Team Fortress 2 now has anti-cheat bots

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Tired of waiting around for an official solution to cheaters, the community for Team Fortress 2 has taken matters into their own hands. Anti-cheating bots have been created to police the FPS game, working against any players that enter a round and break the rules.

The “cheater teminators”, as they’ve been dubbed on Twitter, are bots that enter any given match of the multiplayer game to target anyone whose behaviour seems strange. Known in-game as Bot Extermination Services, they’re AI programmed with cheating powers, drawn to any other players that use the same untoward abilities, and start killing them. A crude system, sure, but modern problems require modern solutions.

Where these bots originate from appears unknown – one Reddit user speculates they’re from LmaoBox, a Team Fortress 2 cheats seller protecting its investment by making sure there isn’t a mass exodus due to too many cheaters. Selling cheats, then anonymously supplying the anti-cheat protection, would be a very clever, deeply capitalist, massively gross business model. As it stands, players in the community seem glad they exist all the same, with floods of memes about the game becoming a war of bots against bots.

Valve did add features to make it easier to mute and report players earlier this year, and the issue of racist bots is something the developer is working on.

there is a new type of bots on tf2 "the extermination bot services", they're cheaters but scripted specially to kill other cheaters in any game, they won't kill you, if you see one of them don't kick him, they're friendly with true players, they will help you. pic.twitter.com/M3FSuM4GBu
— Mr Quattro (@MR_QUATTRO) September 3, 2020

Cheating is something publishers are starting to be more proactive with – Activision recently took legal action with a Call of Duty cheats seller, forcing them to take down their CoD-related items. If you’d like to wind back the clock on Team Fortress 2, this mod takes it back to 2008.