Question A few general Questions

[xNiceEinz]

Hey Guys,

I'm here to ask a few more Question about Steam and Steam Trading and how you handling some problems

1. The first question i've got is about the polling interval of the trading bot. So what amount of seconds you're using and how do you deal with polling errors? You just ignore them or what you've done to prevend you're system from them/reduce the errors? (Tryed out a few different times like 5 seconds up to 20 seconds but everytime my bot show me this errors on mass
   
2. My second Question is about a extended trading system. Currently i've got just one bot on my system. Are there more advantages than just a extended slot capacity? Maybe it prevend the laggs on the one bot and reduce the polling errors? Or why the most sites/systems got more than one bot.
   
3. Another Question is why the most sites banned cases is there a special case why i should do that too or just for "WE DON'T WANT CASES ANYMORE!"? May it slow down the trades or Steam throttle the trades with cases as low priority or is there another important thing i didn't got? Ofc its annoying to fill a bot with just cases but thats not the point here.
   
4. Anyway Question four is about trade handling. I saw only a few gambling site which let the user send the offer to the site, the most sites let the user select the offer than the site send a trade to the user with a security token. It just more comfortable for the users or it's to prevent laggs on the system/bots ? Would be nice to know, may somebody got a answer for this and also if there are more advantages than just the comfortable thing.
   

 

Would be great if i'll get some usefull answers to improve my system and also could help out other people which got the same questions now or in future.

 

best regards xNiceEinz

[Dr. McKay]

Firstly, you need to understand that Steam is completely awful, horrible, and unreliable.

1. It depends on how quickly you need to process offers. If you're going to be acting on offers that users send to you or on offers that you send where you receive items, then a higher interval is fine if you provide a node-steam-user object, which provides notifications. Generally, 30 seconds is enough but you can go down to 5 or 10. How frequently are you getting errors, and what do they say? If they're extremely frequent, then there's probably something wrong on your end.
2. More inventory capacity is the primary benefit of getting more bots, but you also need to keep in mind that you can only have 30 outgoing active offers at a time. If you need to have more active trade offers, then you need more bots. Performance-wise, there isn't really a difference.
3. It's mostly just because cases are plentiful and mostly worthless. Banning them keeps inventory space available for items that are worth more.
4. It comes down to preference and user experience. Personally, I think that having the user pick their items on your site and then having your bot send them an offer is the best way. This ensures that you have the user's valid trade URL. It also ensures that the user can only create an offer using items that you allow. If you have the user send you the offer, they can put anything into it and you'll just have to decline/counter invalid trades. As far as downsides, doing it this way means that you need to load users' inventories on your end. Loading inventories is pretty heavily rate-limited by Steam by IP.

[xNiceEinz]

1. For understanding the background we use atm just one bot on our system and allow any kind of skin in the deposits by the users with up to 5 trade per user (just 2 @ the same time)

So now they come and start depositing. Till up to ~ 15 user the system works fine, less polling errors, but if there are up to 25-60 users which depositing syncron the bot can't handle it because there are to much polling erros and can't accept errors also some trades which got an accept error there is no acepted notification as explained here ( https://github.com/DoctorMcKay/node-steam-tradeoffer-manager/issues/115 ) 
So some trades are already accepted but we don't get a correct response by the node module steam tradeoffer manager.
We've a real time bid application so we're using a 15 seconds polling interval, what do you think is the best solution to improve the system at this point?

2. You've said there is no difference if we got one or multiple bots.
So just for example if there are 5-10 trades which we're accepted by the users at the same time there is no difference if we handle this on multiple bots or just on one bot?
So if understand it correctly steam throw this polling errors for the ip and not for the account correctly? Then we had to add one more ip to get a better perfomance?

 

 

 
 

[Dr. McKay]

Please tell me what the actual errors are.

[xNiceEinz]

Polling errors: Timeout and Data Temporary unavailable.

And"Unable to accept offer: Cannot load new trade data: Data temporarily unavailable

(often on this error we get never a Status Change from "receivedOfferChanged" when accepted, but trade is in the meantime accepted... (so we have to recheck manually (but with which algorithm, for example no statuschange for offer > 60 sec => check manually with getOffer()

 

so we loose neccessary time because we don't know if the trade notify as normal with "receivedOfferChanged" as acepted or we have to check this manually

 

You know if the polling error restrict the ip or restrict it just the bot account ?

As i said interval is 15 seconds atm

Edited April 1, 2016 by xNiceEinz

[Dr. McKay]

Which polling error is more frequent?

[xNiceEinz]

1. Timeout

2. Data temporarily unavailable

3. Can't accept offer

[Dr. McKay]

Timeouts are just timeouts. There isn't anything that can be done about them, unfortunately.

 

I'm considering removing the "Data temporarily unavailable" error. That error is returned when the API call succeeds, but the returned offer has no items on either side. I think there's probably a better way to handle that.

[xNiceEinz]

Mhh okay, but how could i prevend this??
And how they come up its by ip or by account?

Edited April 1, 2016 by xNiceEinz