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problem with portal effects is you need 2 or 3 of them for it to be cool, by itself its kinda sus.

Being able to trade players in servers period was the whole experience of tf2 and only those who experienced it will know.

Bots have significantly changed what trading should've been, which is a player to player experience. I started in 2016 and all I knew back then was to camp scrap.tf to camp for deals, buying a cheap hat and selling it to a player for more. It was sure fun and was probably the best way I can think of trading up. Ever since a bot market has been introduced to backpack.tf, traders seem to be more reliant to them, since it is an service that engages in instant trading without negotiation. Of course when someone sees an easier and more mainstream way to trade, everyone else starts to follow. The current market relies on bots to a significant amount. Traders these days consider bot buyer listings as the new "bible.tf" pricing when it comes to valuing a hat. What I mean by "bible.tf" is referring to traders back then using backpack.tf prices as a firm value of their item even though there are sellers that would sell for cheaper.

You can lose a lot very quickly on these sites, bro prob setup and lost some coin flips while also using some kind of upgrader system, ive seen dudes lose 15k in 5 minutes just getting rolled on coinflips

trading was better then, things weren’t cemented like they are today 2014 - burning flames all classes were king, multi class crate didnt exist to tank the market miscs were laughably cheap compared to now. I paid a burning flames, scorching flames, and sunbeams bonk boy(s) for a single pair of sunbeams tough stuff muffs. back then hats were still valued in buds so my muffs were around 50 buds back then. i paid like 300 keys in hats for a knifestorm/13th hour veil, can’t remember which but I owned both at some point I owned 3 sunbeams bonk boys at the same time, that’s how cheap and common miscs were halloweens were laughably cheap, even just as little as 4 years ago. Soju tried and failed to sell my spellbound hot dogger for like $600 in 2020(?), nobody wanted it. Today it has a buy order of 900 keys. shit was a lot simpler and the community felt tighter back then. there wasn’t 300,000 shit ass unusual effects, unusual taunts were just becoming a thing and bonzo was just around the corner. 2014 was a golden age. 2024 the rules have kind of been cemented, the game is stagnant, the players are making the same moves on the chessboard over and over expecting different outcomes. The same 50 people run the 1% god tier market and trade with each other like a circlejerk since nobody else can afford to get in on their ground floor trading bots have taken over, having a bot making profit on the side is now the norm for hustlers trying to rake some profit miscs became laughably expensive, another gate kept form of wealth to exclude the poors and flex on other rich whales everything collector grade has been yoinked or crafted and locked away, only leaving the scraps for people to suckle on everything collector adjacent has also been yoinked. You like spells? Have fun dropping stupid amounts of money. Glitched items? Dudes like gibson own them all. Whatever thing you feel like collecting? Someone already did it, they did it better than you ever will and have gatekept you from ever reaching their level. Good luck trying to collect ritzy ricks, whisper owns like 40% of them. Fortunate sons? Someone’s already beating you buddy. Milkman? There’s already 2 collectors I know of, and spotlight is already grabbing what he can get his hands on even if you just like certain effects you can be fucked. Like eerie orbiting? Zeussie probably already took the hat you want and is sitting on it trying to get into trading today with this current market is about as enjoyable as stubbing your toe

How did he manage to lose that much that quickly?

They were still swapping hats to be miscs LOL. I remember when they changed the pencil from a hat to a misc and there was a collector that had like 30 of them

the PayPal transactions we make are by nature against their ToS I'm pretty sure, you're putting your neck out there when you do them. There shouldn't really be any expectations of a resolution from support unfortunately. Zelle is king baby!!!

few things i can note off the top of my head like pudin said, scrap banking (albeit not as relevant in 2014 as it was years prior) and crafting hats/rare weps (awp, maul, three-rune etc) was actually lucrative as keys were still worth somewhere in the range of 7-17 ref (i dont have the number off the top of my head), therefore ref was still worth a considerable amount of USD and so were the hats and weapons earbuds were used as a currency in high tier trading instead of keys. buds were very volatile in price, if your unusual was worth 10 buds, it could've been worth 10x(10 keys per bud) or 10x(20 keys per bud) which tripped some people up. there were regular major content updates and brought unique changes and additions, unlike the stale and repetitive case updates we have today. new weapons, new festives (festivizers did not exist, only OG festives), balance changes (buffs and nerfs affected prices), new crates, new stranges all kept the economy interesting and changing. unusual taunts just got introduced around 2014. they were incredibly rare and VERY expensive since they were only from the reel crates. unusualifiers did not exist and there were few effects in the pool. people saw 1st gen effects as the end-game god tiers. the unlocked (multiclass) crates were not introduced yet so all classes in particular held high values. Burning KEs back then were like 4000-6000 keys as a reference. halloween effects were much cheaper in this era albeit some were still up there no warpaints, no graded cosmetic case system. just good ol crates where you could get new effects on most old hats automated trading (bots) was not as relevant back then (other than scrap.tf). most people used sites such as TF2Outpost to trade p2p. there were different trade servers back then (such as PPM, pink taco) having a loadout such as earbuds + bills made you look like the coolest kid on the block lol subpoint on this, there were way less hats and effects back then so loadouts were less unique. there was a much more generally-known consensus on what was high tier and what was low tier. nowadays it can be less clear with all the new hats and effects put out every year (i cant even remember every effect in the game anymore) not TF2 related, but CSGO skin trading was popping off. there of course was no 7 day trade hold back then for CSGO so there was a lot of P2P trading in CS along with trading between CSGO-TF2. nowadays, CS trading is much more cut-throat with the prices, cash oriented, and pretty dry in terms of P2P remember when they would put new hats into the crafting pool and you could get craft #s? good times, when an update adding hats into the craft pool dropped, everyone would scurry to try to craft some craft #s lol and yeah like russ said unusual miscs were unboxable and much cheaper