Building a successor to Barter

[Nao 尚]

If you aren't aware of it, Barter.vg's administration hasn't been on Steam or Barter in many months now. The website's domain may or may not expire come November, hosting may even expire before that, making us all users without a 'good' trading site to use. Unfortunately, the source code for the website remains a secret, so it's not like anyone can just magically take it to another server and ensure its well-being.

So I've been talking with many people, and it looked like I had the most motivation (and/or skill) to try and build a successor website.

The idea is to have something that's close in spirit to Barter, allowing you to retrieve your custom wishlist & tradables, and make offers to other users. I'll also try to add more 'community' features, because why not. There is little money to be made on this website, only the assurance that we can keep the idea alive. So if I ever lose motivation, I'll have to count on someone else to take over.

This will be a community effort, so I figured I should open a new topic here on the Barter Steam community, just so we can discuss current, future and removed features.

[darkstar/zx]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Nao 尚:

Początkowo opublikowane przez DARKKi:

And doesn't barter have that "pending trade" when some game is in offer?

Yes, but (1) it doesn't show up everywhere (it shows up where it matters the most, the offer page, but for instance games aren't tagged as such when selecting them during offer creation. You can only see it once the game is added to the list... (2) it doesn't show up as a 'soon to be received' game. Only as a 'game you're going to send'... Meaning, if you made offers to GET a game, and someone accepted the offer, there's no 'pending trade' tag to warn other traders that you're already going to get the game.

I don't mind doing multiple offers for a single game, but it can be tedious to remember to edit or cancel other trades on both sides of the offer (items i'll send, and items i'll receive)...

Good point! That could be enchanced to show as "pending trade" and "accepted in trade, pending" or something like that.

Początkowo opublikowane przez Nao 尚:

Well, I'm reusing my work from Wedge, so you can already see if you think it looks okay...
http://wedge.org
It's far from perfect, but we're talking about ~100KB worth of CSS just for the generic classes. There are multiple 'skins' you can try out (there's a select box in the sidebar), I'll probably settle on the most popular skin. Which is probably going to be the one used on wedge.org itself... Dunno. I like the other ones, too. Look at Wuthering, it attempts to imitate the default SMF look and does it nicely. Also Warm was my pitiful attempt at doing flat design. I've always been bad at that. But the sidebar is cool.

I think i t looks very nice and clean!

[Nao 尚]

Thanks! ;)

[FlyLeaf]

tyvm for this great idea i was really worried about what will happen if barter goes down
i haven't read all of the comments since its 213 comments yet and i don't know if anyone said that idea yet but i would suggest a price tag for the game if the game has been free in ANY site or been discounted it will tell you that this game had been discounted for this amount so the trader will know the price of that game in any other site.
ty for your effort and hope this site will start soon!!!

[Nao 尚]

Uh you mean ITAD..?

[theemu]

Początkowo opublikowane przez FlyLeaf:

i would suggest a price tag for the game if the game has been free in ANY site :muxin:

Here is quite good actively maintained listing of Steam games that have been given away for free in massive quantities: https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/pJRbR/

Początkowo opublikowane przez FlyLeaf:

a price tag for the game if the game has been discounted

I agree isthereanydeal.com is pretty comprehensive for official store and bundle deals. then you may wanna check grey market resellers,some traders value their games based on those prices https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/4fntxu/

[FlyLeaf]

Początkowo opublikowane przez theemu:

Początkowo opublikowane przez FlyLeaf:

i would suggest a price tag for the game if the game has been free in ANY site

Here is quite good listing of Steam games that have been given away for free in massive quantities: https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/pJRbR/

Początkowo opublikowane przez FlyLeaf:

a price tag for the game if the game has been discounted

I agree isthereanydeal.com is pretty comprehensive for official store and bundle deals. then you may wanna check grey market resellers,some traders value their games based on those prices https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/4fntxu/

what i mean by which game were gone for free is when a trader ofer you a game for another game let's the site will tell you that this game was for free in another site (without telling which site if you want) and you would know that this trader hasn't got this game by buying it.
and by ITAD what i mean was that the site will give another price tag about that game or item and will say the price from there at that moment

[Nao 尚]

Yeah, there's even a Chrome/Opera add-on to show g2a/kinguin prices on Steam store pages. (A bit annoying though, it takes a while to load them and then disrupts the page layout...)
g2a prices aren't exactly fantastic though. They're often close to the real trade market value, but sometimes grossly over- or under-estimated, and there really are people who only swear by g2a's prices. (Unless of course their own tradables are under-estimated... In which case they'll pretend that g2a is just a crappy website filled with scammers. Bad faith is so human :P)

Anyway, yeah, the thing with my site is that I'll eventually enable comments on game pages, so you'll be able to post if a game is being given away etc...

[Nao 尚]

(Warning, technical database-heavy message!)

Aaah, the beauty of trying to do this the right way... :-/
So, a few weeks ago I wrote an ITAD parser for bundles, to ensure that the site would have the best possible source for past bundlings. I met tons of problems, notably due to many titles on Steam (and ITAD) being duplicate, generally because the game owner would rename their product by adding or removing a sub-title. I'm not sure why these aren't 'caught' by ITAD... Anyway.
I fixed & fixed the scraper to try to account for this kind of crap, but there's a limit to what I can do automatically.
Now today I met a game that was marked as being bundled twice on Barter, and zero time on ITAD. It turned out that ITAD used the Steam packages 'Deluxe edition' for this title, and Barter links to the non-deluxe version. Given that only Deluxe editions were bundled for that game, ITAD makes more sense. Problem is, the package isn't entered manually in Barter... And since I mirror the game ID's from Barter, I can't do that either.
So, I tried to devise a thing where I'd populate the database's empty IDs with automatic packages retrieved from ITAD bundles. I would then only need to scrape them from Steam later when my Steam scraper is under work.
That was a cool idea, except a quick select max(id) from my library showed me there were only 32 unused IDs in the database... Ouch. There's likely to be more bundled Steam packages than that.
So then I considered instead going for negative game IDs for barter entries... Yeah, I know it sounds weird, but having a /i/1234/ URL for a game is okay, then why wouldn't a /i/-1234 URL for a Steam package be okay too..? Plus, I could then keep importing games from barter for as long as possible, and manually add my needed packages to the negative range.

Okay, great... Except my id field is auto_increment. And auto_increment implies unsigned, meaning a negative number is seen as a very large number and will break auto-incrementing. Fantastic...
So now I'm stuck with either disabling auto-incrementing and relying on manual ID creation when adding a game (which would be okay as long as I import from Barter, but will be a PITA when I switch to Steam scraping... Then again, doing that 50 times a day for new Steam entries isn't that horrible either), or finding another solution to add these packages without disrupting the game numbers.

Finally, I could also stop 'mirroring' the game IDs from barter... I have a main ID and a barter ID anyway, it just happens they're currently identical, but I could just as well not bother with mirroring these numbers, but then it'd force me to double-check my code to use the barter ID when importing from Barter, and the game ID when handling it internally.
Also, I liked the idea that you could switch from a Barter game page to a new site game page just by changing the domain name. With that change, it wouldn't be possible anymore, unless I add a new URL scheme and do something like /i/1234 -> redirects to the matching game ID in my database (which sits at /game/2345, for instance.)
What do you think, guys..?

(Yeah, I'm mostly writing this message as a way to clear up my mind...)

PS: what's funny with the above-mentioned package is that it only contains one item, the only listed on Barter... And the package is listed on the product page at the exact same price, implying they're the same, but the 'bare' package (game only purchase) and the 'deluxe' package don't have the same sub ID (a classic, I know), so the deluxe version may have some sort of DLC that's unavailable for purchase, and thus invisible on the store. But really, what a mess...

Edit: For those interested, I've also implemented Steam library importing right now. Up until today I only handled wishlists & tradables... Library should also handle games that were removed/revoked from your library, so I'll be able to point out to the user if a game got revoked long ago and they didn't get a Steam notification about it. (Yeah, it happened to me yesterday...)

[Revadike]

What about games like East India Company vs East India COmpany Gold

[r6d2]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Nao 尚:

What do you think, guys..?

(Yeah, I'm mostly writing this message as a way to clear up my mind...)

So, you're not really asking for advice, are you? :-)

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

- ITAD is notoriously faulty at matching games correctly. @tomas3333 has deployed a partial solution to this problem recently, which required some heavy name normalizing, but it will just never really work until he decides to use AppIDs and SubIDs. Hence, ITAD is not a good source to gather info on old bundles, mostly due to the renaming habits you mentioned.

- OTOH, this site[greenlightupdates.com] is a nice, precise and reliable source for new bundles. You may even subscribe to get new bundle notices, easy to parse because they already include the proper URL with AppID/SubID.

Keep up the good work!

[Revadike]

I actually suggest we make use of subs instead of apps:
GET http://store.steampowered.com/api/packagedetails/?packageids=

[r6d2]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Royalgamer06:

I actually suggest we make use of subs instead of apps:
GET http://store.steampowered.com/api/packagedetails/?packageids=

I can think of several reasons why apps are better than subs for inventory handling, but none in favor of subs. Do you have any particular benefits in mind that would derive from doing it that way?

[Revadike]

Because I always had to exclude multiple games from my tradable list, just because they aren't available in the steam store. Also, with Archi's Steam Farm, you can easily find the sub id of a steam key (if you own it) and from steam inventory it is also easily available. Besides, a package contains a lot more information. Like, is it a beta/alpha, is it region locked, is it removed from steam store, what items does it include exactly, etc. No more need for custom user tags or comments.

[r6d2]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Royalgamer06:

Because I always had to exclude multiple games from my tradable list, just because they aren't available in the steam store.

In my experience subs are far more volatile than apps, but ofc YMMV.

Początkowo opublikowane przez Royalgamer06:

Also, with Archi's Steam Farm, you can easily find the sub id of a steam key (if you own it) and from steam inventory it is also easily available.

No need for ASF, actually, remember you can do it using the console commands

licenses_for_app

or

licenses_print

The main issue I think complicates things is that every list Steam manages for the user (wishlist, library, ignored and followed), is in terms on apps and not subs. For instance, you cannot wishlist or ignore a sub on Steam (unfortunately, because it would be handy in some cases, IMHO).

But that's not the worst part. It's very common that a single app belongs to many subs (packages) throughout its history, making it very hard to make consistent matches among subs.

But this is what intrigues me the most:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Royalgamer06:

Besides, a package contains a lot more information. Like, is it a beta/alpha, is it region locked, is it removed from steam store, what items does it include exactly, etc. No more need for custom user tags or comments.

Where do you find all that information in a sub? I'm really puzzled :-S

[alex]

Początkowo opublikowane przez r6d2 🐶:

Where do you find all that information in a sub? I'm really puzzled :-S

Using the name and metadata.[steamdb.info]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Royalgamer06:

I actually suggest we make use of subs instead of apps:
GET http://store.steampowered.com/api/packagedetails/?packageids=

While using subs may solve the metadata problem you proposed, linking keys to subs is generally a bad idea that would create more problems than it would solve. For example, you'd have to figure out exactly which sub a key links to (which may not be an issue with smaller apps but with bigger, region-locked apps, it'll be harder - Fallout 4 has 14, some are identically named) and make sure that it's close to or exactly the same as the key you have, some information about packages is not made public, it's just too technical for a normal user to understand, subs are subject to change more than apps, etc.

Marking everything manually using a system like the one Barter has would probably be much more simpler.