A New Players Guide to BOTS in Team Fortress 2

A brief beginners level guide to dealing with BOTS in Team Fortress 2 (TF2)
To start if you don't know what a BOT is but you keep seeing them mentioned in chat along with constant vote kicks during the game, this guide will explain it all and tell you how you can help!
First off the TF2 "Bots" are players that are cheating in-game and are not being controlled by real people but rather running on a code made by malicious programmers.
This guide will tell you all about how to avoid playing with bots, how to get bots out of games you are in, and try to give advice to streamline your TF2 bot-free experience.

How to Identify Bots and How to Avoid Bots

Bots interfering with Casual Matches of TF2 has been a common problem in the past few months and the community has tried its best to find ways to combat them.
Bots can heavily disrupt the natural and fun flow of a TF2 match and this is why it is crucial to avoid them for the best TF2 experience.


Identifying Bots
There are many ways you can identify bots, sometimes they are a single heavy but mostly they are in groups, they go around in a pack and they instantly detect enemy players and immediately flick to shoot at them. As you play or if you are experienced you can tell if its normal or hacking usually. Most bots I see are aim-bot/spin-bot snipers. Snipers that are spinning in circles flicking and instantly headshoting people behind them and looking up and down while spinning are all things to look out for. Sometimes Bots will spam the chats with links, messages, or spam to make the chat useless, they also might spam the voice chat. Often the bot's in-game name is different than their Steam name. At the time of writing this VALVE has come out with a patch in its latest update that fixes bot name changes but in case the bots figure a way around it I will briefly talk about it. In the past bots have been able to change their names to that of other players in the same server. Quick tip for this is in the vote kick menu which I will talk about in the next section players toward the top have been in the game for longer, players just joining are near the bottom of the player list.

Avoiding Bots
I will first go over the simplest solutions here and in further sections of this guide I will tell you about important specifics such as Vote Kicks as well as other info.
First off Bot accounts are only a fraction of TF2's player count. If you play at peak hours like 3:00pm-10:00pm or in summer 12:00pm to probably even 11:00pm there are enough people playing to avoid most of the bots. Much of the time two or three bots might join but real players will have the majority to easily kick them. If there are too many bots and you are not sure you can kick them all or it will take too long there is no shame in leaving to find a new match.
Once you get a good bot free server you might want to stay for the following match, its easier to keep a server bot free than it is to find a new one and fight to kick all the bots off.
Personally I really enjoy casual mode, but if the bots are too much for you TF2 has a large amount of community servers you can play on. It is good to do research about good servers to join though because if you are not careful some community servers may put viruses on your computer. In the past I was once very active on a community server and you can make great friendships and get a real sense of community on some of these servers, but like I said be careful. Last but not least on this list of simple solutions, you can join FACEIT servers, I have no experience with these but they are a common and popular alternative matchmaking system and have a strong anti-cheat.

Vote Kick

Vote Kicks
Vote Kicks are your greatest tool to combat Bots. When a Vote Kick is issued players on the team that issued the vote can vote to kick a player on their team. If they get enough votes the player will be kicked. You can hit f1 to Vote YES or f2 to Vote NO. Be careful, bots can also call votes and try to kick real players. If bots get the majority in a server they will slowly vote kick out all the real players, it is everyone's job to vote them out before this happens.

A few quick notes before I go into more detail.

• 1. When you join a match there will be a grace period where you cannot call a vote, later in the match this can help because bots that join will not immediately be able to start a kick vote and confuse the Vote Kick process.
  
• 2. Many bots are programmed to leave the server when a Vote Kick targeted at them is started. Once they leave, the game will display that the "Vote Failed" but he left so its a win! Bots leave because the more kicks they have the more suspicious their account is. (That's what I've heard at least)
  
• 3. If votes keep failing because enough bots are voting NO, not all is lost. From what I have gathered there is a quirk in the bots programming that after multiple votes to kick it will automatically leave the server even if these votes fail. I do not know why but that's what I have been told.
  
• 4. Try not to get mad at the other team if they can't kick their bots, its hard to tell sometimes how many bots are on the other team and the majority wins in a vote.

How to Vote Kick
To vote kick hit ESC and navigate at the bottom to the Vote Kick Button.
(all of these steps are on default settings with the default overlay)
Click the Vote Kick button and then select from the list of player names, who you want to kick.
Note: You can only kick players on your team!
It will ask for a reason, select cheating and then click "Call Vote".
The Vote will then appear on the left side of your screen, The game automatically places your vote as a yes if you start the vote.

Thats everything you need to know about the Vote Kick system!

Reporting BOT Accounts and Conclusion

Reporting Bot Accounts

The final step if you are very thorough is to report the bot. Bots are not directly banned just because they are reported. But they are looked into, this is more of a long-term solution. With TF2 free to play, new accounts can be made easily so you decide if this is worth your time. Sometimes I do, sometimes I do not.

First off open the Steam Overlay and select "View Players" then "Current Game". Bots often always have a different Steam name than in-game name, so looking for their profile picture is often the only way to find them. Then click profile once you find the Bot account.

Double check to make sure its the right guy and click on the drop-down menu to the right of "Add Friend" then select "Report Player".

Select "They are cheating in a game".

You will then be brought to a page where you write what the player was doing. I usually have a copy paste that I edit based on what the bot was doing. An example would be "TF2 Bot. Had aimbot and was advertising links in chat" or "TF2 Bot. Had aimbot was with a group of bots and were advertising in chat and blasting music in the voice chat". Then select that it happened in Team Fortress 2. Now just scroll down and click "Submit Report".
Sorry I had no screen shot for the last part, I tried to take the screenshot but later found it did not save.


Hey everybody JBBrickman here!
It seems you have reached the end of this guide. I hope it helps you in some way. Its a crazy time for Team Fortress 2! Not just because of the bots but because of all the new players that are finding this great game! This is my first ever Steam Guide, and it probably shows. I know a lot about TF2 but if I missed anything or made an error, please let me know in the comment section and I will look into it!
Have a great day!

~JBBrickman

[idiot 3 alt (5)]

https://youtu.be/DdmNYNkcwKE

[JBBrickman]

Update: A new update allows for multiple kick votes at once.

[JBBrickman]

I would like to mention there are third party programs that some people use that can instantly detect a bot joining and automatically select it for vote kick.