In reading about the API rate limiting, the documentation talks about a method responding with an ominous backoff field, and states that the client should cease from calling that method for that many seconds.

Is there a dummy method that always returns a backoff that I can test against? Otherwise, what does the backoff field come back in the form of?

Regular int?

{ ... "backoff": 20}

a string to be parsed?

{ ... "backoff": "20"}