What does "MatchActively() Users is empty" mean?

[fr0ntd3v]

My Bot is set up with TradingPreferences "SteamTradeMatcher" and "MatchActively". The first time i did a "match" command i could see that the Bot was matching succesfully. After that every time it tries to match i just see a "MatchActively() Users is empty" in the logs. What does this message mean? The Bot has duplicates in its inventory so it should check for matches to complete sets as far as i understand. Incoming trades from other users / bots are working.

[JustArchi]

It means that there are no users currently listed that have any possible matches for you. Most common reason for that is that either you have no more matchable cards (e.g. finished all sets or you ran out of dupes), or that the dupes you have can't be used for matching with any of the currently listed bots.

[fr0ntd3v]

So is the match function of ASF different than when i do a manual scan on steamtradematcher.com/matcher? Because when i do that i always get some results.

[JustArchi]

You get matches with the bots currently available on ASF STM listing, steam trade matcher might have more bots available from other sources, we don't take those into account and we don't track them.

[nolddor]

Reference: https://asf.justarchi.net/STM

[JustArchi]

Both have their use cases though. STM might get you more bots, but those bots are not running under ASF, so you have no guarantee whether they're up, whether they will accept your trade, and whether you'll actually match at all. ASF bots on the other hand guarantee that they're up, and our server ensures as much as possible that they will accept your trade instantly, if Steam allows. Items matcher plugin also has more "broad" settings than STM, since STM only gives you good trades across fair bots, while items matcher will also consider neutral ones across bots, so you will get match such as A for B with inventory of A A (you) and B C (other party). You wouldn't get it on STM, since the other party doesn't gain anything in it.

So as you can see, on STM you can find more bots, but less matches and without guarantees. On ASF STM listing, less bots, but more matches with guarantees of accepting/reacting. In practice everybody must ask himself what he prefers, there is a possibility of using both, but from my experience, STM bots that do not take part in ASF STM listing are more often than not unreliable and you'll only waste time trying to match them. Those are mostly users looking for profit that will reject your offers or otherwise not react, the whole point why I created ASF STM listing was to ensure that doesn't happen. Still, there is a possibility of some rare card that only some guy logging in to steam once per week has, so you have to ask yourself whether it's worth your time to use STM and try to get that card from him.

I stopped using STM entirely after ASF STM proved its worth through automation to me, the bots listed have so diversified and big inventories that even if they currently have no match for something I need, sooner or later they will have, and I have automation in form of ASF to check those every 6 hours. The most outstanding issue I had with STM was with people rejecting trade offers, not reacting, or items no longer being available, and on top of that I couldn't easily automate it so trades are being sent automatically. Now with harsh inventory limits, STM and manual trading got even less practical, as without using ASF you won't be even able to send a trade offer to bot having 400k+ items in its inventory, so even if you find a match with such, there is little that can be done if you can't load its inventory. Items matcher in ASF doesn't suffer from that, since it gets the inventory snapshot from our server instead of Steam.

[JustArchi]

In fact, the Valve change in terms of inventory limits might be the most important point right now when considering STM vs ASF STM. You won't realistically be able to trade with bigger bots or send a lot of trades, since you'll be cut from doing so through rate limits quickly enough. Even if those rate limits didn't exist, you still wouldn't be able to load really big bots going into 100k+ inventories, and so you also wouldn't be able to match them. ASF STM and items matcher plugin solves that, since our server tells it exactly which assetIDs to ask for, which allows ASF to send trade offers without loading inventory from Steam first, and this is why trading with such big bots finally became viable.

In general though, ASF STM and STM are two independent services, you can use both and they kinda complement each other (as neither covers all of the matches the other has). Whether it makes sense to go after those rare STM matches is your call however, with rate limits we have in place now I wouldn't (and I don't) even bother. It's a pity Steam did what it did, but it is what we have to live with.