Remember when it cost 2.33-2.66 refs?

>Mongoloids basing their economy off fiat keys and even worse, ref
>Not trading strictly by the medal standard, the only resource in the game that has a truly capped physical value

I once made this pic to point out how insane the price of keys became
boy, did this not age well

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I fucking TOLD a guy in a trade server. I fucking TOLD him. I do hope that dumb cuck didn't go through with his suicide rants though.

Holy shit. To think I used to play this market crap years ago.

>this was 4 years ago

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>tell a guy this
>he tells me that's not how the tf2 economy works
TF2 players with MLP names/avatars are dumb as fuck.

>spend like 15$
>craft 83 hats
what happened

> Tfw when opened one of kind unusual roboactive antlers
> sold for a few buds at the time because didn't know better and wanted other cosmetics
> still one of a kind probably worth tons of buds

I think it cost somewhere around 16 ref when I started playing (Gun Mettle). Bloody hell, where are we now.

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>there are still people who participate in an economy this fucking inflated and bad
What the shit, why would anyone bother at this point

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>that fucking drop

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bots and hoarders killed the trading. as well as inflation. nobody crafts hats anymore

Remember when keys were 1 Ref?
Remember when 2 Bills were a Bud and 5 buds was a Max?
Remember when the most expensive unusual was a burning kabuto?

i made 5 grand from tf2 trading

>buds were 4.97 on scm on average a while back
>over 7 dollars each now

bros...

Nice metal sink you have there valve

can anyone fill me in on what happened in 2015? This looks like the digital equivalent of the great depression

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How much would this be worth if it was tradable? its the only thing i have in this game

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that might have been the russian money laundering scheme and item duping thing maybe?

>TF2 killed my habit of collecting stuff in games
Thanks Gabe!

is there any key seller even willing to trade for metal anymore?
I find it hard to believe anyone's happy to see you dump 50 metal in their inventory instead of money

>ref has no value
it used to have some
but yeah, it's not surprising, like many other pointed out already, as time passes, more total drops there are, and thus more and more ref, so the price had to drop eventually

if the item is worth a key, the will accepts 50 ref or a bit more, around 60)

might have been people cashing out of tf2 for csgo, but I don't truly know

How can this be fixed? Would it make sense to disable crafting metal for awhile like another "Golden Wrench" event to stop this or would someone find another way around to it

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it took valve a good 5 years to give these the flashy opening animations everyone else did.

hah

a bunch of burning kabutos exist now, but I rest easy knowing I am the proud owner of the only strange unusual haunted ghosts co-pilot that will ever exist

There was a small drop, people got spooked and went apeshit selling their buds and everything came tumbling down

th-thanks, based gabe!

Barely anyone playing meaning no one is spending money on keys. Reached a point in this game that cosmetics dont mean shit anymore.

I miss my Scorching Tyrants. But I enjoyed 400$ more.

I remember when I had the first Blizzard's Hallmark, top tier pimp hat.

your solution would only stop, temporarily, the increase, but it can't be fixed, the amount of ref around won't magically drop unless people craft en mass, which wont happen

>they dont trade keys to reputable traders to get every game they want off steam for way cheaper than any sale steam has had for the past 10 years

>saved 30 hats for crafting in 2012 or 2013
>wanted low craft#
>valve introduces hats that couldn't be crafted
>they'll never have them ever again cause of grades
I'll never not hate this

spreadsheet.tf got caught doing insider trading and lost reputation. People started using backpack.tf instead as their word-of-god price sheet. Problem is, backpack.tf takes price suggestions based on sales proof while spreadsheet.tf did private investigations. At least one person figured out how fucking easy it is to fake trades with dummy accounts and bots and such and starts hoarding keys to "trade them" for higher prices and keep records of it for the sole purpose of creeping up the value. Rinse and repeat this shit a few times over a very short period of time and people start panicking, treating their keys like a guaranteed investment, and now keys are consistently worth a scrap/rec/ref more than whatever the sheet price currently is.

I won't deny the market was bound to collapse eventually, especially when people start cashing out their backpacks, but the way it started just stinks to high hell. At earliest it should've happened when Valve stopped adding cosmetics to the craft list, which was the only real metal sink.

My unusual is currently worth $1087, not sure how much it was worth before but that's just what it is valued at right now. I'll honestly just carry it with me to my grave, I used to always want a haunted ghosts effect, it's not a cloud effect, and it's an all class unusual that is also strange, while being able to easily fit the art style and mesh into any merc's wardrobe after more cosmetics have been released. It's basically a perfect unusual for me, though it wasn't actually a dream one.

>key costs $2.31
>game i want cost $4.99 at its cheapest
>most traders want 3 keys
>most reputable traders wants 2 keys and 25 ref
>one or 2 reputable traders want 2 keys and 13 ref
>2 keys and 13 ref is $5.20
>"cheaper than any sale steam has had for the past 10 years"
yeah no

>tfw don't have any unusuals
It's not fair, I want a shiny hat too

Just do an event that uses ref, with a decent outcome if you pour lots into it.

Like a Mann vs Machine where you can spend ref to upgrade the last boss and have him drop really good stuff. If you want a homerun you just add a small chance for an unusual at the max level last boss

maybe you shouldn't deal with jews? 5 buck (in USD) games would be 2 keys at the most from my trade partners

>selling for 3 ref
>buying for 2.33
price is firm ;^)

I stopped playing when keys were around 2,55-2,88 ref. What the fuck happened?

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I think you should be able to craft something exceedingly rare like an unusual, obviously not actual unusuals but something just as valuable
perhaps when crafting a cosmetic there's a chance it'll be Austrailium (as in it'll have the same gold texture as austrailium weapons, not just painted yellow) or even better you could get gold paint

Buy keys from 3rd party sites bro

people who care about things like this were the worst part of tf2

all supply & no demand
Metal is made from weapons which is constantly being given to players for free but there's nothing to use the metal on other than trading

Valve needs to implement something to spend the metal on, otherwise it'll remain worthless

>Get unnerved by all this hat weirdness, especially when modifiers are added to make me question the functional necessity of this
>End up stop playing TF2 after like the first Halloween event where I failed to even get enough metal to craft the Horseman's axe
>People keep badgering me on Steam for my L4D Bills hat
>Set inventory to private
>Forget about TF2
Seeing all this economy shit nowadays just makes me sad for what TF2 became
Less a video game and more just a stock exchange

The economy is inflating constantly, what do you expect

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buds pretty much stopped serving a purpose after valve made it so you could trade more than eight items at a time

also the steam market helped people realize just how many of the damn things there are

>the guy that managed Valve's virtual economies was also the finance minister of Greece
D E N B T S

What is crafting weapons
What is crafting cosmetics

Trading was and will always be gay as fuck, let's discuss maps instead.
What does Yea Forums think of cp_Steel?

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you can get a decent looking one for like 40 bucks
hell right now a strange private eye with the orbiting fire effect, the private eye being a very underrated kino hat is selling for 33 dollars

+ it's a multiclass hat

Why would you do either of those things instead of just trading for the weapons and cosmetics you want?

Convoluted.

>What is crafting weapons
Not worth it because you get weapons for free to begin with, and there hasn't been anything new in years.
>What is crafting cosmetics
Not worth it because it's random with such a large pool for the game to pick from.

>an economy will hyperinflate when everyone can infinitely print their own currency and there is no incentive to remove it from circulation
who could have seen this coming

if anything I'm surprised refs held value for as long as they did

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you can get about four steam funbucks for the bill's on the steam market

Best map in the game, only shitters and redditors disagree

I craft hats from my ref specifically because I don't trade.

I think it was the Halloween event, too many kids just started recently and couldnt think outside of spreadsheets and price checkers, they saw buds decrease in price (due to people wanting keys more to get halloween effects) and panicked, tried to undercut others to sell their stock quickly. As a result, it was a domino effect. That was basically when I dropped out, buds were a great currency so having to deal in keys was too much of a pain in the ass, forget it.

That's all cool and all, but I don't care. I have a job, I have spare cash to use on frivolities, if I want a game I just buy it and play it.

Valve should just make it so any hat you craft has a low percent chance of being unusual.

They don't care about the ref market crashing. It's good for them. Means people buy more keys.

Are you a f2p or something? That's the only good reason I can think of for you to spend 3 ref on a random hat instead of getting one you like for 1.33 ref, which is what 99% of craft cosmetics are actually worth.

Nope I don’t, started playing in April of 2017

Steel is a fucking amazing map, but ONLY if both teams know what they're doing, which sadly never happens in pub, and all my Steel community servers are long dead.

>Used to dump the IPs of everyone in the server into some website that showed you the most valuable items in their inventory vs their playtime
>Used to trade laser weapons for salvaged crates and stranges
>Used to frequent sites like backpack.tf and tf2 outpost
It all seems so far away now

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No, I just already have cosmetics I like on everyone and don't like interacting with TF2 traders. Refs on itself is useless to me so might as well gamble it all away.

U have w kritskast helmet? Erm it would probably be priceless

pretty dull, the capture progession mechanic isn’t much fun with how restricted access to the points are. Probably more fun playing on teams of 4 or 6, but highlander or higher is boring.

What's an efficient way to crash the TF2 economy?

join the backpack.tf cabal and pricefix like all the other jews

The same could be said about the irl economy.

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you can't mint your own coins at home

Also you can't just stop participating in the global economy since you have to consume sometimes no matter what you do.

You can always stop giving a shit about TF2.

What do you mean? You can grow food for example and then sell it.
You don't get ref in tf you get weapons you sell for scrap then rec then ref

Tf2 is still fun in 2019 and my addiction won’t seem to stop, if only I took that addiction more seriously

How can I get into comp?

scrap is made out of weapons

Craftless hats are beyond retarded. Completely devalues refined metal.

>tfw you can never sell your reddit hat

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That's exactly what I said yes good job user

Seek out pugs. In-game comp is dead.

>tfw fell for the tf2 trading meme

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Remember what happened to Germany and Zimbabwe?

yes, so you should understand that coins are not made out of food

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I regret not getting one. I knew it was going on but didn't want to be made fun of by Yea Forums bullies

I refuse to believe you can be this retarded user

the feeling is mutual

hyperinflation

Fun before F2P, basically impossible to get a good game going on it now.