Devs outraged as Valve kills CSGOFloat support to fix CS:GO inventory issues
Kind of a shoddy fix if you ask us.
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Valve kills CSGOFloat support: If you’ve been playing CS:GO in the last few weeks, you’ll know that there’s a lot going on with the market right now. Prices on the market have risen and inventory servers are almost always overloaded. Valve has now implemented a fix that has annoyed a lot of third-party developers that own statistic sites around CS:GO.
One of those sites affected is csgocasetracker.com. This website tracks the number of cases opened by the community each day and has been an invaluable asset to those following the state of the market since the announcement of CS2. Whilst this issue does not affect the CSGOFloat market directly, it affects others’ ability to pull market data.
Some argue that the scanning of inventories by the bots could be related to current server issues, and this fix may address that. One Reddit user stated that this is bound to slow you down, with an unbelievable amount of operations occurring daily in the background. The idea to implement filters and data native on the market and inventories were floated, meaning people could rely less on third parties.
Valve changes the CS:GO game coordinator rate limit
Whilst Valve hasn’t killed the CSGOFloat market, they have implemented a heavy limit on requests to their CSGO “game coordinator” that allows the community to fetch inspect details (ie. float values). And since the CSGOCase tracker website works directly off data governed by this feature, the site is now out of commission, for now.
This Tweet directly from CSGOFloat explains the situation. Even though Valve intended to free server load by shedding the CS:GO Case Tracker implementation (that runs through CSGOFloat) as stated above, the CSGOFloat API actually catches Billions of requests and processes them independently.
So Valve has inadvertently probably created more load for themselves – stinker.
Why did Valve limit its server requests?
The reason is simple, save money. With the new influx of players from the CS2 announcement, it’s causing a lot of people to invest in, and open cases. Because of all this trading going on, it’s putting a larger-than-normal strain on Steams inventory servers.
With peak players recently hitting over the 1.5 million mark for CS:GO it’s easy to see how the servers could be getting overwhelmed. We have reported several CS:GO errors lately, including full downs and the “Unable to contact the games item server” error that persists to this day.
In order to fix some of these errors, Valve decided to rate limit the CS:GO “game coordinator” so the servers don’t have to work as hard to respond to requests. This means that services, such as CSGO Case Tracker, that rely on this information are suddenly left in the dust.
Notice this error at the top of the CSGO Case Tracker’s website.
Valve implemented this change in the dead of night, without telling any developers anything. Community is a big part of CS:GO, and Valve just annoyed a large portion of it.
Will CS:GO Case tracker come back?
it’s hard to tell right now, if Valve facilitates an open dialog with the developers of CSGO Case Tracker then we believe that it will be no problem whatsoever. However, if that were to not happen, we’re unsure if CSGO Case Tracker will be able to find a workaround.
Will this affect the CS:GO case market?
No, it shouldn’t have any immediate effect on the market or the value of items, however, it does have an effect on our ability to track the items and statistics of the market. This could theoretically have a small effect on the market, and it could now be so unintuitive that it discourages new users from getting into trading and selling skins. As with anything, it’s hard to say what might be affected and what might not.
But we see no reason as to why this would immediately kill the market. Although the new Anubis collection seems to be doing a pretty good job of that.
Final Word
We hope that these issues can be resolved and Valve can work out a way to keep these third-party sites running without too much strain on the inventory servers. Or we hope that Valve comes to its senses and just upgrades server power and capacity, it’s needed anyway since CS2 is not too far away. And we predict there’s going to be an influx of players like no other.
Shocking news to find out that Valve kills CSGOFloat support. We hope that all can be restored and the community can be whole again once more. We’re sure that the community will figure out a workaround if Valve decides not to work with the community.
