Limits in trading

Suggestions
1

I know that right now it is not possible to trade or sell objects, but I have some suggestions. Maybe there should be some limits in trading? For example, it will be possible to trade only with people who you’ve been friends for more than month or two. Or if you people could trade only 2-3 objects a day/week/etc. I know that trading system is based on steam, but maybe there are some ways to get limits

2

Unfortunately, other than disabling certain items from being tradable, we can’t really limit trading like that.

3

ingame trading system? rather than steam?
thought that’d probably not be ideal and take a lot more effort and time

4

We will not be making our own trading system. Should we decide to enable trading, it would be through Steam only.

5

I’m asking this out of genuine curiosity, but what advantages does using Steam Inventory give you? I’ve always believed that Steam Inventory puts some severe limitations on TU (couldn’t sell multiple items together, lag when winning jackpots, other item glitches in condos, etc.), but I want to know what the pros are :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes
6

I’m sure that at least one benefit is less development time spent on the inventory. Since Steam’s handling most of the backend, they basically just need to make sure that everything interfaces properly. That’s more time for the programmers to work on other things. There’s probably other good reasons, but that’s the only one I’m certain of.

1 Like
7

Yeah I was also certain of that one, but other than that, I can’t think of anything (aside from maybe lower costs from hosting inventories). I’m sure there are other benefits, but until Mac responds, I think I’ll always believe an independent inventory system would have been better

8

It’s an entire system that we don’t have to create and maintain.

9

First off, what Caboose700 said. Our own inventory means our own servers, our own bandwidth, and our own system that we have to create. It’s not cheap and it would take a very long time.

We’re very locked into the Steam inventory system now.

Here’s the pros, though:

  • Valve hosts and maintains everything. They also provide support
  • Inventory is already part of the Steam system and is already coded for us
  • The system is tested daily by lots of developers
  • The system is mature
  • The system is secure
  • It’s integrated directly into Steam’s system so authentication is handled internally
  • You can use the Steam trading system
  • You can use the Steam economy system (if we want to)
  • You can easily create items through gameplay events such as playtime, achievements, or stats
  • You can hook into randomly generating items (catsacks) without any massive changes
  • You can track and reverse any item exchanges (purchases/sells/trades)
  • You can easily retrieve what player owns what
  • It has a web interface that makes it easy to update items
  • Item tag system (which we don’t fully use yet, but it’s there)
  • Item custom property system (which we don’t fully use yet, but it’s there)
  • With the addition of stacks, you can have TONs of items

The selling multiple items is actually a limitation of the webapi, which also includes a limitation on our end. We found solutions to this problem with Tower Express, but in-game it would require a bit more work because we use a completely separate system for it.

The lag with winning jackpots would still occur even with our own system because we’d still have to do a queue just like Valve does. However, there’s another issue with the way we give items that blocks the queue for all players if one person is being granted an item. Zak was working on a fix for it, but it hasn’t been thoroughly tested yet - so it’s not ready to be shipped out.

Item glitching in Condo is NOT a Steam inventory issue. It’s the way we serialized data - we used Unreal’s item serialization which ended up getting corrupted sometimes.

7 Likes
10

Thanks for the response, I appreciate it. I learned quite a bit about what the Steam API can do from your post, which is pretty cool. You answered all of my questions :smiley:

Also, glad to hear that fixes were coming for the jackpot lag. I’m gonna stop talking now though because I don’t want to keep discussion away from the trading system.