How do I avoid TF2 servers loaded with bots?

It seems like whenever I choose to play TF2 at dead-ish times (when my favorites are all empty) all the servers I join are 90-100% bots. Is there some easy way to avoid joining those servers?

Solution 1:

If you right click the header, you can unhide the 'Bots' column. A regular server with bots will then advertise its bot count (unless there are enough humans playing; then it's not an issue right that second):

Be aware that some servers do not advertise their bot count at all, which is what you might be experiencing. If you're playing on Egypt in stage 3, you'll be able to easily tell humans from bots running against the wall; otherwise it can be quite hard to tell those bots apart.

What you can try is logging in at an unusual time where hardly anybody is online, like European morning. Those servers with 23/24 players (or similar) are probably entirely bots; go ahead and blacklist those. They're typically 24/7 servers or idle "trading" servers.

Sometimes I wish servers weren't this moddable.

Solution 2:

I'm not 100% sure if this transfers over to TF2, but I know for the Steam Servers for Counter-strike, if you preview the server you can see the number of players including their ping values. Bots always had a ping value of 5, if a server only has "players" with 5 ping it's full of bots.

Solution 3:

Next to the word "Tags", select "do not include" from the dropdown and type "bots" into the text field. Any server using bots will be filtered from your search results.