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Unusual taunt pricing: options.


Teeny Tiny Cat

Reprice or wipe?  

71 members have voted

  1. 1. Which option would you prefer?

    • Reprice taunts immediately and more regularly.
      45
    • Wipe taunt prices and start repricing once tf2 event is over.
      25


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So again we're considering what to do here. Taunts have dropped quite a lot in some cases, and are fairly unstable. This instability has led us to hold off on re-pricing of taunts, but the downside to that is that it leaves many hugely inflated, which puts some traders at risk of being taken advantage of if they read backpack.tf price and take it as given.

 

The two ideas we are kicking around to deal with this are as follows:

 

  • Allow pricing of taunts now and encourage regular suggesters to focus on them and keep updating them more regularly than we normally update unusuals. Could still run a pricing event late December to reprice them all once and for all.
  • Wipe the prices on all taunts. Allow repricing from the day after the tf2 halloween event ends, and run a pricing event late December to clean up the ones that remain unpriced or have become outdated.

 

I want to know what you guys think about these two options. The first one would require people to actively focus on updating taunts over the next few weeks, and to keep re-looking at them even if they've been recently updated. If they do that, it could work... prices would be more accurate than current. However, if people didn't do that, it could leave us in a similar situation we're in now, albeit to a lesser extent, where prices become outdated quickly as the market changes. In that situation it may be preferable to wipe and start from scratch when the event is over.

 

Thoughts?

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I think that if the problem is for people taking advantage of inflated values of taunts, it'll make it worse to wipe them.

 

Updating them a lot more regularly sounds better to me.

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IMO anyone who says wipe clean just wants the economy to be doomed. All taunts being wiped would likely result in values of most tanking, while leaving it as is provides a barrier of sorts, as people feel weird qsing items over ~75% off. 

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The thing with allowing updating is that it would require some effort and commitment on the part of suggesters to actually keep regularly suggesting taunts. It won't work if we don't get this.

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Most taunts seem to be indeed heavily inflated.

 

I personally know enough traders which refuse to touch unusual taunts at the moment because they don't know if they make a bad deal with them or not. Traders happily seem to sell their unusual taunts these days for much lower prices than those listed on backpack. It's fair to say that those prices are mostly wrong and not reliable. We don't know how many more hundreds of taunts will be unboxed with the Pyro-Update cases. If the unusual taunt unboxing rates stay at the current high levels for a few more weeks then any new prices applied to taunts might be outdated again. 

Wiping the prices is a drastic yet good solution to the issue. Repricing should start before the Pyro-Update-Event ends though (which I believe to have read is in February 2018)

 

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It seems I misunderstood which event we talk about (I thought we talk about the Jungle-Event; not Halloween) Halloween event ends on November 8 so wiping the prices now makes little difference if we reprice them anyways in a few days. I assumed in my first reply that the event referred to was the Jungle-Event ending in February. So I'd like change my vote

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I think wiping all taunt's prices is very extreme, and may make many traders lose faith in bp.tf, even if they know the listed price is inaccurate. We really can't risk hurting the tf2 economy by doing this. 

 

I think we need to start repricing stuff immediately. I know there is talk of a pricing event happening in December, but I am not sure waiting for that is the best solution however I would prefer doing nothing over wiping them. I know Mindacos among other mods have argued to hold off pricing taunts until they are stable or only using sales after the Jungle Inferno's release, but this means that prices are going to be way too high for awhile. Taunts were going down across the board before the update, so updating with sales before the event isn't going to make them more inaccurate. I think we should use older sales on the basis of "better than current," but not use them to price other items. Of course one should use common sense, and weigh new sales much higher than old sales, as the older ones are going to be outliers more often than not.

 

I think bp.tf should implement a more obvious way to tell if a price is outdated or inaccurate, such as a warning (similar to how dupes are handled) on the stats/classifieds page, as well as an upgraded symbol to use on the pricelist.

 

I also believe there need to be more incentives to make price suggestions. Since school has started and the new update has come out, there has been a large drop in suggestions, and since we require more dedicated suggestions to fix the taunts problem, I think more incentives could help. The extra classies slot for suggestions is a step in the right direction, but the benefit is so small nobody is going to start suggesting to get the slots. Im thinking free premium, more classies slots, or even pay suggesters with large contributions through donation money similar to how mods are paid could all be potential benefits for making unusual suggestions. Im open to other incentives as well!

 

Edit: forgot to mention that the Haloween 2016 taunts are actually pretty stable, and the amount of new unboxes is actually pretty low with these effects. I don't think the drastic taunt rules should be applied to them, and wiping there prices would be pointless.

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To be clear: if we allowed the updating of taunts immediately, it would only be with sales that occurred after the event started. The prices are dropping in most cases, not raising.

 

We have discussed free premium for X numbers of unusual suggestions in the past, and it's a good idea IMO but dev changes obviously take longer to discuss and put into practice than rule changes. I don't think that can really be a factor we consider in this case.

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Having suggestions going through quickly is the best option.

 

The biggest thing would be giving people incentives to make suggestions. Say, perhaps a raffle where each unusual taunt suggestion accepted gives a person an entry to win a prize (probably an unusualfier for thematic reasons).

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I haven't voted as I think neither of these two options are the best way to go. Backpack.tf pricing is supposed to be reactive, not proactive. Report on what has happen historically to give the user the most information to make an informed decision. Wiping all values is proactive, trying to actively influence the market; and repricing only based on sales since the event started is being selective (in a good way) but ultimately a waste of time and effort as things aren't settled yet. 

 

I can see the line of thought in wiping the values as a way to protect the less informed (both in keeping them from accepting high key taunts as payments and from getting frustrated by not being able to sell their taunts at the 1 month old bp.tf value), however I see the end result of this causing much more confusion and more people being "robbed".

 

What should we do, nothing. Trading is a free market, if people can't sell at the suggested price and they want to sell, they will lower, and keep doing so until someone buys. Others around them will do the same until eventually some solid ground is discovered. Let the event finish and then allow some time after that as there are people saving their usualifiers to use them after halloween in order to get regular effects. Sometimes you just have to let the out of control spinning car slow down a bit before you can actively start trying to right it. Knee-jerk reactions to a still changing situation are likely to cause more harm than good.

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Option 3: price unusual taunts only in relation to other unusual taunts, no connections to frivolous currencies allowed. Then, after a time,  we could consider allowing other items to be priced in unusual taunts, if they have behaved well.

 

...

 

I voted  against a price wipe:

 - a little extra work for items that haven't changed in price

+ a little less work for people to see which items need repricing (could easily be replicated with an  'old price' tag)

+ fewer sharking opportunities  in the short term

- potentially a decrease in trading volume in the short term due to additional uncertainty ( which could cause prices to depress further)

 

(Either way, still not as good as option 3.)

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5 minutes ago, _rice said:

Option 3: price unusual taunts only in relation to other unusual taunts, no connections to frivolous currencies allowed. Then, after a time,  we could consider allowing other items to be priced in unusual taunts, if they have behaved well.

 

Can you elaborate here, I'm not following what you're trying to suggest.

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Just now, Teeny Tiny Cat said:

 

Can you elaborate here, I'm not following what you're trying to suggest.

 

I'm 120% kidding, but I do enjoy digging my own grave... Every unusual taunt (or an unusual taunt index) would be used to price other unusual taunts. Down with the key tyranny! My infernal smoke [all class taunt] would be worth 6 silver cyclone [sniper taunts]

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43 minutes ago, _rice said:

 

I'm 120% kidding, but I do enjoy digging my own grave... Every unusual taunt (or an unusual taunt index) would be used to price other unusual taunts. Down with the key tyranny! My infernal smoke [all class taunt] would be worth 6 silver cyclone [sniper taunts]

/s is a good thing to add when making post like this. This would be a such a convoluted way to price things...

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maybe best of both world, keep the out of date prices and then when Halloween event is over then we have a pricing event for taunts (and mini's ofc) 

wiping prices would ruin some traders as they use bible.tf not bp.tf

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I think we should wipe. The only way people are starting to make profit on taunts is sharking kids/people who don't know that bp.tf prices on taunts are inflated as hell. That can stop if prices are wiped.

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Would adding a flag to unusual taunts priced before the halloween event be feasible? Just something to say 'This taunt was priced before the start of the event, and the displayed price may be be higher than its actual value.'

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29 minutes ago, Weedoof said:

Would adding a flag to unusual taunts priced before the halloween event be feasible? Just something to say 'This taunt was priced before the start of the event, and the displayed price may be be higher than its actual value.'

 

This would do virtually nothing to protect people. The people being taken advantage of don't know how backpack.tf works.

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would it be possible to ,instead of wiping just hide the price, such that it takes another click to show it(the click pops up a warning about the price like we have for submitting user ratings).Remove this as soon as we fix the prices.Not very sure, just throwing the idea out there, instead of going to the extreme of wiping find a way to maybe hide?

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Taunts already go for way, way less than the prices listed on this site. I'm talking 75% off being a "good deal" for the taunt-owner. There's a few exceptions but those are taunts people actually want (i.e.: non-stationary, all class, a very flashy or attractive effect.)

 

Rather than dissuade buyers even more by showing an astronomical tank in value, it would make more sense to wipe what exists now and allow the market to refine each, especially if the market is going to be flooded with a whole ton of them. Taunts actually resembling the general prices of unusual hats (something much rarer) wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

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I voted to wipe the prices because they are completely inaccurate right now. I think people have the wrong idea about this: wiping the price doesn’t mean that the suggestions for the taunts will also be wiped. If someone wants to go with the last suggested value, they would still be able to see that value, just the actual value of the items is so off to the point where wiping values is justified IMO.

 

 

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Tbh if backpack.tf wipes taunt prices all chaos will break loose. People will be mad and will loose faith in the pricing system, making taunts even harder to sell. I mean, if people are refusing to trade for taunts now, just imagine what would happen if everything was priceless (since unpriced items are traditionally harder to sell). It would simply be a one way ticket to crashing the taunt market and potentially inflicting additional harm in other parts of the economy. Prices should just be updated a lot more frequently and less conservatively. Incentives for price suggesters is the real problem here.

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