Team Fortress 2 experienced a massive collapse of active player numbers in February 2018, which seem to be slowly recovering since then. The community speculates what the reason might be.
Team Fortress 2 is one of the most stable multiplayer titles on Steam. It held a firm position in the top 5 of the most played games for years.
However, in February 2018, the popular team shooter from Valve suddenly fell out of the top 20.
What was the reason?
40,000 players suddenly disappeared
After the major Jungle Inferno update in October 2017, Team Fortress 2 initially saw a massive spike that catapulted the number of daily active players to nearly 100,000.
However, in February 2018, it quickly went downhill again. This ended in the worst drop in player numbers the game has ever experienced.
Possible explanations could be:
- The explosive popularity of battle royale games that currently dominate mainstream gaming.
- The age of TF2, which received much fewer content updates in 2017 than it used to.
However, the drop happened within just a few days. It is therefore unlikely that 40,000 players spontaneously decided to leave Team Fortress at the same time.
Were it the AFK farmers?
The YouTubers from Valve News Network have another theory for the collapse, which they base on the website Teamwork.tf.
According to their own statement, the statistics from Teamwork show the actual number of players in Team Fortress actively participating in the game.
Steam, on the other hand, counts all accounts that have the game open. This includes bots and AFK farmers.
As a result, the player numbers at Teamwork were always about half of the Steam numbers and were not affected by the collapse.
The assumption from Valve News Network is therefore that the development team changed something in the game that makes the usual AFK farming either more difficult or impossible.
This would mean the developers drove away the botters without having to resort to the ban hammer.
Valve itself has not commented on the collapse despite multiple inquiries.
Since mid-March 2018, the player numbers seem to have stabilized in the range between approximately 40,000 and 55,000.
