Yesterday, Team Fortress 2 received an update in preparation for its Halloween event, Scream Fortress 13, and as a result the 13-year-old FPS has broken a new record for concurrent player counts. This particular Halloween event takes place in a year where multiplayer gaming, especially free games like Team Fortress 2, is one of the few good ways to engage with other people while still maintaining social distancing.
The surge in player activity centers around the Scream Fortress XII Halloween event, which comes with 4 community-created maps, as well as the opportunity to unlock frightful cosmetic items and spooky unusual effects all submitted by fans to the Steam workshop. Many players are logging in just to add this year's items to their collection. Items from Halloween events past are also available if a player transmutes 3 items.
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Roughly 130 thousand players were logged in to Team Fortress 2 at the same time yesterday from 3-4 PM PST (11-12 PM UTC) according to SteamCharts, setting a new all-time record. The past two years TF2 didn't break 100k until November, which could mean a lot more activity this year. The catch is that the presence of bots, including ones that spew racist messages, obfuscates true player counts, and TF2's internal stats show closer to 25k non-bot players at peak.
The Team Fortress 2 community has been contending with players who enter the game not with the intent to have fun, but with the intent to dominate other players through cheats or to flood the chat with abusive language. The community's clever solution to program bots to kill cheaters in TF2 has resulted in a higher than average bot count, but the bad players continue to seek ways to disrupt gameplay for their own benefit in an ongoing battle between fun and fear.
Some say that Team Fortress 2 was one of the most innovative and influential first-person shooter games, so it is easy to see why the player base never dropped below 50k. Valve's continued investment in the thirteen-year-old game is encouraging, but the developers continue to be challenged by the presence of cheaters and bots. The Valve Anti Cheat (VAC) system may be strong, but determined hackers continue to seek out ways to circumvent the precautions.
A word of advice for those who are planning to get back into the fray: it would be a good idea to brush up on how to spot and remove hackers in Team Fortress 2.
Team Fortress 2Â is available now for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.
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Source:Â PC Gamer