Disgruntled Team Fortress 2 players bind 340,000 signatures into a book and hand-deliver it to Valve

Over 340,000 Team Fortress players have amassed as part of the ongoing #SaveTF2 campaign, lending their signatures to an anti-bot petition that has now been lovingly assembled into a hardback tome and hand-delivered to Valve’s offices in Washington.

#SaveTF2 was born in 2022, amid a bot situation so severe, it was threatening to make Valve’s classic team-based shooter literally unplayable. The community faced daily battle bots using game-ruining hacks, racist usernames, disruptive noises in voice chat, and worse – and with Valve doing little to help, players even took to fighting bots with bots of their own.

Happily, though, the community’s first orchestrated #SaveTF2 campaign was a success, drawing Valve’s attention and a pledge it was “working to improve things”. That promise culminated in a mass bot ban, but the nuisances eventually returned – leading to a second #SaveTF2 campaign in 2024, this time in the form of a petition calling for the game’s “persistent and continuous upkeep” to ensure those naughty bots remain in check.

And round two of the campaign has had a similarly positive effect, with Valve initiating another wave of bot bans earlier this year. But with the petition eventually attracting over 343,700 signatures, its creator – YouTube TheWhat – decided it might have more of an impact in physical form, serving as a permanent reminder of the Team Fortress 2 community’s enduring love of the game, if it could be placed in Valve’s hands.