This week has been a doozy for active traders in the world of Valve’s Team Fortress 2. An unexpected bug resulted in the flooding of hats of the “Unusual” rarity - normally rare and valuable because of their scarcity in the game.
Currently, no permanent solution has been offered by Valve, but many people have been asking what the big deal is. To answer that, we head back in time to 2011, when Valve first rolled out the feature of trading in an open beta.
Trading In Team Fortress 2
Team Fortress 2 is well-known for its hats and cosmetics. The feature to trade with other players allowed for an economy to form, in which players could trade their items for other items, or for one of two currencies that became synonymous with the in-game economy: refined metal and Mann Co. Supply Crate Keys.
Refined metal is slowly accumulated in the game by playing and requires nothing else from the player. Keys, on the other hand, are purchased from Valve directly and used to open Loot Crates that drop in the game as well.
Opening these crates provide an item in the same way loot boxes operate. The items could range from a loot table of cosmetic items, with a small chance at unboxing the rarest of all items in game: Unusual hats with special effects. These include the Sunbeams effect and Green Flames, with many others.
In little time, third party websites began to appear for players to post items they had for sale or trade. They could then negotiate a price, usually based in keys.
Interestingly, these rare hats in the game were priced based on nothing more than subjective opinions agreed upon by the player base. Since they were relatively scarce, and supply never increased too quickly, maintaining the value assigned by the community was an easy task. However, the in-game economy of the game did at times shift in a way that harmed some traders.
One Of The Early Victims Of Change: Earbuds
Some of the rarer hats could be worth hundreds of keys, or thousands of real dollars if buying keys outright at $2.49 USD a piece from Valve. It was often difficult to conduct such trades, and so another item was used to alleviate the difference: White Earbuds styled after the popular Apple commercials from the iconic iPod commercials.
Initially, these items were given away in-game, but only to those who launched the client in Max OS X between June 10 and June 14, 2010. The number of Earbuds was artificially low, thanks to the brief window of time they could be gained, and so they were used as both a status symbol and to facilitate larger trades - with their worth often at around 30 keys.
However, in 2012, Steam launched the Steam Marketplace. Players could list their items for sale, then receive money right in their Steam wallets - with Valve taking a tidy 15% fee for themselves. Since the value of Earbuds was purely subjective, the price of Earbuds plummeted, and today sits at around $5 where once the price was closer to $75-100.
Valve Makes Big Changes To Trading
That was not the only time Valve made changes that affected the trading in Team Fortress 2. Over the years, various measures have been put into place with the idea of increasing account security, as scammers and hackers were rampant in the early days.
Although the idea was to prevent such scams, players often hated these changes and left trading altogether as a result. For a time, there were long holds on trades - upwards of seven days in order to receive an item. Before this, trades would be instantaneous. The frustration came because too many actions could trigger these long holds. Newly authorized devices could not trade for a period of 7 days, and things like clearing browser cookies also triggered this condition. Steam Guard was all but forced on buyers and sellers, regardless of how clunky and impractical it was when it first launched. Resetting one’s password triggered a 5 days restriction on trading, and payment methods needed to be on the account for a few days before being used.
One at a time these are not terribly inconvenient, but in the cumulative addition of one after another, it make players wonder if Valve really wanted its players to trade at all, given how hard it felt to do even the most simple of exchanges.
Before these restrictions, it was far easier to “cash out” of the game. This usually referred to selling all valuable items in a player’s inventory for keys, then selling those keys to a trusted third party over PayPal. There was risk in doing so, but with due diligence it was not impossible.
The Recent Glitch
The recent glitch has now been fixed, but for days, it allowed players to open a certain crate, normally common and worth next to nothing, and have an Unusual hat awarded 100% of the time. The prevailing theory over the years, based on community statistics, is that a 1% change of acquiring an Unusual hat exists per crate. The video below shows one user opening a number of crates and obtaining Unusual hats in each one through the glitch.
So why is this a problem for traders and those who have spent years and a lot of money building their collections? The simple answer is that the limited supply of rare items was suddenly skyrocketing.
This led to a rush on crates, and a flooding of new Unusual hats into the market. From an economic point of view, this shifted the Supply line of hats hard to the right, forcing the value of legitimate Unusual hats down since they are now far more common than before.
As mentioned earlier, Valve has not released a permanent solution on the matter. They did Tweet out a temporary solution, which is to make all those new Unusual hats now untradeable while they decide how best to act.
So, what is the best solution in this case? Some have suggested deleting the hats obtained via glitch. However, that would affect many of the wrong people. Since the glitch began, many hats have been traded, obviously at lower values than normally expected, and are now with new owners.
Another option is to keep these hats as untradeable, which would remove them from circulation and restore the supply to their pre-glitch quantity, while still allowing those who own them to still use them.
But two issues arise there. First, those who purchased an Unusual hat may not have known that it came from a glitched crate, as there is no way to track that. Second, these hats may have been purchased with the intention of trading them later, which would mean that the buyer was now stuck with an item that has no value, since it cannot be traded for other currency.
Whatever the decision, Valve needs to consider the feelings of those dedicated traders in the Team Fortress 2 community and those players who may have purchased these hats without knowing there was a glitch happening. It's a delicate situation, and there's no easy solution.