the bots don’t have any access to your account, that other users don’t already have, that wasn’t afforded with a publicly viewable profile
STM essentially only have “viewing” access
and since you need a non-private inventory to trade with people anyway, people could already “get” everything/indexed through your manual trades as with STM, or a public profile…
even sites with redemption access don’t really have access to your account through the steam api, even if they have the privilege to activate keys “direct”,
ok now THAT has got to come with a huge potential for fishy shit going on! If not even putting your account at risk for a ban or something for whatever reasons.
i don’t trust IdleMaster myself, nor would i use SAM to get cards, people have been known to get vac bans using those two idling cards
i’d much prefer ASF, and even tho i don’t “fully trust” ASF more than to run it on a unused relic of a machine, and i change my pass after each use,(because i’m pranaoid af), i still prefer it it more over the alternative of the two others, as at least it can’t give me a vac ban.
JShackles, the guy who created Idlemaster is legit, and Idlemaster is totally opensource so I have no issues with using it at all. I suppose there’s the VAC issue but that’s easily remedied by not using Idlemaster whilst playing games. I’ve never used ASF myself but just reading through the documentation it doesn’t strike me as implicitly safer.
Ultimately everyone has their own level of caution and I’d urge people to do the research first before using any third party tools.
true, i just don’t trust vac, or steam, to not misread something and not somehow give me a vacban for not even idling or playing a vac enabled game (highly unreasonable i know, i’m just too paranoid and don’t trust them with their own system enough)
so while i’m sure IM doesn’t give me a vac strike on it’s own, probably only to silly people that did stuff they shouldn’t like playing a vac game while idling, i just didn’t dare risk it after i read a post or two about it
hell i don’t even dare enter a CoD lobby on steam anymore, out of fear i’ll get a false positive strike “by association” on my 12 year old account, because fck InfinityWard etc
so even with common sense and a “don’t be an idiot” stipulation, using X tool, -if it’s a risk, i just run away in fear
-but that’s just me being a bit irrational tho (we need a “crazy face with foil hat” emoji)
Once I found that you could idle games without having to download them I was sold…plus as I said earlier being familiar with JShackles from Neogaf, plus the general total lack of repurcussions over the years people have used Idlemaster and it’s opensource-ness (?) made me realise that it made my life much easier.
yup, there is probably no “good” reason not to use IM, -unless “highly” (unreasonably) paranoid
if i’d never seen a random vac mention it would probably be the one i’d use too, since its the much simpler tool to use,
-i just don’t trust steam enough to not let me be the “1 in a million” and screw things over for me, despite the thousands users that never had any issue. 'Cos i “know” for sure i’m gonna be that guy that’s the exception to the rule
I really like that game, and i still think it holds up to this day. (even re-played it not long ago )
Might be a bit “clunky” in controls to some. But for a linear rpg i find it great:
even with not much new or “spectacular” and with “usual” story, -yet somehow still absolutely stellar back in its day;
*kicks guard
Just adding on to the recent discussion about using card bot services. SteamTradeMatcher is the only one scanning your Steam Inventory and it will only show you matches with other users. When you use the site it will occasionally check your cards for either a week or two as a matching duplicates candidate so you may geta random trade ofer from someone who gets matched with you when they use the site. Usually users mention STM in the trade offer comment. You can also remove yourself from being scanned for public matches on the STM Options page if you want. Users that don’t visit the site in that 1 or 2 week period are delisted from searches until visiting again. STM works and it works really well if it doesn’t timeout under load.
I believe most of the card bots are running an instance of ArchisSteamFarm.
For idling cards yourself, IdleMaster is still the easiest way to do it despite almost everyone out there insisting ASF is the easiest way. IdleMaster is no longer maintained but still works fine and I presume the ASF diehards have just never tried IdleMaster since it’s deprecated.
IdleMaster is open source software so you can view exactly what it does if you want. It uses Steam’s OpenAuth to get permission from you to scan your profile for games with remaining card drops. It then proceedes to tell Steam you’re playing the game. I believe it’s just the basic WebAPI that handles the in-game status for a user. I believe the same web request is used by Steam to show the number of currently online players for the title. It’s not very sophisticated like the Achievements that can also easily be unlocked by a user with SAM. If exploiting the web requests for these purposes were a problem for Valve they surely world have reimplemented a more secure solution by now. A more telling fact about Valve’s concern with farming is that they haven’t simply revoked the API key being used by IdleMaster. There have been no known instances of IdleMaster triggering a VAC ban. What it does isn’t even what VAC sorcery looks for. What IdleMaster can do is possibly prevent you from _connecting_to a VAC secured server since the program is telling Steam you’re also running another game concurrently. Valve doesn’t like users being in two VAC games at the same time. If you’re not idling a VAC game and trying to play one connecting to a VAC secured server at the same time there is close to 0% chance of getting hit with the VAC perma-ban.
don’t think i’ve ever seen that, quite the opposite,
since asf isn’t just a download click and run like IM, but requires some config setup etc etc, asf page itself even says if it’s too complicated use idlemaster or another instead
asf haven’t been hailed as “easier” the posts i’ve read, but “better” → 'cos more features for “other stuff”
single account idling: IM, or asf if bothered/gnome paranoid
multi account idling: asf
any other stuff beyond that, bot, trading, whatever etc: asf, because this wasn’t IM’s purpose
cards don’t expire until february this time i think, so at least no “rush” to get them crafted/trade in those last 24 hours from today until sale ends tomorrow
-man i hated losing cards because they were in trade transit the other years lol
(we need a “crazy face with foil hat” emoji)
'Cos i “know” for sure i’m gonna be that guy that’s the exception to the rule 
)