that it gets annoying, but it does happen enough times that it doesn’t surprise me. Perhaps it’s not the players that make the irregular pattern but instead the game’s servers fluctuating?

[@kekahoz]

Playing tf2 myself, at least one explanation can be that after about 5 or so players leave a server, quite a lot leave then after. This is what happens on the servers I play on, and that could explain why the troughs are so devastating. Or I could just be speculating on something that only happens on the community servers I play on.

[@Elsier1]

tip: if an enemy spy is disguised as your spy, he will always have a mask on. Having a mask on removes all cosmetics. So if you see a teammate spy with cospmetics there is no chance that it is an enemy spy in disguise!

[@karlbischof2807]

actually didnt know this, thnx.

[@aceplante]

No it’s not

[@Bone-Owner]

So im not only one who knows this.

[@brettzolstick989]

True!

[@kantor7834]

This isn’t true

[@garchompenthusiast]

I think given the massive amount of different kinds of bots it is entirely likely bots could outnumber people 9 to 1, maybe with a generous addition of actual players just waiting for a game

[@luke0able]

I wonder if this could be steam somehow recognizing other games as tf2. It already says its hl2 when you alt+tab and i’ve had discord mistake tf2 for gmod

[@kered13]

FYI, Windows says it's hl2 because the executable file for TF2 is literally called hl2.exe.

[@mentlegen1632]

Irrelevant, Valve has just banned over 30k bots form the game and we still have almost 140k players in peak. Tf2 is just build different (always has been).

[@ThatBeePerson]

I do believe there is definitely something going on, maybe not something terrifying like the actual "bots outnumber all players by 9 to 1" but still definitely something weird, tf2 is a weird game, but that doesn't explain why it's player numbers are so erratic and funky. But I think the only way to solve this would, sadly, be to manually comb through every individual account playing during certain suspicious hours and look for trends, compare to accounts in game, ect. There will never be an easy "catch all" way to tell why there is these anomalies with player numbers without people actively devoting time to research and testing of this, maybe it's just a mistake with the coding of these sites, maybe there is "dummy" accounts which are neither bots nor players but simply false players being counted as active. Overall though, it's safe to say this isn't normal but is quite interesting

[@emilianozamora399]

Also refusing to acknowledge idle bots as an actual answer is so weird it's literally asking a question, getting an answer you don't like and making up excuses to get a answer that makes you happy, like the numbers spiking erratically can be interpreted as idle bots restarting, starting up or shutting down such as when a new case drops, which will result in a record high player count for an update that literally added nothing of note except the case, and then when the case drops in value the player count dramatically falls

[@PretzelSage]

used to know a guy around jungle inferno, one of the coolest guys i've ever played with. He was a sniper main but he only used jarate and melee, a funny lad. i played with him for a few weeks, until eventually he just started sitting completely inactive with his menu open day after day ALL DAY. I dont remember if i still have him added or not,,, i wonder if hes still on the menu

[@mentlegen1632]

So do you think that we have 90k bots or maybe tf2 is possessed by souls of every single gamer that died while waiting for the release of HL3?

[@360xxx_swagluvunohomosapie9]

7:54 Did you mix up l4d1 and l4d2 stats? Cause I find it hard to believe there are only 400 people playing l4d2 lol

[@krypt1ccc739]

I feel like it's impossible to draw one conclusion and it's the accumulation of all these small hypotheses together. Everyone is trying to say no it's because of this or that when in reality it could just be all ideas put together which makes it even harder to explain why the numbers are the way they are because there are so many factors.

[@MythicTF2]

Personally, I believe it's a mixture of a lot of things causing that. TF2 mods, like TF2C(TF2 classic), launches through TF2 iirc and would report to steam that the user is on TF2 even when they won't have access to TF2's specific servers. That would probably be a decent 5-10% of that count. Another 5-10% would probably be trade bots as they generally just sit in TF2 at the menu. Another 5-10% could very well be the cheating bots that idle in the menus trying to join servers. I'm hopeful it's not actually that many but it's an answer. You also can't count out private servers that aren't on steam's "masterlist". These can be servers that only connect to TF2C clients as mentioned above or private servers hosted on LAN or anything like that. Probably a decent 5% at max. That 20-30% alone makes up for the huge differences in active vs idle accounts in TF2. There's tons of mods and things like that for TF2 and with an average 20% we can easily bring that lowest count of 15% up to 35% which is way more inline with other games. It's still relatively low even with those numbers but it is sort of an explanation. ALTERNATIVELY: Valve is purposefully inflating TF2's reported numbers just to make sure the game doesn't die out or appear to be dying.

[@sugaryhull9688]

TF2 just built different

[@hamstergaming4219]

Built different, build stupid.

[@FalkyRocket2222]

@@hamstergaming4219 n

[@OscarknightTF2]

Tf2 is ded

[@jeraldtanthetown7765]

Built diffrent built ded

[@maxresdefault_]

Love videos like this. The simplest things can be surprisingly complex when you look beneath the surface

[@gamesux420]

does the site counting people in servers count community servers too? or only official matchmaking servers?

[@睷]

Its mainly a combination of trade bots having the game open for aesthetic reasons, case farming accounts and accounts farming hours for tf2

[@Casperr]

That would be my guess as well!

[@kex7294]

I do think it's natural that we have more 'idle' players than any other game, simply because it's so easy to trade, and you have so many options to choose from - both in items to trade for, and services to pick from. - That being said, I doubt that the difference is quite that big. It also doesn't do a good job explaining away the strange rises in playernumbers, or how lows and highs are so close.

[@temkin9298]

I have a feeling that these numbers should be compared with server numbers cus some servers have necessary active "players".

[@leeto64]

@@temkin9298 if you mean server bots, they technically shouldn't count as they're actual in-game bots rather than Steam accounts

[@temkin9298]

@@leeto64 I'm talking about MVM & side account (helper aka pocket medic bots) After thought: No, I was talking about exactly the what you said. I had a short circuit there for a moment. Anyway I will leave the comment there for future me to laugh at my smooth brain moment.

[@MogoPrime]

I bet it's a bit of idle farming, but also some form of XP farming. I've noticed that bots all seem to have a considerable rank for their matchmaking badge. I theorize that they sit, mostly idle, for weeks or months, while background processes auto-level their steam account, and maybe they even found a way to exploit the matchmaking XP system to acquire XP without actually joining servers. Then, once the account, as far as Steam's checklist can tell, is a human with plenty of play-time, steam account levels, XP, etc., then the bots are used in the collective effort of ruining matches, able to spam text and voice channels freely.

[@nathangamble125]

How does "steam's checklist" actually work, and how long has it worked like that for? I'm fairly sure the bot detection system doesn't work like that (or at all).

[@galegopaulista4564]

What genuinely puzzles me is how people have this reluctance to believe that tf2 is genuinely doing well in terms of players, even in spite of the bot problem. It's undeniable that the bots affect the numbers, but if they really were more than half of them, then it'd be nearly impossible to find matches that don't have at least about 12 bots. And at least for me, that is not the case (in fact, I can still find normal matches just fine, honestly). And I haven't even gotten to the fact that the TF2 fanbase is still undeniably active. There are still youtubers making stuff about it (even some that don't regularly make tf2 content!), and the same applies to artists and such. TF2's steam workshop is still active. There are still many community servers that people play on. There are still f2ps discovering the game. The game still makes a ton of money for VALVe. And, of course, there are still many people playing it. And not just in USA or Europe, mind you. I myself can confirm that there are many people who play the game here in Latin America (I'm something of a Brazilian myself), and I've heard of many people playing the game in many different parts of the world as well. To conclude, even if these numbers aren't completely true, why is it so hard for some folks to accept that people still like tf2; that this game not only is not dead, but also has a passionate and active community; and that despite being more than 14 years old and getting little attention from VALVe, this game is still going strong, and remains a fun and timeless masterpiece?

[@bluny8392]

80,000 pessoas AFK é muita gente cara. Não duvido que o TF2 ainda tem muita galera jogando mas com tantas pessoas assim fazendo nada 24 horas por dia só vendo o menu do jogo, eu acho dificil que todos sao jogadores.

[@Crazymanbos]

TF2 is still popular! 😁👍

[@MaxIgnatyev]

What genuinely puzzles me is how people have this reluctance to believe that tf2 is genuinely doing worse in terms of players because of the bot problem. I've played tf2 since 2010 on and off but left for over a year as many others have because of how annoying the bot problem was, came back and there are still bots, last few days I haven't been able to queue up a single casual game without it being overrun with bots and community servers are pretty limited in my area. There's still a big fanbase of tf2 but the game's been declining for a long time, too many people just don't want to admit it.

[@galegopaulista4564]

@@MaxIgnatyev tf2 may not be as big as it was before, but that doesn't excuse saying that the game is "dead" (something people seem to say every other Thursday whenever anything happens, and never ends up being true), neither does it excuse this compulsive negativity that does nothing good to the game. Also, I don't know if it's just me, but I don't have that much of a problem finding a good match in Casual. And even then, you can still play on Community Servers.

[@sycolix]

​@@MaxIgnatyev Nah. The problem is that you're just a pessimist.

[@yukowolfang8645]

"TF2", "not", and "popular" in the same sentence? Say your prayers you unfriendly ghost! Those are fighting words! (I appreciate the video. Information and TF2 content is always a good video :3)

[@SuperNuketown2025]

I think it’s unlikely that it’s directly a scrap farm at the very least, as the amount of ref per key would likely have skyrocketed to around 100-200+ per key at this point if they found it at all profitable. I’m not exactly sure how much profit could be generated from let’s say 40,000 idle accounts atm, but it would be an interesting figure to look at.

[@bigk8796]

As of July 13th 2023 tf2 hit a new player peak of 253,000 16 years after release, took just one update after starving us for 6 years.

[@unfunniestman]

ah yes, they added a seal.

[@mentlegen1632]

From what I remember mastercom counted around 30k bots on the day of tf2's peak player numbers.

[@Casperr]

Very interesting! My estimates would have it at A LOT more than 30k, but I'd love to see their workings - can you remember if this was tweeted or in a video posted somewhere?

[@mentlegen1632]

@@Casperr It was tweeted by Tyler McVicker around 5 or 6 months ago.

[@mentlegen1632]

@@Casperr Also r/tf2 between 2019-2022 gained around 500k users

[@mentlegen1632]

​@@Casperr People have been speculating about bots being a majority of tf2's playerbase for at least 6/7 years now, only to then forget about it and celebrate a new milestone. Also many players like me have a habit of opening a game and then leaving it running for hours. And having few trade/idle bots on a friendslist myself and I can easily say, that these bots are opening the game for an hours or two once or twice for few days and then they stay silent for the rest of the week. Even Tyler McVicker himself, the main youtuber that popularised this theory, after gathering more information about the entire thing, slowly started to dismiss the entire concept, especially by pointing out a stable growth of the tf2's playerbase since the beginning of 2018.

[@Vaniity_Velvet]

Honestly, this may explain why Valve kind of doesn't care about the game anymore. No one wants to work on it because of the sketty code and just how dated it is and it doesn't have the player numbers that CS:GO or DOTA have to bother investing much more into it. But, it still makes them some sort of profit considering they don't really have to do anything themselves anymore. I suspect that internally at Valve TF2 is a dead game, they just might not want to say it out of fear it might spook the traders and if they leave then the game officially is dead.

[@M.H.E.]

A theory of mine is that it's due to a bug where tf2 is sometimes counted as on as it relates to the player count even when a player has quit the game. This would explain why it steadily rises over time (as people would steadily become permanently on), why tf2 has a weaker peak time (since it wouldn't matter if you were asleep, you'd be considered on) and (if steam being down makes steam recognise you are not on) why the average player counts went down only to slowly pick back up. I don't see this being caused by any bot activity or strange player activity. Idle bots should rejoin quite quickly after steam is back up. I don't see how a bug could make someone considered both on and off tf2 in the eyes of steam (since it would still have to say that you are not playing steam on your account to not be obvious), but tf2 is the king of spaghetti code. If my theory is true then peak time should immediately become more pronounced after steam being down and less so after time goes on (since accounts would go back to normal for a time) and the average should go up more after periods of high real player activity than else (since there wouldbe more opportunities for people to become permanently on). It's probably something else, but I have a good feeling it's a bug of somekind.

[@reeman2.0]

Trade bots are definitely part of it. Trade bots always seem to have the game open, but I don't think they do have it open, rather they used something like steamedit to point TF2's play button to the program that runs the bot's trading functions, making Steam think they have the game open.

[@Xiefux]

you dont need tf2 to be open to trade items

[@denizo9263]

There's a game on steam called "spacewar" This game is very barren, but it shows that it has a big playerbase. It's because pirates use some kind of exploit to trick games into thinking that they are connected to steam. You should probably account for that.

[@PowerUpT]

The graph at 9:38 makes me think bots. I think people should work on figuring out how many there are, because that irrational increase makes me think that someone just connected a crap ton of bots onto the servers, and there were a ton at that time. And who knows, the outage could mean that the system needed downtime before all the bots could go back online; 30,000 bots would probably tax most computers. This is all just conjecture of course, I definitely think it could be a combination of things.

[@Okagemi]

I think it could also be explained a little bit by how many people might play all of those games together. Say one person is playing CS:GO, then they log off and play TF2. What if that sort of thing is happening across a variety of games at a variety of different times for a variety of userbases? TF2 is a free game, after all. It's very accessible (not counting required specs, which only seem to be going up). I think that sort of thing happening across so many games could actually explain this as well. 40k accounts that didn't get back onto TF2 immediately because they just went and did something else instead of waiting for servers to come back up, while the rest of the player base continued playing.

[@PK-Radio]

TF2: consistently one if the most played games for over a decade Valve: dota dota csgo

[@Casperr]

If my conclusions are right, TF2 actually sits somewhere around position 25 - 50 of Steam's most played games when the unexplained accounts are removed.

[@PK-Radio]

@Kody Pendleton bah humbug

[@bluny8392]

@Kody Pendleton they get bigger numbers cuz they get regular updates. Do you really think csgo or dota 2 would have the same player numbers if they didnt get a major update for 4 years?

[@Tao_7891]

I probably idle in tf2 more than any other game, other people in the comments seem to say similar things. Also I tend to play tf2 solo a lot so I don't end up playing at regular hours when my friends get online, so I often play at inconsistent times.

[@voratheexplorer6442]

My bet is trade bots. Trades can be initiated from steam itself, but backpack management can not. Let's say you want your trade bots to be quickly scalable because you don't want to pay for the backpack expanders upfront for every single bot you make. What you'd do is make the bots able to use backpack expanders if they have to handle a trade larger than one unusual, or a couple of crafts

[@TotoGeenen]

This video deserves more recognition

[@patrickfrost9405]

TF2's bot problem is starting to remind me of the mining bots in EVE: Online, where a swarm of automated mining vessels would just rip apart asteroids at a pace that regular people can't keep up with. The hat bots in TF2 are most certainly not a good thing for the game, especially now that we have to contend with bots that are actively hurting gameplay on top of farming boxes.

[@turtley8581]

This video was phenomenally put together, very well researched, and informative. Amazing job, enjoyed it the whole way through :)

[@tonyhawksunderground2]

thank you for doing this research. I have always been curious about this.

[@artemis8878]

thank you for this, I thought our player counts were messed up because of bots, but there seems to be more to it than that.

[@XFanmarX]

I remember an anecdote from YEARS ago from *Gabe Newell* himself that after they "invented" an online market with virtually priced items they started to realise that some people in 3rd-world countries were using their game, TF2, to make money. To us a few cents means little, to others it can mean a day of food. They unexpectedly had to hire economists, lawyers and other outside-people to see if this online market was dangerous, unstable or even illegal. We're still not sure. We do know they got way more efficient at it. Online games with virtual storefronts need a lot of security to make sure purchases are valid and done by real people, TF2 lacks this. And even if it's only a few cents, if some of these entrepreneurs have been doing this for years they might've gotten really good at it. And Valve doesn't mind because it still makes them money, even if it's marginal.

[@lactatertots]

My understanding of bots is that they attempt to rapidly join on eachother in order to overwhelm a server. I'd imagine that the reason for the idling is likely to be on the ready to join as soon as they can, in addition to item farming.

[@tsunamio7750]

2:37 Are servers considered as clients too? Maybe there are more servers than players... but that would be overwhelmingly dumb. Are there private servers we don't know of? Are there servers who modify the maximum number of players to allow for mega sized games?

[@thomasr11]

I believe trade bots/item farm bots make up the majority of those numbers, but I can't back that up.

[@stroopwafelenjoyer]

You’d have to run 102 bots simultaneously for 10 hours to make 1 key. After that they will all have reached the weekly 10 hour cap and you will have to get 102 entirely new bots/accounts to make another key. I don’t know how much it costs to run that many bots, given electricity cost, computer power etc. but it seems very much not worth it, so I don’t think that’s the answer to this mystery. The math: avg. 50 minutes/item , 10 hour=600 minutes cap every week 600/50=12 items/10hours (/week) 12 items is 6 scrap is 2/3 ref. Key is 68 ref 68/(2/3) = 102.

[@IrelandVonVicious]

That is still over five dollars a day. Now imagine that one computer running 1000 bots at a time on rotations and making $50 a day with power costing a very small fraction. 10 computers doing it and you have a $100,000 a year income after electricity cost.

[@468erpeashooter9]

World of Tanks has told me that at any given moment most people in the game will be doing anything but playing the main gameplay of the game. World of Tanks usually has around 22,000 people on at any given time, yet when you ready up for a match only about 400 will actually be in the in queue. Most people not playing the game is normal.

[@alexandermaverick9474]

would be curious of player numbers by region, that might point out whether the case farms are such a major influence?

[@DerpRob]

I believe we should consider that TF2 is a free-to-play game that is very popular, meaning that a lot more kids around the globe who didn't successfully steal their mom's credit card hop on the game at anytime they want. Other games are a little more serious and somewhat pricey, so they would have a lower player base of kids

[@jackinblack19]

I’m pretty sure it’s trade bots

[@shrub8644]

So I guess trade bots are also farming crates?

[@giorgiofarina1419]

@@shrub8644 trade blts actually open the game to trade. I added some bots as friend since you can just use a command to sell/vuy staff in chat. And they actually appear sometimes in my steam to play tf2

[@shrub8644]

@@giorgiofarina1419 I wonder why they do that, since I don't think it's ever required

[@giorgiofarina1419]

@@shrub8644 not sure how they work. But i guess that they may require to lauch the game for actually do the trade or maybe trade bots are made like this to inflation the player number?

[@0sac]

Regarding part 1, I always thought the explanation was that Valve themselves used the cumulative method, not that 3rd parties were making their own calculations. Is there actually any info on how the official Steam stats are recorded other than Valve refering to it as "current"?

[@Casperr]

The only explanation from Valve is what is on their main stats page and the developer docs page I showed on screen (both linked in description). There's nothing at all about that wording that suggests anything other than Steam reports the count at the moment it updates. That page updates every 5 minutes - there's nothing that happens hourly at all, so why would the conclusion be that it's added up 1 hour of players?

[@0sac]

@@Casperr Yeah not saying Valve does use that method, just that we never really can know. Which might've explained some anomolies until part 2 presents some very sus findings

[@xMrPhantofulx]

Casperr, even if it updates every 5 minutes that wouldn't mean it's not the last hour still? Like at 1:00PM it'll count all the unique visitors from 12PM to 1PM, then at 1:05PM it'll count all the unique visitors from 12:05PM to 1:05PM? Also, I remember that when Dota 2 was new, there would be an in-game player count that would definitely count new players within the last hour, and it matched up with the numbers on Steam's Top 10 list, and then they updated the game and it changed how it counted players (around 2014?).

[@Glubbable]

Simple. Idle farms. Most obvious when they give out a free Secret Saxton in December, it's idle farms ramping up to full cap to collect the free stuff to resell on market.

[@Sercil00]

It wouldnt be too surprising if these were idle bots. You can make a lot of them for free, they probably don't need a lot of resources since they're just idling in the menu, and you'd need A TON of them to get any noteworthy profit. When I started playing, a key was worth under 3 ref, and it was a real struggle to get that much with the ~10 item drops you'd get in a week. Now, keys are worth around 68 ref. That's ~1224 items for the equivalent of ~2,20$ If you had around 50K idle bots getting 10 items per week, you'd get around 500K items in a week, which is enough for ca. 408 keys (likely less), or roughly 900 bucks in a week. I can see why people would do this if they could.

[@WC3fanatic17]

when you open tf2, in the task manager is shows up as HL2, could it be that steam charts includes people running other games that are built off of HL2 like fist of frags. that wouldnt be in the server associated with tf2 that teamwork.tf checks?

[@abnt_official]

Bots wait until people queue in order to join servers, because the game matches people in batches. It would be a waste of processing power to have a server full of only bots. The point is to annoy players, and if there are no players to annoy, they might as well recoup and wait for some to queue. If you don't believe me, join a tc_hydro server and watch it fill up completely with bots that immediately steal your username. The 75% sitting at the menu, along with the erradic player counts, are bots waiting in the wings to ambush queueing players.

[@ghostofyuanman4232]

i have a rather large friend list and sometimes i notice a lot of people don't play for a day in particular or time of the day and sometimes everybody happens to be playing the same day at different hours

[@CopeAndSeeth]

Hello zesty viewers

[@BigManBilliam]

Looking at the servers you can see that the fourth largest servers are the Australian ones, so it is definitely a world wide thing Also I do not know if the player count counts only Valve hosted servers. If teamwork.tf only counts valve servers it wouldn't be counting the player hosted ones, meaning anyone on a classwars server, vsh server or even x10,000 server wouldn't be counted. Also the reason other games are played in sessions is because their ranked system is a lot more encouraged unlike tf2 where people play it very casually

[@karlbischof2807]

This is the best explanation so far

[@Thornskade]

teamwork does count community servers, or at least it claims so. But note that it only counts publicly accessible servers, and anyone who does something like play a rocket jump match by themselves or training maps like tr_walkway wouldn't be counted. People who create particle effects or hats or playtest maps for themselves or the Steam Workshop don't count, either. People who are in the menu to look at hats in the Mann Co. Store or to organize their backpack, play dress-up with their characters to find the perfect look etc. also don't count. People who play locally against bots don't count. People who noclip through maps to check out the many easter eggs don't count. People who host a local server to maybe play MvM with their friends (connecting through Hamachi, LAN servers) don't count. I think it's safe to say that TF2 has a lot of things and activities going for it outside of servers. Still, I doubt those people make up a huge number so that alone cannot explain the mysterious discrepancy Something of note is that TF2 keeps receiving the "Silver Award" on Steam for highest-grossing games each year. There's Gold and Platinum above it and each category only has a handful of entries. Given how many AAA games release each year that this beats and if TF2's average player number is really just between 10k and 30k, then it sure as heck must have a lot of really rich whales who keep buying crap from the Mann Co. Store. I somehow doubt that this is the case, but who knows.

[@SCP-tn2ln]

Most bots do open the game to trade, usually to organize their inventory, that's what I noticed

[@ainzooalsmoketron3833]

I Just maybe found something when looking at the Steam DB tracker, it says for all games "playing MM". It could be that it only counts Matchmaking games. That would make sense, since games like CSGO have most of their Players using Matchmaking matches. But tf2 is known for its use of Community servers. Possibly that's why, it's such a huge different. Also, would it make sense that a game with only around 15k active players to be one of valve's biggest moneymakers? Besides, most TF2 KZbin videos get way too many views for such a low active player count.

[@LostElsen]

VAC banned bots can still open the game, but can't join protected servers. And if left unchecked they might just idle around in menu trying to join a server.

[@Casperr]

Definitely an interesting thought!

[@phrtaj3937]

I noticed something, when sometime a player with a strange name join or maybe normal name but select sniper, then sniper bot join. Since bots can join any server at any time, round etc, why when I am alone they are no bots.

[@Omabatfartsbruh]

are you sure you didn't mix up the player numbers of left 4 dead 1 and 2 at 8:04?

[@julianprzybysawski8543]

The numbers can't be as high as they say, because it's been difficult to fill less popular maps for a long time now. Even on popular maps, slots can remain empty for quite a while before being filled.

[@dracoalpha]

I think this could be happening to CSGO to, and maybe from average player count of 600k, 200k are real players.

[@detectiveback6371]

idk if this will be helpful but i remembered years ago before i quit my tf2 addiction me and my friends would all have tf2 open 24/7. mostly because we'd only sleep once every 4 days and when we did fall asleep it would be with tf2 open...i'm not sure if thats a common occurence but thats my anecdote

[@tristenarctician6910]

I don't really know why there's such a gap between steamcharts and teamwork, but the irregular shape of the graph might be because that players might not play tf2 on a regular schedule

[@kibbies]

Does the “in game” function also count as mvm or community servers?

[@kittyarsonist]

Great video, one small graphical issue that bothers me for whatever reason: when you compared tf2 to csgo, l4d and l4d2 you put l4d2's player numbers for l4d and l4d's player numbers for l4d2.

[@Casperr]

Yep, silly mistake from me 😣

[@nathangamble125]

I often have TF2 open in the menu in the background when I'm looking stuff up about it. I imagine a lot other people do this, though not enough to create a discrepancy of this magnitude.

[@BottomOfTheDumpsterFire]

Shoot, I own thousands of cases, like, literally multiple accounts' worth of cases. I should probably do the bot thing myself. But yeah, I've been saying this for years; it's just bots and item farmers that aren't caught in the actual game, maybe even just running a local map or LAN server.

[@karlbischof2807]

Notes on comments ive read: -Players tend to go solo on tf2, where they would otherwise always party up on other games. This would explain why, if the steam servers stop, they might just leave, or they'll idle on menu as there is no pressure/commitment. This also why players will launch tf2 at irregular times & also partially explains the very irregular lines on the charts compared to the clear pattern of other games -Many players also dont play on Valve servers and only community servers which are not counted on either of these charts. This partially explains the big difference of players in games and on menu, because the ones in community servers are counted as in menu -malicious bots & other bots are very often controlled simultaneously and so they might leave together in mass, explaining other dips and growths -Idle bots & trade bots account for the other amount of players idling on menu. Someone also mentioned that u only need to interact with the Steam servers directly to be counted in as a player, which might explain additional irregularities

[@thisisspy288]

The charts should still count people who play on community servers because they are connected to Steam overwise you wouldn't be able to use cosmetics or anything online related

[@PretzelSage]

the charts count people in community games, shows them in game on the menu and in steam on pretty much any server

[@gasparmxm]

Also there's another thing, what about competitive players, a popular schedule for competitive players is between 8 to 10 pm new york time, most servers are private and there's some SDR servers who don't report themselves in any way because of ddos. There's many factors, and it's hard to count players that are playing in servers, you have to count competitive players and so on

[@apolloknight9521]

This is a rather interesting analysis video, but if I may add my own inquiry; I may sound stupid to say this but hear me out; Wouldn’t be it possible if these players counts to be rising and falling is because we live in a world of at least 7 Billion humans? You think that the the thousands of players could be just people across the world playing the game at their spare time? I mean, playing TF2 players from different countries isn’t unheard of and also not uncommon since here in Asia I have an experience of playing TF2 with players from different countries so could it be the possibility that is the reason for its rise and fall of players?

[@Casperr]

Seeing people around the world playing and then not playing the game all around the same time is definitely something we expect! The confusing thing about TF2 specifically however is how it's pattern of players doesn't look like any other game. Why would TF2 be so different to all the other games? Maybe there's a very good reason and explanation... but if so, I don't know what it would be 🤷‍♂️

[@Sauce787]

If someone is hosting a community server does the computer hosting run an instance of the game that stays idle on the menu maybe

[@solaireofastora6173]

I would like to add something more to the discussion although the numbers on different platforms reflect that the number of active players is actually lower than it seems but what about the content related to tf2 on social media like here on KZbin KZbin reflects that there are a lot of users interested in tf2 you just have to check the number of visits that medium size channels gets that reach 30,000 to 100,000 consistently, that's not to mention the legendary channels like uncle dane's that reach 1M visits easily It just seems strange to me that KZbin shows numbers similar to the supposed number of players… and here it could be argued that these users do not necessarily play tf2 but then it would not make sense that among the most watched videos related to the game are the tutorials and reviews of the unlockable weapons (and I mean recent made ones)

[@Casperr]

Here's KZbin's trend data for TF2. It is currently at its least popular period on KZbin ever trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all_2008&gprop=youtube&q=%2Fm%2F060phy

[@solaireofastora6173]

Ah chucks