hazThe issue with changing keys straight to metal is that people will be reluctant to deposit keys at all as they are pretty much on a constant rise. I would exchange them on bet rather than on deposit, so that people know that by having keys deposited they aren't losing value.
It would be really awkward in my honest opinion, keys should either be bet(?) or they shouldn't be part of virtual inventory at all, and making a trade with keys buying bots when someone bets keys would also overcomplicate the process
hazOther ideas:
Rosters come up if you click on a team maybe?
Could help people see who they are betting on
That's not a bad idea.
hazHave a friends bar on the side where you can see how much your steam friends have lost/won recently, sort of like the duels thing you see on map change
This one could discourage betting if they see that they friends lost, I like this one much better:
hazAlso maybe a scoreboard of biggest winners each week? Could encourage betters.
Allow comments on matches so people can shit talk about how they are gonna win big on this one
How withdrawals work
Withdrawing item was very hard to design as Valve wants us to specify exact item that we want to trade rather than just any refined metal. This is real problem when two users want the same item and bot has to decline one trade so I had to implement some sort of queue like you can see on scrap.tf and other automated trading websites.
Bot could send offers himself, taking care of choosing correct items, but then users will need to give me their secret token and it makes the site overcomplicated, since I want signing up as easy as signing in.
So I decided to make withdrawal work the same way as deposit, you click on withdrawal button, establish connection with bot and when you reach first place in line you get Trade just like in the previous case. The only difference is that you need to select bots inventory and items that you want to get from him instead of giving him items from yours. If you select more than 2 items of the same kind (except refs), like 3 scraps or 4 recs your trade will be declined automatically, otherwise if you fit in 120 seconds timeframe your trade will get accepted.