Has Valve become more aggressive with rate limiting / throttling / whatever?

[fiftykyu]

Noticed "MatchActively" hasn't been working for a while, I see stuff like:

2022-11-18 14:24:47|ArchiSteamFarm-20392|WARN|1|MatchActivelyRound() System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException: Failed due to error: TooManyRequests

Checking https://steamcommunity.com/my/inventory/ gives "You've made too many requests recently. Please wait and try your request again later." Fortunately it does work later, so it's not permanent (yet?) Dunno if it's the fault of too many badges, trading bots with too many cards, Steam servers being weird or what.

Seems like https://steam.tools/cards/ and https://www.steamtradematcher.com/ have been struggling to read inventories recently too, wonder if there are some settings we can adjust or is this Valve asking would we kindly just go away. :)

[Rudokhvist]

Yes, it has. Some measures were taken in this regards, but Valve seem to keep changing rate limits, so for now there is no reliable solution that works all the time. So, right now it's on hold from ASF side - until rate limits would be settled at some fixed values or until somebody will come up with other reliable approach to handle this.

[War Pig]

I'm guessing those of us with large inventories get locked out quicker. I was looking at a few other large inventories this morning with the intention of sending some trades, got this error, and was locked out of viewing my own inventory for at least 12 hours today.

I shut my ASF bot down to be on the safe side. Even though it wasn't actively farming cards, it does seem to poll every few seconds.

[War Pig]

I had ASF off for nearly 48 hours and still was encountering this issue. I wrote to Steam Support and they seem to be pointing the finger at browser extensions:

"The error you are seeing indicates you are sending too many requests to the Community Market. This most often happens when an automated browser extension is gathering information about items on a page."

I run Augmented Steam as well as SteamDB on Firefox, so perhaps one of those is causing the issue.

[fiftykyu]

Ouch, 2 days and still broken sounds like a big problem. :( My experience with random broken stuff + Steam support has been that by the time you reach the "person who actually knows how stuff works and has the power to do something" it's already fixed itself, but good luck!

It would be nice to get some official word from Valve on what they want us to stop doing, specific numbers, so the people making the tools can change their tools and we can all stop doing it. :)

Don't know if "normal" Steam users have been hit by this yet, or if it's just us fringe users + bots. I'd expect to see a lot of complaining if regular guys checking their inventory or trading or whatever got zapped, but it seems like nobody else has noticed.

I've stopped using MatchActively and that ASF-STM script for now, and not trying to look at any big inventories... Which is a shame since MatchActively has been so, so useful for the badge addicts in here. :)

[Rudokhvist]

Originally posted by fiftykyu:

It would be nice to get some official word from Valve on what they want us to stop doing, specific numbers, so the people making the tools can change their tools and we can all stop doing it. :)

I'm in no way affiliated with Valve of course, but I have a feeling they just don't want us to use tools at all.

[fiftykyu]

Yeah, it kinda feels like that... :(

As for the "MatchActively" stuff specifically, some people have had the idea that Valve could automate that functionality, assuming they actually wanted to. Opt-in, and all your cards magically go where they are needed. Guess you'd need safeguards in case you had a buy order for some specific card, but it shouldn't be impossible. Lots of trades on that first day, though. :)

I've always thought the points shop was a "plan B" by Valve in case of potential anti-lootbox legislation. They could remove random drops, trading cards, booster packs, badges but at least save all the work publishers did on backgrounds and smileys.