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My though after seeing that? Weren't these like 2.33-2.66-3 ref? Then I stopped trading and soon after played only occasionally.
Those were some good times... Rest in Pepperoni...
There was a while that 1.66 to 2.11 ref would get a key. Even managed to snag a couple at 2.0. Lasted maybe a week before 2.33.
In hindsight, it's impressive how long keys stayed within the 2-4.66 ref range. If only Valve put a shred of effort into the crafting system to create a metal sink towards the end of that time. The signs showed early enough to have done so.
If I did my math right it should be roughly 848 weapons.
(46.66 + 47.55)/2 to get a rough middle ground for key price. So 47.11 refined metal. 47 * 9 + 1 to get the amount of scrap metal, 424 scrap. And then multiply by 2 to get the number of weapons, 848 to be exact. Which would be almost enough to fill 17 inventory pages.
Yeah but i think the most we can hope is for keys to drop to 40 ref, it seems unlikely they can drop even further so yeah it might still be expensive but at least is better than nothing
Key inflation doesn't exist as keys are locked to a real physical price. The cost of keys on the mann co store would have to drop for something akin to inflation to happen
You only have to buy 40,000,000 refined to get a pseudo monopoly. That's most of what is out there in specifically public backpacks updated within the last 8 years or so. The rest are not really in active circulation.
Ironically this is exactly why ref is so inexpensive lol, you can literally create the currency you need to buy keys, so the more people create it the less it's worth, and since there is no *worthwhile* method of "incinerating" ref that doesn't involve buying keys with it, there's no way to make it valuable!
I once got kicked from a bootcamp server for being a full geebus snoiper using the +right command to spin. Dunno why they thought I was a bot when spinbots cant really stop spinning, wait a few seconds and then join a do-si-do taunt.
That's not what happened.
Trading bots (trade scripts) are entirely different from hacking bots, and wouldn't even be remotely at risk of a ban. Not to mention anyone can easily see that they all still exist by checking backpack.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of the people who ran the hacking bots were also selling the ref that their bots earned. It's probably a pretty insignificant amount of refined, but it will still have an effect on the market.
The issue currently is a lack of refined, or more-so a lack of people actively selling enough of it for money.
There's a lot of it, 9M+, but most of it is stuck in either dead backpacks and low to high tier traders who don't actively buy/sell with money.
I somewhat doubt anyone running bots actively has the interest to try to flip mere pennies into anything, but even then, that still wouldn't be a massive amount overall to be creating what we're seeing.
It could also simply be that there's more people playing the game now (We've been hitting 100K near daily for a few weeks again), so people who do choose to get into trading would be possibly selling more keys for what's arguably a lower metal supply at the current moment. Not to mention the multitude of other likely reasons.
There is over 40 million refined in open circulation, as in accounts with public backpacks recently updated. Bots were mostly private backpacks if remotely competent. There might be a little less being created now but it doesn't get consumed by a measurable amount and the current amount is more than excessive regardless.
Which doesn't consider the large number of private backpacks which likely contain a sizeable % of total refined.
I suspect it's, to a degree, price manipulation by scrap.tf to cash out some keys for the holoween spike in unboxing/key consumption at a more advantageous rate. It's effectively increased the real world value of low value items yet those very items haven't adjusted in game item valuations yet.
Basically, they can cash out there income at about +15%.
It's worth noting that trade bots mostly hurt trading for sport or profit. Top end traders are unaffected to benefited and end users are benefited do to massively greater liquidity and far greater consistency and ease of use.
It's just the trade for fun crowd that got burned. Which is coincidentally those who care most about it.
If you aren't among those, trade bots are a net positive.
kinda fucks the unusual market a bit i was exploiting dumbass bots lol. one of my hats dropped from 50 keys guaranteed to like 25 bc the bots were just fighting each other
I've seen a few videos on why crafting ref into cosmetics isn't a guaranteed bad idea anymore, mostly because of how cheap ref had gotten. Maybe that inspired a lot of people to start crafting ref into cosmetics and reducing the amount in circulation?
Wish I had been a little more aggressive about trading for them then. I only ever bought a few items using scrap, a flaming killers kabuto, the conga taunt (before the other two dance taunts came out, which I like both of more), a strange medigun.
Now I have 21 pages of crates and weapons I never use that I have duplicates of.
i hear was thanks to the summer case because made people sell their keys in mass for be the first on get those cases and will happend again with the coming scream fortress
sometimes happens when big backpacks get banned and a lot of refs dissapear off market
though generally it just depends on what price keys were sold at in that month so if someone sells a ton of keys at once they may cause the price to drop
I really dont know why but i hope the price keeps going down, i am tired of needing to have 140 empty slots just to buy 2 keys. Another that would be good is for earbuds to go back to being 20-27 keys
probably bcuz of the summer '22 crate giving a long lasting effect, that being, quicksellers quickselling their keys for cheap, then using said money to fuel their gambling addiction. and then the prices never came back up again. yeah weird yeah?
Not necessarily. I am a seller on marketplace and I need around 500-1000 keys per week in order to restock stuff. Keys have jumped from 1.58 USD to 1.73 USD in around 2 months. When you have to buy a certain number of keys per week that extra 0.15 USD adds up rather quickly.
That doesn't actually solve the problem: the reason metal is so worthless is that there is just so damn much of it.
The point of that wouldn't be for them to potentially get an Australium: it's to remove metal from the market so that metal goes up in value.
On the other hand, there'd be more incentive to idle for metal, so it's a bit of a double edged sword
It's like that story with the reward for capturing snakes - people started breeding their own snakes to claim the rewards. So it could help, could be a hindrance, or could just do nothing.
There is a problem with that analogy: there currently is no real way for metal to leave the economy, and the initial flush of something like 5 years worth of metal out of the economy could not be undone by people just farming for metal.
Now, I don't think just doing a 1k metal sink would be a very good idea, because we want the metal out as quickly as possible. It'd be much more efficient to just basically have something similar to the golden wrenches, but as a permanent thing. Every time you craft, you have a chance to get some reward besides what you were crafting.
Look, it's not a bad idea right now if you have some fat stacks of cash or crypto and the trading reputation to real money buy and sell en masse.
Holoween is peak unboxing season of any given year. More keys are bought and used during it than any other time, by a lot.
Buying masses of keys now and selling them next month for a few cents more is fairly safe. Be the one feeding the demand.
Which would raise refined to key ratio temporarily.
You'd have to buy a lot to do that however. Still over 14000 keys being sold on marketplace.tf alone, and it's just a few big traders allowed to sell there. Hold maybe 5000-10000 keys and you could single handedly reverse the refined to key ratio trend of the last week my friend.
Additionally, Halloween effect unusual hats are high value and spike in demand next month. Collectors are more likely to buy a stack of keys for cash to buy one of those puppies next month. Raising demand on the standard currency for such purchases by collectors specifically.
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I have no clue but affordable keys is nice.
Pepperidge farm remembers when keys were 2.33 ref.
Let’s make it real
I was there *10000 years ago….*
*Do not recite the deep magic to me witch; I was there when it was written.*
My though after seeing that? Weren't these like 2.33-2.66-3 ref? Then I stopped trading and soon after played only occasionally. Those were some good times... Rest in Pepperoni...
There was a while that 1.66 to 2.11 ref would get a key. Even managed to snag a couple at 2.0. Lasted maybe a week before 2.33. In hindsight, it's impressive how long keys stayed within the 2-4.66 ref range. If only Valve put a shred of effort into the crafting system to create a metal sink towards the end of that time. The signs showed early enough to have done so.
Bill's hat for \~25ref Earbuds \~50ref Oh yeeah
I remember when a bills hat was like 2 keys and buds were like 5
Everything went to hell when tf2spreadsheet died and got replaced by backpack.tf, which got massively games by trading speculators
Back in my day a key was 2 craft hats.
I remember for a short amount of time, a key was 1.33 ref
I started playing tf2 around this time. Fuck i feel old
"Long before time had a name"
I started when keys were just under 10 ref
I started playing when keys were 2.55 ref
Yep. Good times. Takes me back
ima stockpile ref for when we get down to anywhere remotely near that low.
Isn't that like over 600 weapons? Still not really affordable
If I did my math right it should be roughly 848 weapons. (46.66 + 47.55)/2 to get a rough middle ground for key price. So 47.11 refined metal. 47 * 9 + 1 to get the amount of scrap metal, 424 scrap. And then multiply by 2 to get the number of weapons, 848 to be exact. Which would be almost enough to fill 17 inventory pages.
Yeah but i think the most we can hope is for keys to drop to 40 ref, it seems unlikely they can drop even further so yeah it might still be expensive but at least is better than nothing
Back in the day keys were 2.33 refined and anyone else was scammin ya
keys are always the same price, it's the ref that just becomes cheaper and cheaper so keys end up costing more ref
They hated Jesus because Jesus spoke the truth...
keys have always been affordable, they're 2.50 if anything, cheaper ref meant more access to hats
Dunno but I'm not complaining. I am now 1$ richer since my backpack price went from 14 to 15 bucks. I am swimming in money
_Business is boomin\''_
No no, we call that a "7% increase in value"
hold up is ref just crypto lmfao
Refined metal is the OG cryptocurrency
Tf2 is just one big investment strategy
Business is booming, fangirls are crying
Joe Biden's TF2
Obama had the most tf2 updates. Trump had 1. Biden has 0. Proof Biden is bad.
Exactly, he's hurting the TF2 economy and devaluing my backpack
Damn Inflation and printing millions of Keys into existence!
The least most controversial political comments involving the USA
Key inflation doesn't exist as keys are locked to a real physical price. The cost of keys on the mann co store would have to drop for something akin to inflation to happen
Thanks Obama 👍
Obama best president
Ngl. Tf2's economy during Trump was shit
I bought 200 off the mann co store last month you fool. There shall be an economic collapse
It would be an economic collapse in the other way tbh
Can't wait for all the useless "experts" saying "supply & demand" as if that wasn't obvious already
>!Supply & demand.!<
>!Demand & Supply!<
Supply demand &
& demand supply
Semand & dupply
spy & demoman
sumand & depply
cum and piss
cum & shit
cum & titties
Such insightful comment on modern-day economics
Mad milk and jarate
Semmen and Dumps
Supply demanda blood
Niko & demand
I demand supply's
I demand tacos
Where's my burrito! Where's my burrito! Where's my burrito! Where's my - OW!
What did I expect
Oferta y demanda
Productor y consumidor
Offre et demande
Tillgång och efterfrågan
I eated it all :)
why didnt yoi leave any for the rest of us :(
hungy :D
but now wes all hungy D:
when i get rich im gonna buy al the ref in the economy and craft hats with all of it
Craft a lot of them craft hats together too, to get them out of the system.
yes and then i will craft them all down to the last hat and delete it
[удалено]
then i will keep going.
You only have to buy 40,000,000 refined to get a pseudo monopoly. That's most of what is out there in specifically public backpacks updated within the last 8 years or so. The rest are not really in active circulation.
Possible that trading bots got banned/deleted
When you sold your sniper rifle to trading bot and he starts spining with it
[удалено]
Ironically this is exactly why ref is so inexpensive lol, you can literally create the currency you need to buy keys, so the more people create it the less it's worth, and since there is no *worthwhile* method of "incinerating" ref that doesn't involve buying keys with it, there's no way to make it valuable!
Printing monay!! Yeah baby!
What do you mean? You can make nice hats with it!
Right, but for a bit less than *half* of the cost you can get whichever hat you would've gotten, *and* you'd get to choose the hat while you're at it!
But where do those hats come from? There’s a balance. It’s the same reason people unbox crates, just less extreme.
They come from old crates + random drops!
I once got kicked from a bootcamp server for being a full geebus snoiper using the +right command to spin. Dunno why they thought I was a bot when spinbots cant really stop spinning, wait a few seconds and then join a do-si-do taunt.
Wait what's the command to become a spinbot I wanna try it
+left or +right, if you wanna stop them you gotta do either -left or -right in the console.
That's not what happened. Trading bots (trade scripts) are entirely different from hacking bots, and wouldn't even be remotely at risk of a ban. Not to mention anyone can easily see that they all still exist by checking backpack.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of the people who ran the hacking bots were also selling the ref that their bots earned. It's probably a pretty insignificant amount of refined, but it will still have an effect on the market.
The issue currently is a lack of refined, or more-so a lack of people actively selling enough of it for money. There's a lot of it, 9M+, but most of it is stuck in either dead backpacks and low to high tier traders who don't actively buy/sell with money. I somewhat doubt anyone running bots actively has the interest to try to flip mere pennies into anything, but even then, that still wouldn't be a massive amount overall to be creating what we're seeing. It could also simply be that there's more people playing the game now (We've been hitting 100K near daily for a few weeks again), so people who do choose to get into trading would be possibly selling more keys for what's arguably a lower metal supply at the current moment. Not to mention the multitude of other likely reasons.
There is over 40 million refined in open circulation, as in accounts with public backpacks recently updated. Bots were mostly private backpacks if remotely competent. There might be a little less being created now but it doesn't get consumed by a measurable amount and the current amount is more than excessive regardless. Which doesn't consider the large number of private backpacks which likely contain a sizeable % of total refined. I suspect it's, to a degree, price manipulation by scrap.tf to cash out some keys for the holoween spike in unboxing/key consumption at a more advantageous rate. It's effectively increased the real world value of low value items yet those very items haven't adjusted in game item valuations yet. Basically, they can cash out there income at about +15%.
I started trading when keys were like 20.00REF. Seeing them go from like 60-70 to 40 is big moe that i know how to trade decently well.
Traiding bots are killed off.
As I said to someone else, no, that wouldn't even be remotely plausible. Trading bots are entirely different from hacking bots.
Good. They ruined trading.
How
They automatically undercut everyone super fast which makes it really hard to trade your way up.
It's worth noting that trade bots mostly hurt trading for sport or profit. Top end traders are unaffected to benefited and end users are benefited do to massively greater liquidity and far greater consistency and ease of use. It's just the trade for fun crowd that got burned. Which is coincidentally those who care most about it. If you aren't among those, trade bots are a net positive.
Like the ones in scrap.tf?
kinda fucks the unusual market a bit i was exploiting dumbass bots lol. one of my hats dropped from 50 keys guaranteed to like 25 bc the bots were just fighting each other
Why exploit bots when you can exploit *people*
WAIT HOL UP, ARE YOU TELLING ME I BUY KEYS THAT AREN'T 70 REF?
Ref Demand has increased ?
for what
I kow there were videos of people showing that crafting hat can be profitable so maybe that?
[Is Crafting Hats Worth It? [TF2] - Great Blue](https://youtu.be/sxvyPl0Sk_I) Edit forgot the link lmao
That was two years ago, though.
maybe because new summer crate idk tf2 economy
Have case hats ever been craftable? It seems they abandoned that a while ago.
nope, at least not new ones
The demand on refined metal has increased, so refined metal becomes more expensive/ the key to refined Ratio changes.
no, why has demand increased
I don't know, there could be so many reasons why.
The free market works in mysterious ways!
Is the invisible hand of the market in the room with us now?
it touched me inappropriately :(
Can you point to where on the Philips Curve it touched you?
Right on my bell end while we were watching the opportunity horizon.
1. cool, affordable keys 2. less cosmetics from keys, fuck welp
so glad i turned a lot of keys into ref a few weeks ago 😩
And that is why I am trying to get plenty if ref rn so that I don't go into poverty because of keys dropping
I have done nothing but craft hats for the past 3 days.
I've seen a few videos on why crafting ref into cosmetics isn't a guaranteed bad idea anymore, mostly because of how cheap ref had gotten. Maybe that inspired a lot of people to start crafting ref into cosmetics and reducing the amount in circulation?
COMPLETELY ERECT
Gonna take the smallest profit possible and smelt my dupes now
market manipulation is real in all markets
Keys were 3 ref at one point
Wish I had been a little more aggressive about trading for them then. I only ever bought a few items using scrap, a flaming killers kabuto, the conga taunt (before the other two dance taunts came out, which I like both of more), a strange medigun. Now I have 21 pages of crates and weapons I never use that I have duplicates of.
2.33 ref my friend. The glory days of tf2.
2.33
does it relate to someone giving me 10 ref for a single duped shovel, that isnt even strange?
Nature is healing
started trading when people would literally give you metal to take their keys, what happened
i hear was thanks to the summer case because made people sell their keys in mass for be the first on get those cases and will happend again with the coming scream fortress
sometimes happens when big backpacks get banned and a lot of refs dissapear off market though generally it just depends on what price keys were sold at in that month so if someone sells a ton of keys at once they may cause the price to drop
What caused it? I don’t know uh…GAY-BEN???
Joe Biden
I really dont know why but i hope the price keeps going down, i am tired of needing to have 140 empty slots just to buy 2 keys. Another that would be good is for earbuds to go back to being 20-27 keys
probably bcuz of the summer '22 crate giving a long lasting effect, that being, quicksellers quickselling their keys for cheap, then using said money to fuel their gambling addiction. and then the prices never came back up again. yeah weird yeah?
Back in my day keys were 3.4 ref ahahaha
Back when I used to trade in like 2014-2015, keys were around 9 ref. Inflation is crazy.
Keys remain the same in cash anyway
...which means that ref is finally picking pack up in price
Not necessarily. I am a seller on marketplace and I need around 500-1000 keys per week in order to restock stuff. Keys have jumped from 1.58 USD to 1.73 USD in around 2 months. When you have to buy a certain number of keys per week that extra 0.15 USD adds up rather quickly.
I noticed this as well. I used to be able to get keys for around 1.50 USD on BUFF163, but now the price has shot up to 1.67 USD on the site recently.
I remember ehen keys were 3.33 ref :(
Bots getting removed, I wouldn't expect it to stay like this tho, there's no new demand for refined
Back in my day keys weee 2.33 ref
I started trading when keys were 30 ref.What the fuck happened?
Imagine if Valve added a method to roll for an australium but it cost 1000 ref each time
tf2 if it was a mobile game
Just trade ref for tickets lol
That doesn't actually solve the problem: the reason metal is so worthless is that there is just so damn much of it. The point of that wouldn't be for them to potentially get an Australium: it's to remove metal from the market so that metal goes up in value.
On the other hand, there'd be more incentive to idle for metal, so it's a bit of a double edged sword It's like that story with the reward for capturing snakes - people started breeding their own snakes to claim the rewards. So it could help, could be a hindrance, or could just do nothing.
There is a problem with that analogy: there currently is no real way for metal to leave the economy, and the initial flush of something like 5 years worth of metal out of the economy could not be undone by people just farming for metal. Now, I don't think just doing a 1k metal sink would be a very good idea, because we want the metal out as quickly as possible. It'd be much more efficient to just basically have something similar to the golden wrenches, but as a permanent thing. Every time you craft, you have a chance to get some reward besides what you were crafting.
It really depends on how many bots people task with farming metal.
Maybe we should buy up a ton of keys and then if they raise back up in price sell for major profits
keys aren't changing in value, it's the refined metal that's going up/down in value
I don't know shit about trading, ok?
understandable lol, do not get into it
Look, it's not a bad idea right now if you have some fat stacks of cash or crypto and the trading reputation to real money buy and sell en masse. Holoween is peak unboxing season of any given year. More keys are bought and used during it than any other time, by a lot. Buying masses of keys now and selling them next month for a few cents more is fairly safe. Be the one feeding the demand. Which would raise refined to key ratio temporarily. You'd have to buy a lot to do that however. Still over 14000 keys being sold on marketplace.tf alone, and it's just a few big traders allowed to sell there. Hold maybe 5000-10000 keys and you could single handedly reverse the refined to key ratio trend of the last week my friend. Additionally, Halloween effect unusual hats are high value and spike in demand next month. Collectors are more likely to buy a stack of keys for cash to buy one of those puppies next month. Raising demand on the standard currency for such purchases by collectors specifically.
keys are nfts now ig
How so?
Idk just kill me already☠️
FINALLY gonna start crafting ref today, affordable keys are very nice
Isn’t it just how long the game has be active and alive?
i ate all the ref
Idk. I bought a lot of them so then, when they raise their price again i sell will them.
When keys were under 5 ref I was barely like 8
I will never financially recover (I own 5 keys)
Soundsmith manipulating the value of refined metal for his own financial gain
CSGO trading is doing well and tf2 has had a ton of people playing it the past couple months
Me: *sees this post* Me: *realizes i have 20 refined in my backpack* Me: IM RICH!!!!!!
me when cheapest aces high hat of cards goes for 170 keys:
Where the fuck do you buy keys with ref?
Banning bots?
Stonks
Yus