Bots need to be banned or limited

[Toad]

This is getting out of control. 

 

If you don't have any coding experience or want to turn your account into a bot, you won't be able to do much on this site. Putting up a buy order results in instant counters by multiple bots. Same goes for selling. Turning a profit is out of the question. You need to buy from the bots and sell to them, otherwise your options are limited.

 

Bots auto bump their trades, have auto pricing, and auto acceptance. Backpack.tf needs to offer similar features or at the very least limit the functionality of bot users.

 

No one should be able to automatically dominate the markets like this - whether it be one person using a hypothetical super trading bot or a few people using regular bots like now. The playing field needs to be leveled in some way. Everyone should have the ability to do what they want given the same opportunities.

 

 

[Pixxi0us]

thats the whole point of having a bot Isnt it?

[Toad]

To what? To have the few users who are able to get their hands on bots do everything most optimally & dominate with little effort? Not being a smartass, that's what I'm seeing. 

[Danny | QB Backpacks/Spell]

Bot owners are scumbags

[Starbucks®]

14 hours ago, Toad said:

This is getting out of control. 

 

If you don't have any coding experience or want to turn your account into a bot, you won't be able to do much on this site. Putting up a buy order results in instant counters by multiple bots. Same goes for selling. Turning a profit is out of the question. You need to buy from the bots and sell to them, otherwise your options are limited.

 

Bots auto bump their trades, have auto pricing, and auto acceptance. Backpack.tf needs to offer similar features or at the very least limit the functionality of bot users.

 

No one should be able to automatically dominate the markets like this - whether it be one person using a hypothetical super trading bot or a few people using regular bots like now. The playing field needs to be leveled in some way. Everyone should have the ability to do what they want given the same opportunities.

 

 

NGL I was gonna ask if that was a rule or not I saw this one bot almost instantly ups me on the buy orders when I list them up, and I refresh theres one above me for a scrap more its kinda annoying tbh I dont even mind if they under cut me like in a few min or hours but instantly when I refresh that kinda is frustrating, 

[Starbucks®]

5 hours ago, Danny | QB Backpacks/Spell said:

Bot owners are scumbags

 

Not Zol hes actually bae <3 everyone else probably but Zol he's a bot with a heart 

[Zeus_Junior]

Bring back backpack.tf automatic when

 

Nothing wrong with bots really, they do what bots are supposed to do

 

In all seriousness do not use any "fixed" versions of backpack.tf automatic there are high likely still a bunch of bugs ok thank you

[Toad]

1 hour ago, Zeus_Junior said:

Bring back backpack.tf automatic when

 

Nothing wrong with bots really, they do what bots are supposed to do

 

In all seriousness do not use any "fixed" versions of backpack.tf automatic there are high likely still a bunch of bugs ok thank you

If you mean a small group of people who are able to get their hands on them and stomp the market, giving no chance to anyone else, then yes, they're doing what they're supposed to do.

 

Now, is it right? In my opinion, absolutely not, which is what I'm trying to argue in this post. 

[Toad]

5 hours ago, Starbucks® said:

NGL I was gonna ask if that was a rule or not I saw this one bot almost instantly ups me on the buy orders when I list them up, and I refresh theres one above me for a scrap more its kinda annoying tbh I dont even mind if they under cut me like in a few min or hours but instantly when I refresh that kinda is frustrating, 

It's funny, I was trying to buy a Black Rose the other day. I put up my buy order and within 5-10 minutes, I couldn't see my listing anymore. Was it deleted? Nope, it was buried underneath the 5-6 bots that control the weapons market who autopriced above me. 

 

From a user POV, this is extremely frustrating. 

[Goliac]

Totally agree. Though i really doubt anything will be done about them.

[Uncle Dang]

Let's also not pay attention to the fact that the opinions expressed here are pretty much exclusively from high-end traders about the market for unusuals or other expensives. I agree that undercut/overcut scripts specifically are cancer, but in most cases the alternative would be almost no buy or sell orders whatsoever? Bots do also bring tons of net benefit to regular players just wanting commodities like a Strange Grenade Launcher without having to ask around for 2 hours on trade servers (and when they finally find a willing seller, they'll probably try to take advantage of their desperation by price gouging by an extra 50%).

 

For 95% of items that are actually bought/sold by bots (and there are plenty of markets that almost noone will touch with a bot either because it's way too risky or backpack listings can't handle them), it pretty much boils down to bringing a significant downside brought to competing sellers but an extreme benefit to buyers. There are legions of players, believe it or not, who don't actually like trying to haggle deals for hours for regular hats/stranges when there's no need to (because there are thousands of the item circulating), but whose situation of being saved a few minutes per trade (actually very substantial benefit when you add it up across the whole site) isn't as sexy to scream about.

[Toad]

On 3/25/2020 at 6:06 PM, Uncle Dang said:

 I agree that undercut/overcut scripts specifically are cancer, but in most cases the alternative would be almost no buy or sell orders whatsoever? Bots do also bring tons of net benefit to regular players just wanting commodities like a Strange Grenade Launcher without having to ask around for 2 hours on trade servers (and when they finally find a willing seller, they'll probably try to take advantage of their desperation by price gouging by an extra 50%).

 

There are legions of players, believe it or not, who don't actually like trying to haggle deals for hours for regular hats/stranges when there's no need to (because there are thousands of the item circulating), but whose situation of being saved a few minutes per trade (actually very substantial benefit when you add it up across the whole site) isn't as sexy to scream about.

Regarding the first paragraphed point - That isn't the alternative. I've been here for years, before bots were popular, it wasn't very hard to find what you wanted, even niche items. Now what we have is if you are looking for that niche item, you HAVE to buy from a bot because you can't create an order yourself else you'll get immediately pricecut. Bots in this sense make it more difficult to trade.

 

For your second paragraphed point, if a player wants it instantly - ok, so be it. We don't have to ban bots. They can still provide instant trading but have their functionality limited on this website to give human traders a fair chance to make buy/sell orders, fair bumping, etc.

[Zeus_Junior]

23 hours ago, Toad said:

For your second paragraphed point, if a player wants it instantly - ok, so be it. We don't have to ban bots. They can still provide instant trading but have their functionality limited on this website to give human traders a fair chance to make buy/sell orders, fair bumping, etc.

How would you do this

[Toad]

1 hour ago, Zeus_Junior said:

How would you do this

For bumping, add a rule wherein if you are using a bot to manage your trades and backpack.tf you must limit your bumping, say, double to those not utilizing a bot.  Or perhaps you have to manually refresh the page instead of letting the bot do it automatically. 

 

I'm not sure how bots are automatically price cutting. There may be no way to monitor it, still, you could set a rule such as "all those using bots must be limited to price adjusting once every 24 hours" or "price changing must be done manually" etc. From a software perspective, I would think the website is being accessed by a third party service that the bot is utilizing that constantly pings all of the bots open trade URLs and when it's not at the top of the buy/sell orders, it either notifies the user (and lets the user auto increment to that of [highest + .11 scrap] and/or does it automatically. From this, it may be fairly easy to check for these services constantly pinging certain URLs. But, we may not even need to code anything aside from a basic html edit in the rule div.

 

If we were to implement these rules, I would think "how are we going to monitor it?" may be a question. I'm sure there's ways to check via code, but frankly, the community may do a decent job at policing. There's also the issue of user switches to bot mode and vice versa - if this is seen as being abused, it can be up to the discretion of the mods.

 

tldr:  We could limit bot functionality by adding a few basic rules, and joined with community policing we may not need to code anything that checks for bot use. What the rules contain exactly is still up in the air and should be discussed.

[Chuck]

The playing field is already leveled since you can get bptf API access just like everyone else. If you cant make a bot, pay for one. Even bot.tf bots have autopricing now. "Few users who are able to get their hands on bots" are literally everyone able to spare 6 keys a month.

 

On a side note, automation taking over every industry, regardless of you liking it or not. It's faster, more efficient, and better for consumers (no, you and every other profit maker here are not consumers), and it shouldn't be held back just because "robots taking our jobs" advocates are unable to learn and adapt to changing reality. If you can't keep up with business trends, you'll be discarded.

[w0lk]

Trading died when the bots took over and sucked out literally every single joy out of trading.

 

If you're not a bot and you're trying to make a buck nowdays, don't even try.

[Sniper Noob]

Just for the record, most of these restrictions could be done by simply limiting the rates at which users can hit particular API endpoints. Obviously it would require some well thought-out details on what the limits should be, what endpoints, etc., but if you designed the API in such a way that it was intended to enforce certain rules it could all be done programmatically. Bot users would have no choice but to oblige without any intervention from staff. The added benefit is bot users would not have to program around each specific rule either, they would only have to design their bots to utilize retry rate backoff logic across the board.

[Uncle Dang]

37 minutes ago, Sniper Noob said:

Just for the record, most of these restrictions could be done by simply limiting the rates at which users can hit particular API endpoints. Obviously it would require some well thought-out details on what the limits should be, what endpoints, etc., but if you designed the API in such a way that it was intended to enforce certain rules it could all be done programmatically. Bot users would have no choice but to oblige without any intervention from staff. The added benefit is bot users would not have to program around each specific rule either, they would only have to design their bots to utilize retry rate backoff logic across the board.

this

[Starbucks®]

On 3/25/2020 at 6:06 PM, Uncle Dang said:

Let's also not pay attention to the fact that the opinions expressed here are pretty much exclusively from high-end traders about the market for unusuals or other expensives. I agree that undercut/overcut scripts specifically are cancer, but in most cases the alternative would be almost no buy or sell orders whatsoever? Bots do also bring tons of net benefit to regular players just wanting commodities like a Strange Grenade Launcher without having to ask around for 2 hours on trade servers (and when they finally find a willing seller, they'll probably try to take advantage of their desperation by price gouging by an extra 50%).

 

For 95% of items that are actually bought/sold by bots (and there are plenty of markets that almost noone will touch with a bot either because it's way too risky or backpack listings can't handle them), it pretty much boils down to bringing a significant downside brought to competing sellers but an extreme benefit to buyers. There are legions of players, believe it or not, who don't actually like trying to haggle deals for hours for regular hats/stranges when there's no need to (because there are thousands of the item circulating), but whose situation of being saved a few minutes per trade (actually very substantial benefit when you add it up across the whole site) isn't as sexy to scream about.

 

Bots usually don't undercut when it comes to unusuals its mostly strange items or weapons that they undercut you almost instantly

[Toad]

15 hours ago, Chuck said:

The playing field is already leveled since you can get bptf API access just like everyone else. If you cant make a bot, pay for one. Even bot.tf bots have autopricing now. "Few users who are able to get their hands on bots" are literally everyone able to spare 6 keys a month.

 

On a side note, automation taking over every industry, regardless of you liking it or not. It's faster, more efficient, and better for consumers (no, you and every other profit maker here are not consumers), and it shouldn't be held back just because "robots taking our jobs" advocates are unable to learn and adapt to changing reality. If you can't keep up with business trends, you'll be discarded.

Assuming you know what an API even is, which I wager the strong majority of the tf community doesn't.

 

Your automation argument is more like - imagine even all of our real life markets were controlled by a few people using bots. Want to trade a stock? You can't, you'll be instantly beat by a bot. That doesn't sound right to me.

 

[Toad]

2 hours ago, Starbucks® said:

 

Bots usually don't undercut when it comes to unusuals its mostly strange items or weapons that they undercut you almost instantly

Hate you break it to you but bots are now starting to control much of the unusual market. A large amount of unusuals now only have scrap-rec margins - but that's a bit off topic.

[zol]

No one forced you to use buy or sell orders. The fact you don't like it doesn't make it "out of control". Change the market if you don't like it. But that's how market work.
There are a lot of traders which dont use any bots, make good profit and feel good. If you are just sitting and waiting for any offers without putting any effort then yea, the only thing you can do is crying about bots take your profits.

 

On 3/25/2020 at 8:34 AM, Starbucks® said:

 

Not Zol hes actually bae everyone else probably but Zol he's a bot with a heart 

[MsFloofie]

5 hours ago, Toad said:

Hate you break it to you but bots are now starting to control much of the unusual market. A large amount of unusuals now only have scrap-rec margins - but that's a bit off topic.

It's not that hard to make your own bot. If you've used a terminal for at least 5 minutes, it should be very easy to set one up with TF2Automatic.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

[Toad]

13 hours ago, zol said:

No one forced you to use buy or sell orders. The fact you don't like it doesn't make it "out of control". Change the market if you don't like it. But that's how market work.
There are a lot of traders which dont use any bots, make good profit and feel good. If you are just sitting and waiting for any offers without putting any effort then yea, the only thing you can do is crying about bots take your profits.

 

"We are ruining it for everyone else and if you don't like it, don't use it" and "that's just the way it works" aren't very compelling arguments.

 

 "if you are sitting and waiting for any offers without putting in effort"...says the bot user. Not using a bot requires substantially more effort. Don't be so smug, zol.

[Toad]

8 hours ago, MsFloofie said:

It's not that hard to make your own bot. If you've used a terminal for at least 5 minutes, it should be very easy to set one up with TF2Automatic.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

It shouldn't have to come down to that. Either the website should offer these services to level the playing field or they should limit the functionality of bot users.