I'm not sure if I'm going to be actively developing Idle Master any more. It's just become so demoralizing to wake up every day and see this:
(the guy with the link goes to a screenshot of his Steam client library that has about 20 total games in it, almost all of them are F2P). And that's just from the Steam group. The discussions on that group are the same though there are some great people filling in for me answering these questions (even though this particular issue is #1 in
the stickied FAQs post). This sort of stuff is prevalent not only in Steam but also in Reddit any time I sign in I typically have a handful of messages that typically get the same copy/paste response from the FAQs. Everyone in that screenshot also tried adding me as a friend on Steam. They're not always this nice about it either.
I completely understand that these users are in legitimate need of assistance when using Idle Master. However, the program started as a "this works for me and solves my problem, it might work for you too" and has grown into a huge hassle. The majority of this misunderstanding comes from people not being fully aware of how trading cards work - so Idle Master gets a bad reputation because people don't fully understand the problem it intends to solve. This has been exacerbated by Steam changing how Steam works in regards to trading card drops and various other things several times over the past year.
The latest issue is that Valve finally started cracking down on account security by invalidating cookie data server-side.
This is something they should have been doing all along. Idle Master took advantage of them not doing this, but now that they are there really isn't much that can be done about it. I'm sure you have all seen this by now, but you know when you're in the client and you open a webpage on Steam and you get the "Checking your information..." with the loading animation centered across the page? This means that Steam has invalidated your existing cookie data and it's checking your local client authentication data to generate a new sessionID. Unfortunately for Idle Master, this means you're getting logged out because the program can no longer read your badges page until you re-authenticate with Steam. The bottom line is that if Steam logs you out server-side, you're going to have to go back through client-side authentication.
The problem again of course is that people expect me to have some kind of miracle fix so they can go back to interruption-free idling. While a fix is technically
possible, this isn't a problem that really affects me personally very much (I get logged out about once every 24 hours) so it's not a huge priority for me to fix. Even if I did start getting affected like some people's accounts that get logged out every hour, I've more or less stopped buying bundles and my supply of available trading cards is going down faster than they're being replenished, for like the first time ever.
I think what I'll do is simply update the Github page / website to specifically state that the program is being provided completely as-is with no warranty or support, use at your own risk, etc etc. I'll keep the Steam groups open but unsubscribe myself from everything there. My email is already doing auto-responses.
It sucks, but I think the only thing I can do for my own sanity at this point is to step away. Maybe I'll be back at some point, maybe not.