The End Man

For those wondering why you can't play TF2 right now: there's a new "bot" wave. Currently, there seems to be an exploit where one can "speak" to TF2's game coordinator without a TF2 client running, or running via text-mode or "headless." Bot hosters can effectively lie, and tell it that they're a "player" wanting to join a server, and it will reserve a slot for them as if though they were a real player. Since they aren't real, they'll reserve that slot until they time out, preventing other players from joining, delay games from beginning, and increase queue times. Rinse and repeat with thousands of "accounts," and you can't play the game. Since they aren't running the game client, each "bot" requires far less memory to operate, meaning the scale of these bot waves can be far larger than that of the cheating bots we saw years prior. Here's a screenshot from a website that tracks the number of queuing players. All gamemodes are being affected. This is really bad. Unlike cheating bots, you can't kick these out. They clog the server indefinitely. Lord knows how long it will take for valve to address this. Hopefully not years like last time.