Hypocrisy of the #FixTF2 movement

[Trick]

I'm not the first one to point this out, but I think it should be talked about more thoroughly. I find it extremely hypocritical to start a petition, asking Valve to fix the bot crisis, yet use bots to inflate that petition to an unrealistic degree. Nearly 300K signatures while the game itself has barely 16K actual players. Are you actually serious?

And before someone throws in the argument that some people are disgruntled and won't touch the game due to the bots. The player numbers have been in the basement for an entire decade now, the bots had very little to do with that. You're trying to tell me that nearly 280K people won't touch the game because of the bots? Yeah, not buying it.

As for the argument that there are people who don't play the game but want it to be fixed regardless. Give me a break already! You can't be bothered to play the game at all, probably don't even have it installed, but have the audacity to demand Valve to care enough to fix it? I hope you see how utterly ridiculous that sounds. Either you're part of the community, hence you play the game, or you're just an interloper. You people genuinely think that this plays in your favour to represent the demographic of this community in such a way?

In the end it doesn't matter what numbers you can conjure up since Valve won't abide to your pity protest. Let's for the sake of argument say that you had 300K real people backing up this petition. So what? Anyone who has been on the internet for a long period of time knows that petitions don't do jack. You think Valve is all of a sudden going to have a change of heart by being handed a piece of paper with names written on it? Gaben will run it through the shredder in mere seconds. As any reasonable individual should.

[dudenugget]

i disagree

[( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)󠀰 󠀰]

i agree

[Moe Howard]

I'm applying Occam's Razor; seems more likely that a lot of non-players want Valve to actually do their damn job to maintain the game. So many people have been talking about this mess that its common knowledge even among non-TF2 players now after all.

[UlτrαΤwο]

Inb4 "#FixTF2 will work" comments start parading in here.

[Fireschlong #2Broke4MannUp]

Originally posted by Trick:

Nearly 300K signatures while the game itself has barely 16K actual players.

These numbers are difficult to compare, because one contains the total number of signs, while the other only contains the average amount of players playing at the same time. It would be different if we had a statistic of daily unique players, which probably would have been at least slightly comparable to the petition numbers. This is why I don't blindly trust statistics and numbers.

That being said, I've seen some people brag about having signed multiple times, and while it's not outright botting, it kind of misses the point. I assume there were botted signs too, that were either "well-intended" and malicious, or something completely different.

[Fireschlong #2Broke4MannUp]

As someone who is skeptical about the movement, this post seems highly fallacious.

[Moe Howard]

Originally posted by Fireschlong #2Broke4MannUp:

As someone who is skeptical about the movement, this post seems highly fallacious.

Yeah like I said before, it seems to overlook a pretty obvious fact. I'm not on board with this new movement but I do appreciate the thought at the very least.

[Booyah]

It's not that unbelievable if you check how popular tf2 content is on youtube. Some SFM videos are hitting milions of views. Sure, part of it is definitely botted, but I think 200k of unhappy people are definitelly believable

[Mina]

It moved on

[DarkCrystalMethod]

Imagine if you will that perhaps at least a few signers of the petition were bot accounts who were flooding the list to make the number completely unrealistic(just like the player counts). I still haven't heard any confirmation that the petition has been delivered. Where do I find that if it happened already?

Second people who have otherwise given up and uninstalled have done so because of the bots and if this works they can resume playing the moment it is fixed.

As far as I know signing the petition and spreading the word was the only instructions. Leaving bad reviews on the game was not my idea and I disagree with it and again perhaps just a few were probably made by bot accounts just to skew the numbers either way. The sheer number of reviews should have at least caught Valve's attention, something we seem incapable of as paying customers(me) or free2players.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. We have no route to communicate to the dev team and if support deletes a thread that the dev team 'should' see I doubt they're even passing on the info(if there is any mechanism to do that at all).

[Trick]

Originally posted by Fireschlong #2Broke4MannUp:

As someone who is skeptical about the movement, this post seems highly fallacious.

You can double, triple, even quadruple the current player numbers of the game and compare them to the total number of the signatures, it's ridiculous to assume that nearly 300K people are involved with this community whatsoever. From what I've seen, 16K active players hits close to home. Thus that's the number I'm going with here. We can be extremely generous and double those numbers which wouldn't change the fact that this petition is inflated with non-participants of this game or community.

[Trick]

Originally posted by Feisty Nermal:

I'm applying Occam's Razor; seems more likely that a lot of non-players want Valve to actually do their damn job to maintain the game. So many people have been talking about this mess that its common knowledge even among non-TF2 players now after all.

That's what I'm getting at. Non-TF2 players signing a petition so Valve fixes a game that they have zero involvement with. In other words, people who don't even contribute to the game have the audacity to point fingers at Valve and demand that they do. It's pretty hypocritical.

[Moe Howard]

Originally posted by Trick:

Originally posted by Feisty Nermal:

I'm applying Occam's Razor; seems more likely that a lot of non-players want Valve to actually do their damn job to maintain the game. So many people have been talking about this mess that its common knowledge even among non-TF2 players now after all.

That's what I'm getting at. Non-TF2 players signing a petition so Valve fixes a game that they have zero involvement with. In other words, people who don't even contribute to the game have the audacity to point fingers at Valve and demand that they do. It's pretty hypocritical.

No its a sign that people want accountability. People dont typically like it when a business is this irresponsible weither or not they are consumers of said company. So what if non TF2 players are signing it??? They probobly know someone who does, or just sympathize with the player base because of the behavior of Valve. The fact you are looking at the numbers as a conspiracy or something else equally stupid is more of a failing on your part than on the people who wrote the damn petition....

[Fireschlong #2Broke4MannUp]

Originally posted by Trick:

Originally posted by Fireschlong #2Broke4MannUp:

As someone who is skeptical about the movement, this post seems highly fallacious.

You can double, triple, even quadruple the current player numbers of the game and compare them to the total number of the signatures, it's ridiculous to assume that nearly 300K people are involved with this community whatsoever. From what I've seen, 16K active players hits close to home. Thus that's the number I'm going with here. We can be extremely generous and double those numbers which wouldn't change the fact that this petition is inflated with non-participants of this game or community.

My point isn't the numbers specifically, but what those numbers represent and how you use these numbers. 15k is indeed the average player count, and the petition has 300k(?) people who signed it. However, the 15k are affected by daily/weekly cycles and the fact that not everyone is awake at once, while the petition's signatures couldn't care less about whether that person is asleep or not. Even if you're right, combining unrelated numbers is manipulative.

I know it doesn't nearly come close to 300k even with that in mind, but it's still misleading to use those numbers, as if people are obligated to keep playing TF2 to qualify for signing the petition. It's a fact that people take breaks from a game, and others would rather see something change as well, even if they don't play TF2 frequently nowadays.

[LQIM]

There was a guy asking whether he was in the wrong for getting his friends who knew absolutely nothing about TF2 to sign the save.tf petition lmao. I guess the ends justify the means