Trading

ASF includes support for Steam non-interactive (offline) trades. Both receiving (accepting/declining) as well as sending trades is available right away and doesn't require special configuration, but obviously requires unrestricted Steam account (the one that spent 5$ in the store already). Trading module is unavailable for restricted accounts.

Logic

ASF will always accept all trades, regardless of items, sent from user with Master (or higher) access to the bot. This allows not only easily looting steam cards farmed by the bot instance, but also allows to easily manage Steam items that bot stashes in the inventory.

ASF will reject trade offer, regardless of content, from any (non-master) user that is blacklisted from trading module. Blacklist is stored in standard BotName.db database, and can be managed via bl, bladd and blrm commands. This should work as an alternative to standard user block offered by Steam - use with caution.

ASF will accept all loot-like trades being sent across bots, unless DontAcceptBotTrades is specified in TradingPreferences. In short, default TradingPreferences of None will cause ASF to automatically accept trades from user with Master access to the bot (explained above), as well as all donation trades from other bots that are taking part in ASF process. If you want to disable donation trades from other bots, then that's what DontAcceptBotTrades in your TradingPreferences is for.

When you enable AcceptDonations in your TradingPreferences, ASF will also accept any donation trade - a trade in which bot account is not losing any items. This property affects only non-bot accounts, as bot accounts are affected by DontAcceptBotTrades. AcceptDonations allows you to easily accept donations from other people, and also bots that are not taking part in ASF process.

It's nice to note that AcceptDonations doesn't require ASF 2FA, as there is no confirmation needed if we're not losing any items.

You can also further customize ASF trading capabilities by modifying TradingPreferences accordingly. One of the main TradingPreferences features is SteamTradeMatcher option which will cause ASF to use built-in logic for accepting trades that help you complete missing badges, which is especially useful in cooperation with public listing of SteamTradeMatcher, but can also work without it. It's further described below.

`SteamTradeMatcher`

When SteamTradeMatcher is active, ASF will use quite complex algorithm of checking if trade passes STM rules and is at least neutral towards us. The actual logic is following:

Reject the trade if we're losing anything but item types specified in our MatchableTypes.
Reject the trade if we're not receiving at least the same number of items on per-game and per-type basis.
Reject the trade if user asks for special Steam summer/winter sale cards, and has a trade hold.
Reject the trade if trade hold duration exceeds MaxTradeHoldDuration global config property.
Reject the trade if we don't have MatchEverything set, and it's worse than neutral for us.
Accept the trade if we didn't reject it through any of the points above.

It's nice to note that ASF also supports overpaying - the logic will work properly when user is adding something extra to the trade, as long as all above conditions are met.

First 4 reject predicates should be obvious for everyone. The final one includes actual dupes logic which checks current state of our inventory and decides what is the status of the trade.

Trade is good if our progress towards set completion advances. A A (before) <-> A B (after)
Trade is neutral if our progress towards set completion stays in-tact. A B (before) <-> A C (after)
Trade is bad if our progress towards set completion declines. A C (before) <-> A A (after)

STM operates only on good trades, which means that user using STM for dupes matching should always suggest only good trades for us. However, ASF is liberal, and it also accepts neutral trades, because in those trades we're not actually losing anything, so there is no real reason to decline them. This is especially useful for your friends, since they can swap your excessive cards without using STM at all, as long as you're not losing any set progress.

By default ASF will reject bad trades - this is almost always what you want as an user. However, you can optionally enable MatchEverything in your TradingPreferences in order to make ASF accept all dupe trades, including bad ones. This is useful only if you want to run a 1:1 trade bot under your account, as you understand that ASF will no longer help you progress towards badge completion, and make you prone to losing entire finished set for N dupes of the same card. Unless you intentionally want to run a trade bot that is never supposed to finish any set, you don't want to enable this option.

Regardless of your chosen TradingPreferences, a trade being rejected by ASF doesn't mean that you can't accept it yourself. If you kept default value of BotBehaviour, which doesn't include RejectInvalidTrades, ASF will just ignore those trades - allowing you to decide yourself if you're interested in them or not. Same goes for trades with items outside of MatchableTypes, as well as everything else - the module is supposed to help you automate STM trades, not decide what is a good trade and what is not. The only exception from this rule is when talking about users you blacklisted from trading module using bladd command - trades from those users are immediately rejected regardless of BotBehaviour settings.

It's highly recommended to use ASF 2FA when you enable this option, as this function loses its whole potential if you decide to manually confirm every trade. SteamTradeMatcher will work properly even without ability to confirm trades, but it can generate backlog of confirmations if you're not accepting them in time.

`MatchActively`

MatchActively setting is extended version of SteamTradeMatcher which in addition to passive matching offered by that option, also includes active matching in which the bot will send trades to other people.

In order to make use of that option, you have a set of requirements to meet. Firstly, you need to enable SteamTradeMatcher (as this feature is extension of that), and ensure that you have MatchEverything disabled (as trading bots never match actively). Afterwards, you have to be eligible for our ASF STM listing, with a bit relaxed requirements. At the minimum you must have Statistics enabled, unrestricted account, ASF 2FA active and at least one valid type in MatchableTypes, such as trading cards.

If you meet all of the requirements above, ASF will periodically communicate with our public ASF STM listing in order to actively match bots that are currently available.

Each matching is composed of "rounds", with up to 10 being maximum at once.
In each round ASF will fetch our inventory and inventory of selected bots that are listed in order to find MatchableTypes items that can be matched. If match is found, ASF will send and confirm trade offer automatically.
Each set (composition of appID, type and rarity of the item) can be matched in a single round only once. This is implemented in order to minimize "items no longer available" and avoid a need to wait for each bot to react before sending all the trades. This is the primary reason why matching is composed of rounds and not one ongoing process.
ASF will send no more than 255 items in a single trade, and no more than 5 trades to a single user in a single round. This is imposed by Steam limits, as well as our own load-balancing.
Matching round ends the moment we try to match a total of 40 bots.
If last matching round resulted in at least a single trade being sent, next round starts within 5 minutes since the last one (to add some cooldown and allow all bots to react to our trades), otherwise matching ends and repeats itself in 8 hours.

This module is supposed to be transparent. Matching will start in approximately 1 hour since ASF start, and will repeat each 8 hours (if needed). MatchActively feature is aimed to be used as a long-run, periodical measure to ensure that we're actively heading towards sets completion, but without a short-term time and resources pressure that would happen if this was offered as a command. The target users of this module are primary accounts and "stash" alt accounts, although it can be used by any bot that is not set to MatchEverything.

ASF will do its best to minimize the amount of requests and pressure generated by using this option, while at the same time maximizing efficiency of matching to the upper limit. Exact algorithm of choosing bots to match is ASF's implementation detail, but right now ASF will tend to favor bots with better diversity of games that their items are from, with Any bots further preferred.

MatchActively takes into account bots that you blacklisted from trading through bladd command and will not attempt to actively match them. This can be used for telling ASF which bots it should never match, even if they'd have potential dupes for us to use.