Level up bots and Steam rules

[SleepyKitti ❤]

Hi,

There are several (bot) accounts on Steam which never play games but they (automatically) trade/exchange certain items, cards, gems, etc. to support some users leveling up their Steam account.

Are these "bot accounts" allowed on Steam? (The accounts themselves. Not the use of their services) Is there no rule against them?

a, If they are allowed, why? They don't play games and are totally impersonal... they just massively trade.
b, If they are not allowed, which rules are against them?

Thank you for any opinion! Maybe this is a grey zone, but I'd really like to know what other people think..

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

It is a grey zone as of now. They aren't officially allowed but Valve has yet to stop it.

Valve has only recently started removing advertising names and avatars. Who knows if they will start on the ones with BOTs as names since most are linked to skin sites.

[SleepyKitti ❤]

oh, thank you! :) This is what I thought, too.

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by SleepyCat ❤:

oh, thank you! :) This is what I thought, too.

Generally speaking, things work like this (and this is also the case out in any other business in the real world).

It's not so much "are they following the rules?" as "are they doing anything so bad it's actionable?"

View it from the side of someone like Valve. You're a company. You provide a service , and have customers who enter into an agreement in the terms of service.

Contrary to what some people think, they don't go around looking for tiny things to throw the book at people for, because they REALLY want to err on the side of caution and not throw the potential for legal action back at them.

So, in cases like this, yes, it's a grey area, but they will continue to abide unless they start doing something swry connected with them, like scamming others, and then they will act appropriately in each case.

I suspect, like Hotsauce says, that it's only a matter of time before this is changed and tightened down though, if it becomes enough of a problem affecting others.

[B-o-B]

If they had to take this kind of action then you can be sure it was to curb a large and/or growing problem.
Those account's now being action'd spawned mostly trouble.
Quite evident to the average forum user over the last couple of years.
I haven't seen much of what you say, as anywhere near problematic, but i don't want to rock any boats either.
All 3rd party site's are a risk.
And of course in valves tradition normal users weren't affected. That's very important to them.

[Reaper]

Why would they want to stop them? Level bots help people get card sets fast and that means people are crafting badges. That puts money in Valve's pocket since it means people are more likely to trade for what they want and buy the remaining cards on the market. Especially since the more people make badges, the more cards are dropped through booster packs, which in turn causes people to buy the remaining cards from the market which Valve takes a cut of.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Originally posted by FeaR_TH3_Reap3R:

Why would they want to stop them? Level bots help people get card sets fast and that means people are crafting badges. That puts money in Valve's pocket since it means people are more likely to trade for what they want and buy the remaining cards on the market. Especially since the more people make badges, the more cards are dropped through booster packs, which in turn causes people to buy the remaining cards from the market which Valve takes a cut of.

Mainly because it is a service that is paid in items that can be extracted for real money.

[Reaper]

Originally posted by cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

Originally posted by FeaR_TH3_Reap3R:

Why would they want to stop them? Level bots help people get card sets fast and that means people are crafting badges. That puts money in Valve's pocket since it means people are more likely to trade for what they want and buy the remaining cards on the market. Especially since the more people make badges, the more cards are dropped through booster packs, which in turn causes people to buy the remaining cards from the market which Valve takes a cut of.

Mainly because it is a service that is paid in items that can be extracted for real money.

:qr:

To be fair though, everything on Steam can be extracted for real money. Rules say Steam accounts can't be sold, and yet there's always a market. Hell, the current rate for a global elite account in CSGO is around $50 I think.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

The bots are trading for keys by the thousands daily. The amount of money that can be laundered in this fashion is astounding.

I'm glad they locked new CS:GO keys to accounts and made them worthless because they can no longer trade new keys.

[Sazzouu]

Originally posted by cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

It is a grey zone as of now. They aren't officially allowed

Infact given the Steam ToS they are forbidden.

You may not use [...] automation software (bots), [...] or any other unauthorized third-party software, to modify or automate any Subscription Marketplace process or the process of Steam account creation.

However basic trading without any money going from a to b is not that big if a deal for Valve

[J4MESOX4D]

Originally posted by FeaR_TH3_Reap3R:

Originally posted by cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

Mainly because it is a service that is paid in items that can be extracted for real money.

:qr:

To be fair though, everything on Steam can be extracted for real money. Rules say Steam accounts can't be sold, and yet there's always a market. Hell, the current rate for a global elite account in CSGO is around $50 I think.

The item bots associated with the likes of CSGO house an incredible amount of items with a significant real money value. A lot of these items are stolen and laundered between accounts which put other users (who buy for real money) in danger of accepting stolen goods and receiving an account lock. A huge and popular group yesterday was nuked and I was absolutely astonished about how many items were present - literally over 100,000 items with an unfathomable end value.

Trading card bots are harder to trace and the cards have been obtained legit largely. Although it's against the standard Steam guidelines, action against them seems to be very little and it doesn't negatively impact other users as a whole.

Accounts that are sold always carry the risk of being stolen or being reclaimed by the original owner. Just a couple of weeks back a user who had possession of an account since 2014 and over 250 games lost access because the original owner self-locked it - they can now use proof of ownership to claim the account back and everything that the other user bought on the account in the past 7 or so years. Valve also can't do much about accounts sold externally in private deals but they can take action when things like bots operate on the platform.

[cinedine]

Originally posted by FeaR_TH3_Reap3R:

Why would they want to stop them? Level bots help people get card sets fast and that means people are crafting badges. That puts money in Valve's pocket since it means people are more likely to trade for what they want and buy the remaining cards on the market. Especially since the more people make badges, the more cards are dropped through booster packs, which in turn causes people to buy the remaining cards from the market which Valve takes a cut of.

Level-up bots are normally fueled by low-effort games. Often times by getting Steam keys en masse for them or pretty much abusing give-aways. Steam has done quite a bit to hinder them already.

They also are affecting actual users' chances to get these boosters as opposed to their hundreds of thousands of farming accounts.

There was a dev some time ago that noted that a give-away resulted in a 10k increase of players on Steam while only around 100 were actually on the servers. That was before the introduction of give-away licenses which don't grant card drops. https://www.pcgamesn.com/prismata/steam-bots-popularity-indie-prismata
Just to give you an idea on the ratio of farm accounts Vs actual players.

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by FeaR_TH3_Reap3R:

Why would they want to stop them? Level bots help people get card sets fast and that means people are crafting badges. That puts money in Valve's pocket since it means people are more likely to trade for what they want and buy the remaining cards on the market. Especially since the more people make badges, the more cards are dropped through booster packs, which in turn causes people to buy the remaining cards from the market which Valve takes a cut of.

Simple - because you're looking at the problem wrong. You're viewing it from ONE perspective, that of making money.

If that money is made at the expense of other users, or affects the other user's in some other way (like ruining the market or pricing) then Valve just ain't going to have that.

[Kargor]

I'm using trade bots frequently, to reduce the number of "unbalanced" cards in my inventory bit by bit -- basically, the end goal is to clear the entire trade matching list :-)

There's no money involved whatsoever -- it's a card from a set vs. another card from the same set. I'm not even using the Exchange bot, which uses a credit system for cross-set trades and for taking the last card that it has, unless I can get an actual 1:1 trade.

[♥♥tutor♥♥tαrα♥♥]

Originally posted by cyberluddite:

Yet ask Steam Support or a Community mod, and they'll swear up and down that bot accounts are impossible because of the verification system. Doesn't matter if you can prove it right then and there, "bot accounts don't exist."

I know that at least one Valve employee is aware that some Steam accounts are set up to be automated traders:

Originally posted by johnc:

We’re updating trading to include a captcha as part of confirmation process.... We’ve excluded a few of the existing third-party trading services from this requirement so they can continue to function.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/tradingcards/discussions/1/622954023422884592/

The Steam community soon figured out that there wasn't a white list of approved trading sites' trading bots. It was just that any account that had more than 5000 trades didn't get a captcha when confirming a trade offer. My account had more than 5000 trades when this was implemented and I never saw a captcha when confirming trades then.

Originally posted by YarNova:

For those who haven't read the last few pages: There's no actual whitelist, simply accounts with 5,000+ trades do not get the captcha.

I can confirm that after having farmed 5,000 normal trades on my bots, automatic trade offers are working again. backpack.tf did the same thing with their donation bots and have confirmed it as well.

If a site you use is broken, just wait for the developers to do the same with their bots. Valve & Steam Support cannot whitelist specific accounts it seems.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/tradingcards/discussions/1/622954023422884592/?ctp=17#c622954747290191699

[Halo]

I've always found the trashbots to be useful, with no option to delete inventory I have used them to get rid of accumulated offer vouchers.

You can usually get better offers off Steam than with the voucher, you can't give them away and they do eventually expire, but if I get a rash of them I have used the trashbot to offload them.

They are unsolicited junk, I don't want them and the bot serves a purpose Steam hasn't bothered to implement in 20 years.

You are referring to abusers, which is the problem with any system, but banning them outright can remove things that are useful.