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Racist bots run rampant in Team Fortress 2

Racist bots run rampant in Team Fortress 2

Racist spam bots are overwhelming Team Fortress 2's in-game chat.

As reported by Kotaku, one particular kind of bot called Myg0t has become particularly noticeable, filling chat with hate speech including that George Floyd deserved to die at the hands of “supreme race.”

The Team Fortress 2 community has started trying to tackle the problem itself, launching The TF2 Hacker Police to try and combat bots.

Fans feels that developer Valve has given up on the game in favour of more lucrative projects like fellow online titles Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The company has largely stayed quiet on the topic.

“There’s been more than enough time to even acknowledge this problem, and yet the TF2 team hasn’t seemed to even mention it on their blog or Twitter account,” one player said.

“Meanwhile, Valve continues to profit daily off the tens of thousands of everyday players that spend money on the game’s microtransactions. It’s unprofessional of Valve to continue to profit off of this game while showing absolute apathy to the racism and hate speech actively being cast upon their player base.”

Valve is one of the few games companies that hasn't voiced their support for the #BlackLivesMatter movement.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.