Bots given leniency if they break rules

[Toad]

One of rules of this site is that you have you accept offers based on your listing. For example, you put a buy/sell order up, someone sends you an offer fulfilling that buy/sell order, you have to accept. However, it appears to me that bots are given a different set of rules to work with: They can decline offers if Steam is acting up and even change their offers after they decline - no punishment is given. Why is this?

 

If your bot cannot adhere correctly to the rules of the site, it shouldn't be operating. 

[Teeny Tiny Cat]

How are bots supposed to accept offers if steam isn't working? Like what are you arguing for here? Banning users and bots because steam went down and they couldn't accept an offer? Who does that benefit?

[Toad]

Can't accept an offer during a certain time and declining are two different things. They can wait to accept it instead of declining. But instead, they are not only allowed to decline (which by itself is against the rules) but they're allowed to change the price without punishment. I'm very confused, how is this fair? If a person did exactly the same thing, they'd be given punishment. Otherwise, we should allow humans to decline if Steam is acting up and change their orders.

[Teeny Tiny Cat]

26 minutes ago, Toad said:

Can't accept an offer during a certain time and declining are two different things. They can wait to accept it instead of declining. But instead, they are not only allowed to decline (which by itself is against the rules) but they're allowed to change the price without punishment. I'm very confused, how is this fair? If a person did exactly the same thing, they'd be given punishment. Otherwise, we should allow humans to decline if Steam is acting up and change their orders.

 

The reason this occurs is because bots repeatedly attempt to accept an offer until it works, so bot owners put a cap on that after which it just declines. Otherwise it would endlessly be trying to accept it. 

 

If a user can't accept an offer cause steam is down and then changes their price in the meantime, I'm not gonna ban that person either. I really don't get what your issue is?

 

The rules have NEVER involved banning someone, user or bot, for declining one trade.

[Toad]

I'll just get to the point: As a nonbot, if Steam is acting up at all, am I allowed to decline the trade and change my buy/sell order? I've always been under the impression the user always had to honor their price when this occurs because even if Steam goes down, your buy orders aren't, so the buy order should still be fulfilled if another user sent you a trade during the outage.

[Teeny Tiny Cat]

Just now, Toad said:

I'll just get to the point: As a nonbot, if Steam is acting up at all, am I allowed to decline the trade and change my buy/sell order?

 

I mean, if you can't accept an offer and then when you check pricing realise you'd like to change it, yeah that's perfectly fine. Straight up using steam not working as an excuse for doing that just because you wanna change the price is shitty, but since I can't know your motivation I'm not gonna ban you for it happening once. A pattern, on the other hand, is a different thing - for users AND for bots - and it's those patterns that generally lead to bans. 

[Toad]

Okay, I'll hold your word to it in the future then. Thanks for addressing my concerns.

[D.Alex]

I see how this might look unfair that "the bots are allowed to do that" but I think the main point here is that people renting bot.tf bots can't really abuse this feature because it's "random" (depends on Steam having issues).

 

Still, I think it would make sense to ask if Danny could change this so bots keep these offers pending until they can be accepted or at least for much longer time.

[LaughingLollipop]

bot.tf bots will not trade with me

 

they should all be banned

 

instead their lazy algo insists I'm a scammer and suggests I check rep.tf

 

my rep.tf is clean.

[Zeus_Junior]

1 hour ago, LaughingLollipop said:

bot.tf bots will not trade with me

 

they should all be banned

 

instead their lazy algo insists I'm a scammer and suggests I check rep.tf

 

my rep.tf is clean.

I suggest you check out the message the bots sent you and also join the discord and check the #faq channel

[LaughingLollipop]

1 hour ago, Zeus_Junior said:

I suggest you check out the message the bots sent you and also join the discord and check the #faq channel

 

I directly emailed support

 

I was told that as I am banned from comments on bp.tf I am a scammer in their algo

 

I can provide direct evidence of this if desired.

 

The response I received is

 

"

Trust me, I'd rather not check for backpack.tf permanent bans, but unfortunately I have no other choice. Backpack.tf has been banning people and some of my bots for trading with permanently banned users on backpack.tf, they probably won't for your type of ban, but there is no way for the bot to reliably check if the ban was actually issued because the user is a scammer or not according to them.

 

You should contact backpack.tf and ask them if they could specify a "ban type" in their API: http://backpack.tf/api/docs/IGetUsers - For example ban type 1 = scammer, 2 = insults or whatever etc.

 

Other than that there's nothing I can do for you.

 

Danny

Bot.tf

"

 

So

1) they know the rules

2) they know I'm not a scammer

3) they won't trade with me anyway

 

bots above the rule?

[MasterMinder]

Putting the trade offer on pending is something I have considered, but decided not to implement, instead I went for declining trades, reasons for this include but are not limited to:

• Having hundreds, sometimes even thousands of trades pending when Steam is having a massive outage puts a lot of stress on my service, continuous retries of accepting trades and monitoring Steam's service status uses a lot of resources;
• Sending many requests to Steam retrying while they are is down is probably not helping the outage they are having...;
• Sometimes, a trade offer gets accepted anyway when Steam is having an outage, however items will get temporarily lost. It's a long story, but how it works is Steam takes the items from both parties, tries to exchange them (but fails) and then thinks the trade went through, but then later realizes it didn't and it will then rollback the trade, essentially giving the items back. But this process usually takes several hours, people usually panic because the items are gone and then proceed to contact me or post reports of the bots having scammed their items;
• One way would be to constantly (say every 30 seconds) monitor Steam's service status / TF2 API status and to hold trade offers and not retry accepting the trade offers while it detected Steam being down, however I believe we all know that the TF2 API in particular sporadically goes down and up many times a day, but usually fixes itself within seconds or so. Meaning if I were to implement this, trades would be held pending unnecessarily for long times and people tend to be very impatient nowadays with automated trading, which is something I have contributed to. Anyway, this will lead to a massive increase in trade offer cancellation rates, which is not desirable;
• The user could simply retry another time. Toad mentioned that the prices would change, I don't think that happened, and if it did it would be purely coincidental by the autopricer or the bot owner is refreshing the trade offers page every minute 24/7, as Bot.tf does not send out a notification for declined trades.

 

@LaughingLollipop I first want to mention that your issue was from two years ago, back when the IGetUsers resource didn't categorize ban types, which it does now. I have to admit that I would have responded differently to your email now than back then and that I wasn't very professional and I would like to publicly apologize to you for that. I was in a rather stressful position at the time, trying to prevent bots from being banned because they traded with users who were permanently banned on backpack.tf. I was aware that you were not a scammer, but again, the IGetUsers resource didn't mention why you were banned, so I couldn't take any risks but to ban anyone who was permanently banned on backpack.tf for any reason. With that said, you are unbanned now, I'm sorry it had to be like this.

[Toad]

13 hours ago, Zeus_Junior said:

I suggest you check out the message the bots sent you and also join the discord and check the #faq channel

If a user isn't actually a scammer and the bot is declining, the bot should be banned for breaking bp.tf rules.

[Zeus_Junior]

Just now, Toad said:

If a user isn't actually a scammer and the bot is declining, the bot should be banned for breaking bp.tf rules.

As Masterminder alread said, that issue was 2 years ago when it wasn't possible to know the difference between a permanent classifieds ban and a permanent all features ban.

[Teeny Tiny Cat]

1 hour ago, Toad said:

If a user isn't actually a scammer and the bot is declining, the bot should be banned for breaking bp.tf rules.

 

I'm also gonna clarify that we don't ban anyone for declining one trade. That would be absurd. People are allowed to change their minds or forget to update their listings every now and then, we're not here to force people to buy things for more than they're worth just because they were too busy or changed their mind. What we are here to do is ensure that people don't repeatedly make listings they have no intention of honouring. 

[D.Alex]

Related question. Is blocking a user (using Bot.tf interface) and then subsequently declining all valid trades okay by Backpack.tf rules?

 

I'm assuming usual account blocking using Steam is okay. One could say it could be misused when done after a report but whatever. Mods probably don't have time to investigate who blocked whom and for what reasons.

 

However bot.tf "blocking" is implemented in a different way. Once you're "blocked" you can still send an offer to a bot which is immediately declined and bot sends you a chat message "your trade was declined with reason code: BLOCKED, visit bot.tf/trade/### for more information and to report any issues".

• So on the minus side you waste your time creating an offer (Steam blocking would not let you create one).
• On the plus side you can submit an "issue" but then you could as well just contact the bot owner directly on their Steam account.

I see 3 possible answers to this question:

1. This blocking is okay.
2. It's okay only if bot owner can demonstrate either malicious or repeated invalid offers from a blocked user.
3. This blocking is not allowed and Danny should change it somehow.

I'm already blocked by some bots and I might want to block some accounts myself. I'm fine with either outcome.

 

Last note. If this is okay I think some bot.tf bots owners might want to "block" some other bots that are smart enough to send offers to other bots. (Yes, I'm looking at you, bots with name starting with "Gan" and ending with "dalf"; and some other bots too). Because when you receive such an offer this usually means this item is not really profitable anymore. And there are extreme cases like this one.