So, I have a little confession to make. I have been running a steam market arbitrage bot for the last 4 months.
It was around Jan 13, 2013. It started when I saw a SF Scattergun being sold on the steam market for only $3. I was refreshing the new listings, and I pressed the buy button, but I was too slow, someone else had already purchased it.
Since the steam market opened in December, I had bought a lot of crates before by manually refreshing, and was also somewhat aware that other people were using bots to buy from the steam market. So, on Jan 17th, I decided to write and run a steam market bot, which would refresh the page, and start buying things at under the market price. Buy low, sell high seemed like an obvious strategy. It would output a log file, which told me whether I was fast enough or not in buying a particular item.
I kept my bots running as fast as possible by locating it as close to Valve HQ to minimise ping, so I chose the Oregon EC2 region hosting it on Amazon AWS. It cost roughly $25-30 per month to host it there, and I used about 800 GB down and 23 GB up of bandwidth per month, running between 3 to 15 concurrent http threads. At no time did I feel like I was straining their servers. The bots would sleep with a few seconds delay depending on the response received.
I was able to make easy profit using this, about $100-$300 a day. I covered approx. 99% of the TF2 market, everything except for botkiller items and a few strange parts. I used catchalls and regular expressions to buy any items of a specific quality or type, for example: any genuine hats, anything with strange and festive in the name, or Level 0 vintage weapons and set buyout thresholds for each item. I was able to buy almost anything for well below market price. The most profitable included 2 strange festive scatterguns for $23 and $2, salvaged crate #30s for between $0.02 and $25, a vintage bill's hat for $0.02, and thousands of crates series #1,#13,#14,#19,#21 for between $0.02 and $0.66 each. I traded the items, such as crate #19s bought for $0.02, for 1 tf2 key, even though they were worth more, and so they would just be resold on the market; the 200 item sale limit was restricting my ability to just resell those myself. Similarly for other low value items.
Most of the dips in the graphs on each item in the market page were from my bot buying. In total I bought over 10,000 items. I would manually resell higher value items such as salvaged crates at their market price to keep the steam wallet topped up, and just recently set up automated trading converting low value items to keys using the dispenser.tf site. It became an endless profit cycle which required minimal effort to maintain. Normal trading felt slow, boring and unprofitable. I used custom email notifications instead of Valve's to email myself the name of the item I bought and the price in the subject line. Every time my iphone lit up, it said that I bought x for y.
It became an addiction.
I knew that it was against the Steam TOS, but Valve didn't seem to be taking any action at all, until now.
On 2 May 2013, I was banned from all my steam accounts. I have since been in contact with steam support to come up with a resolution.
Steam support has deleted all my TF2 items, worth aproximately $10,000, including: 2261 TF2 keys, 52 salvaged crates, 3 craft #1's, 3 earbuds, a Max head and an Unusual (worth ~3 buds), and a couple of vintage timebreakers and a Dragonclaw hook (Dota 2 items), as well as adding a 52 week community and trade ban on those accounts. However, I am allowed to buy and gift games from the steam store on those accounts, as well as activate cd keys, so its not a full account lock.
Overall, I enjoyed the challenge of writing the bot, and also competing with other bot writers. I am going to miss some of my items, especially the low craft numbers. I will never forget the experience of crafting those hats, it was a mixture of excitement and adrenaline, of being the first to do it. The items themselves are just an entry in a database.
Here are the backpacks showing the items that were deleted:
dmn001 (main account):
http://backpack.tf/id/76561198029635086?time=1367564400
dmn008 (main buying account):
http://backpack.tf/id/76561198078383626?time=1367564400
dmn0010 (key storage account):
http://backpack.tf/id/76561198082831146?time=1367564400
I had been making a steady profit before the steam market existed. I also don't really need the money, which is why I had put 2000 keys in storage in the first place. It was more of a way to store and diversify my investments, obviously in hindsight it seems that it is not a good place to store them, since if you break the TOS for any reason, steam can basically do anything they want to your account.
I have a bit more spare time now, I no longer have to check the prices of items and adjust the buyout prices of falling items, which lately has been all of them. I no longer have to worry about someone hijacking my backpack. I don't think I will ever go back to the scale of the inventory that I had, and I didn't really play the game to start with, except for a little bit of MvM.
If I had any advice to give, it's that if you have a lot of TF2 items with value, ask yourself if you really need them there, and if not, start cashing out any spare assets.
In future, I plan to move onto other things, one of my goals this year is learning Python and iOS and writing an app.
Ask me anything.
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) De scout zijnde Wltrs en ook 
. Anders pak ik een willekeurige hightower server of inderdaad een rocketblast of reddit server. UKCS kan altijd ook nog.
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