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Bots need to be banned or limited


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On 3/28/2020 at 6:37 AM, 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.🤦‍♂️

 


🤨

Zol 💔 I do like it, I just don't like any other bot except yours  

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  • 2 weeks later...

I think the undercutting thing is more of a problem with people being able to undercut by 1 scrap on a (for example) 100 key item than it is with bots. In my opinion there should be a min percentage to over/undercut. Like there is on auctions and marketplace. Just my opinion tho.

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On 3/25/2020 at 4:31 PM, 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, 

I've been having the same issue recently with another trader and a buy order. I have a buy order up for a Blizzardy Storm Snowcapped. Every time I relist, I have to adjust the price since the trader keeps bumping it up 1 refined every time. It's just turned into a childish war.

 

EDIT: Since writing this post, the user has removed their buy order. So, that's a thing.

 

On 3/28/2020 at 5:53 AM, Puddingkeep said:

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

While I understand where your point is coming from, I would tend to disagree. I returned to trading after a 1-2 year hiatus and I still enjoy trading and negotiation with people. When it comes to most things, like craft hats, strange weapons, Australiums and taunts, I don't mind having the bots around. It makes life quick and easy to get the taunt I want at the best price currently available. That being said, if I feel I want to negotiate, I just check through the Classifieds and see which traders don't advertise that they're accepting the buyout only or don't have written "24/7 Trading Bot".

 

I would say that low tier trading actually benefits from having the bot inventories around for purchasers. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about unusual trading.

 

The market for buyers is heavily dominated by bots. I've put up a bunch of buy offers for different things. Let's assume, for the sake of the argument, I put up 30 offers. Over half of these instantly got bogged down by bots over-cutting me by a ref or less. It wasn't worth trying to keep the trades up unless I wanted to sit there and just bump the prices to keep my price relevant. And because of this cutting, it makes it harder for negotiations. There's a huge stigma behind "paying less than the top buy order", because traders see the price that they can instantly get from these bots. The price may have been reasonable 2 days ago. But, now that the bots drowned it out, it's essentially "This is what a bot will give me. Make it around that price or I go to the bot".

It makes it a lot harder for low tier unusual traders when you have to negotiate around a bot to get a good deal. Low tier unusual trading is a much bigger game, now that you can pick up unusual hats for as little as 5 keys. But, if negotiation and bargain hunting is what you'd rather do for trading rather than dealing with the slew of bots, there's other websites that allow this.

Am I saying that you should just abandon backpack.tf for trading? No. 

 

But what I am saying is that backpack.tf allows for easier automation for simple trades with more. For the more complex trades, such as unusual negotiation, there's other sources around to allow much better trading. The main one that comes to mind, that most traders use, is bazaar.tf. Not only does it allow you to advertise multiple items in one trade, you can put in lengthy notes about pricing, details about the hat and put placeholders in the trade, like "Craft Hat", "Currency" and "Offers". It makes unusual negotiation a very viable method. A lot of traders on backpack.tf use bazaar for wanting offers on multiple hats, as well as advertising them on backpack.tf.

While I could understand wanting to slow the bots down, there's no realistic way of making it happen unless there was an API rate limiter, as suggested by Sniper Noob:

On 3/28/2020 at 8:54 AM, 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 utilise retry rate back-off logic across the board.

 

The only other way that a price suggestion war could be stopped is what was suggested by Markt3:

On 4/10/2020 at 7:42 AM, Markt3 said:

In my opinion there should be a min percentage to over/undercut. Like there is on auctions and marketplace.

If it was made that the price suggestion had to have a larger margin over (like 1-2% or something), it would mean that price suggestions would just have larger prices overall and discourage "tennis bumping", where the prices just goes back and forth. The other idea is to limit the currency for things like unusuals. Most people don't want to pay rec and scrap for unusuals. So, making it have to be 1-2%, to the nearest refined up or down from previous minimum, means less cutting by fractions. People putting up buy orders would have to consider if raising their buy order to try and beat another seller but having to raise it multiple refined, or even multiple keys, is really worth it.

That's just my 2 cents about the issue.

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