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.
And so those signatures (thanks PC Gamer) were turned into a literal hardback tome spanning hundreds of pages – a “symbol of the astounding amount of people that love TF2 and want to see it flourish”, as TheWhat put it on social media. The book then got its very own flashily cinematic reveal video before being whisked off to Washington, where – as seen in TheWhat’s more recent update – it was deposited in a conspicuous place somewhere in Valve’s lobby.
Whether the book has now made its way upstairs and into Valve’s inner sanctum is unclear, but it’s hard not to admire the mere existence of the thing, and the kind of ceaselessly passionate fandom it represents. As for the Team Fortress 2 community, there are mixed opinions on how the book will be received. “It will most likely be cherished by the people at Valve,” one poster on the TF2 subreddit wrote. “They’ll use it as toilet paper,” another less optimist soul added, “I hope my name touches Gabe’s asshole.”
