LootBear — Growth, Security, Bugs and Roadmap

LootBear
LootBear
Sep 6, 2018 · 5 min read

LootBear’s goal is to deliver joy to millions of gamers around the world, and it’s the security team’s job to keep our members, partners and employees secure.

The past month we’ve invested valuable time and resources on upgrading both our security protocols and risk evaluation AI, fighting scammers/hackers and making sure you are 100% protected. As you know, we ensure the safety of your deposited items or your moneys worth back.

Unfortunately focusing on security upgrades had its price, causing bugs to pile up, some of the most common issues were:

  1. Items disappearing.
  2. Error while trying to withdraw.
  3. Steam trading errors.
  4. Returning items not being detected.

What happened, how did we fix it?

After investigating each case we found and fixed the problems, here are a couple:

  1. Using an open source trading library — as you know, trading got a big hit when Valve decided to add trading cooldown, closing down any site who supported gambling or instant trading, the CS:GO developer community started abandoning trading and CS:GO, this left the open source trading library unmaintained and out of date.
  2. Bot issues with valve —We are operating with a large number of bot accounts, actively holding an inventory worth more than $1.5m. Some of our bots had issues with Valve and were frozen. (see the solution below)
  3. Support team understaffed — long waiting times for assistance.

Solutions:

  1. We used bleeding edge tech and developed our own trading library (not open for 3rd party use), supporting more than 120 edge cases and fully integrated into our security AI, an adaptive machine learning system that evaluates each rent risk level in real-time. It uses hundreds of signals about each user & payment and taps into data across our network of 100,000+ businesses to predict whether a user, payment or trade are likely to be fraudulent. This is a true coding beauty.
  2. After negotiating with a representative at Valve all our bots are fully operational and back online! =]. We are growing rapidly and becoming a major player in the trading community, we do not believe in gambling, nor in attempting to bypass Valves terms of use, as I wrote in the beginning our goal is to deliver joy to millions of gamers around the world.
  3. Scaling customer support, we now have representatives in 5 major countries (including USA and UK), tripling our support staff. Leading the team is Julia, she’ll personally oversee every inquiry, making sure it is handled ASAP, for urgent issues you’ll hear back from us within 1 hour, otherwise it can take up to 24h. With patience and cooperativeness we ensure everything will be taken care of.

Encountered a bug?

In a perfect world, every time we rolled out code, it would work perfectly in production and there would never be any bugs or issues. Our strategy is not about pretending that our world is perfect. It’s about adapting to reality, and iterating to improve our processes and our flexibility so that when problems arise we’ll be able to deal with them ASAP (this is the reason for tripling our customer support staff).

We are growing massively whilst still in Beta and doing our best to resolve all user-facing issues, we ensure everything will be fixed and users will get compensation accordingly.

Still having an issue, please report it here, an agent will contact you asap.

What’s next?

Wow, so many epic things are planned for the upcoming months, crazy partnerships, new games, skins to gear instantly, LootBear prime, sponsorships, tournaments and of course continue improving the security of our products and services while strengthening our relationship with the community.

Skins to Gear Instantly

When you paid those $50 on a new skin did you imagine that you would be able to convert the skin in to a real life gaming mouse? Well, its true, and open for early access. Read more about it at the bottom.

Meet the man who put the GO in CS:GO

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.

We are very happy to welcome the brilliant Jordy (MojoOnPc) to be a part of the founding team. Jordy is a visionary, high tier youtuber, businessman and a phenomenal marketeer. Good to have you with us!

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Skins to Gear Instantly Love Story

The addition of this service came from our partnership with Jordy Janssens (AKA MojoOnPC). He and his team had been working on delivering this service to the CS:GO community (with plans of expanding into other games) in a separate project. Upon speaking with Jordy, we realised that the two projects shared many of the same goals and so we decided to combine our efforts and begin working towards delivering an all inclusive skin marketplace — Allowing users to do everything imaginable with skins, all from one incredible platform. Pretty cool, eh?

The inspiration for this service came from one of the co-founders of our company breaking his mouse in anger whilst playing CS:GO (we’ve all been there, surely?). This now-mouseless gamer felt frustrated at the fact that he now had to spend more money on buying a new mouse, investing cash (that was meant for other things) into his hobby to continue playing.

But he then realised, he had already invested hundreds of dollars into CSGO skins and if he were to sell one, he could buy a new mouse without having to invest more cash that was intended for alcohol the following weekend.

The problem with this was the waiting time — He wanted the mouse ASAP so he could continue to play. He didn’t want to wait a week for his mouse to sell. He wanted it NOW.

And voila, the “SKINS TO IRL ITEMS, INSTANTLY”. Service was born. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

LootBear

LootBear's blog

LootBear

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LootBear

Top rated by more then 100k gamers. All-In-One trusted marketplace for buying and renting gaming items.

LootBear

LootBear

LootBear's blog

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