State of Trade 2015

[ᴰᴳᴺ Church of KFC]

Allow me to reiterate
KFC you and I were not playing TF2 back in 2009 when Buds, Bills, and Keys were those prices and unfortunately there not going to go back there as sucky as that is. The price change of most if not all items was inevitable as the game grew in popularity, more players got into trading starting of course crafting weapons to make scrap metal, with more metal getting added into the system everyday for 6 years you bet there will be a lot of inflation. So long as more metal is created in the game keys will continue to rise in price. Since metal and keys are changing in price it also has an effect on the value of items. Bp.tf prices values on what they sell for and what people buy them for. People sell items for bp.tf suggested values because that's what they have sold for. Sure sometimes I don't like when people stick to bp.tf prices but they have every right to charge that price.
What frustrates me is that I try and maybe buy unusual people get offended when I offer lower than that price or when I try items bulk at my discount of 30% I get trades from players who put in the items then ask full price completely oblivious to what I posted in the chat and said on the mic. Some people don't read and other's don't listen. My point is trading websites have not broken the economy, they have linked it together made it even stronger. Everyone has a way of accessing any item they could ever want just by looking it up and finding a seller. It has become a faster system which I enjoy very much. The fact that I can buy any item in game and then open that item for sale to the entire TF2 community is amazing. It's a wonderful connected free market that I use just about everyday. If you blame the trading websites that provide a way to connect the market and all the players together as the downfall of our economy, in my opinion you are most surely mistaken.

Sidenote: Apologies for any offence given KFC, Cmp, and Nano.

Apology accepted.

Side note, I do believe scrap.tf has done bad things. Scrap-banking is pretty hard considering people can literally just go to the website and buy one for another wep instead of twice the price (it doesn't seem like that much, but a scrap is twice the price of a weapon).

I do feel that bible.tf is going downhill. I know it's based off of outpost trades, but... a lot of people sell things for BS prices on outpost.

It's at times like this I wish games didn't have an "economy". Tf2 should be "The Great Depression Simulator". If you don't get that, go over your history again.

 

[DarkPaladinPrime]

Scrap.tf did take away the business of scrapbankers but it provided a way for anyone to get whatever weapon they want for a cheap price in a matter of minutes. Before you had to go on a trade server and find a scrapbanker and hoped he had the right weapon but most of them charge a scrap per specific weapon while scrap.tf just does wep for wep. Anyone who trades using the websites can sell for whatever price they want there is gonna be BS pricing for rare items like unusuals but more common items are going to stay the same price (Hats, Cosmetics, Stranges, etc.) Those small items are the basis of the economy and their prices don't shift a significant amount everyday like unusuals.

 

[Gatherix]

Not to mention with these rapidly changing key prices, you can take such a huge advantage. Buy keys, sell them for high price, wait for 'em to go down, buy a bunch more... And sure, making profit like that is easy. If you're patient. But it's almost impossible to do scrap2unusual now because of all these automated bots like scrap.tf etc. because if someone wants a weapon, they can buy it for another weapon. Bots have played a huge part in ruining the economy.

I fail to understand why your inability to compete with a competitor is equivalent to "ruining the economy"

trading

 

[ᴰᴳᴺ Church of KFC]

I fail to understand why your inability to compete with a competitor is equivalent to "ruining the economy"

oh god that's so huge. *insert that's what she said*

It's not just me, it's everybody who does scrap banking. It's so convenient that it's ruining profit making for scrap-bankers. It takes 5 mins to get a wep nowadays...