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Major proposed changes to unusual pricing to target price inflation


polar

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Price inflation has been a major problem on this site ever since our currency switch from buds to keys in March 2015. We have tried fixing this with measures such as drops based on buyouts and buyout caps, but the reality is that these still result in inflated values - just less inflated than if we didn't have them. Below are some further, major steps we have been discussing to tackle this problem. Nothing has been decided. Please give input below. 

 

Proposed changes:

(1) Wipe all prices on items priced before March 2015. 

 

Rationale: Not only are these items outdated but they were inaccurately converted from buds to key values. 

 

(2) Wipe all prices on unusual taunts Taunt prices have been fixed with the event!

 

Rationale: It's a common misconception that the new effect taunts are the ones that are inflated, but in reality, these taunts are more or less stable. The old effect taunt supply has dramatically increased with unusualifiers. Supply will continue to increase, while demand will continue to drop. It's impossible to rely on these taunt values. Even week old taunt prices have become inaccurate. I propose removing their price entirely and starting anew based on pure sales or sales for other hats. This will not only give better taunt prices but also prevent them from being used to inflate hats. 

 

(3) We will no longer distinguish between clean and duped items in price suggestions. 

 

Rationale: Duping was an issue with mass-duping by scammers 5 years ago and with Valve restoring items after hijackings. With this no longer the case, the value decrease due to an item being duped has slowly eroded over time. We will no longer support this change in value and will allow all items to be priced, duped or not. Outliers will be identified by deviation from the mean. In situations where dupes deviate greatly from clean sales, the more common version of the item should be used to price it. 

 

 

Unusual Pricing Event

We understand that wiping prices, especially on taunts is not fair to taunt owners. We will plan on hosting an unusual pricing event to re-update all taunts after wiping the prices with potential rewards such as premium gifting and / or donation credit available to participants. Still discussing the logistics of this, but I'm happy to hear opinions on this below.

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I think duped should not matter anymore , I recently paid bp price for two duped bonk boys, and sold one for bp price.
Every unusual before 2015 get to its price cleared is bad because no one wants unpriced stuff apparently.

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I agree. Unusuals that are based on 3-4 year old prices (in decimals, earbuds) don't represent what they'd sell for. 

This goes even more for the 1st gen taunts. It's better to just wipe them all and start over again to make sure the prices provided on the site are the most accurate. The 2nd gen taunts however, seem rather stable. So it wouldn't be necessary to wipe those as well? It's rather the 1st gen taunts and the more expensive ones (50> keys) that seem unstable.

 

I'd also like to see an unusual pricing event. Basically like this ( http://steamcommunity.com/groups/backpackunusualsuggestors#announcements/detail/120795049828976222) but with taunts instead.

 

The fact that duped unusuals could be used to price non-duped (or along each other) is also great news as all hats should slowly get treated equally instead of the 'not interested, is duped etc' stuff. 

 

 

that was quite an interesting 1 hour of discord chat though..

 

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I'm no mod but I like to think I know my way around a suggestion. Mind if I weigh in on this?

 

Proposal 1: Yes, sounds good. Nothing really to add to this, the old prices are shitty and actually do more damage than help for sellers.
See: My recent suggestion on the 4 YEARS outdated Sunbeams Pure Tin Capotain.

 

Proposal 2: I myself have repriced (read: heavily dropped the price of) several taunts in the last week since I've been back, and I agree a more, unilateral, more sweeping and effective response is needed. The trouble is, if these taunts are become outdated within a week of pricing them as you say, what purpose does pricing them at all serve?
I PERSONALLY (again, speaking as a layman), would definitely suggest a couple things:
1. Wipe all prices a month or older
2. Set these new prices to outdated in a shorter timeframe than the 3 month period that applies to other unusual items (if this is even a thing we can do)
3. As you've suggested, make taunt-for-taunt sales invalid as evidence.

 

Proposal 3: Had my doubts upon reading the title but you've argued your case excellently, as usual ;)
Sounds like a smart idea, certainly suggestions containing duped sales will need to be considered on a case-by-case basis, but all suggestions are anyway so that's no trouble. I trust the moderators here to be able to smartly adjust to this change, as they have every change before.

 

Event: Awwwh hell yes, I've had DREAMS of something like this happening for years.
As somebody who literally only uses their premium FOR suggesting I'm all for this. Rule changes that benefit me are the best kind of rule changes ;P

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I might just be an idiot, but I don't really see the point of this.

 

For #1, if an unusual hasn't sold enough to create a price suggestion in 2 years, then it's unlikely to be priced quickly. This would probably hurt more than it would help.

 

For #2, I know that pretty much every taunt is priced way too high, but other than annoying trade offers of people trying to dump off their over-inflated taunts onto you, what's the issue here? Like you said yourself, in only a few weeks taunt prices are inaccurate, so would wiping the prices really help that much? (An unusual pricing event for taunts would resolve this better).

 

For #3, there still are people that don't value dupes as highly for whatever reason, so I feel as though there should be rules against single-duped sales if there are clean sales/sellers as well as establishing a low end with a duped sale, however duped sales should definitely be included as range support/high end sales.

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The trouble is, if these taunts are become outdated within a week of pricing them as you say, what purpose does pricing them at all serve?

I PERSONALLY (again, speaking as a layman), would definitely suggest a couple things:

1. Wipe all prices a month or older

2. Set these new prices to outdated in a shorter timeframe than the 3 month period that applies to other unusual items (if this is even a thing we can do)

3. As you've suggested, make taunt-for-taunt sales invalid as evidence.

 

The reason they get outdated in a week is that they get priced off other taunts or (more importantly) based on b/o caps. All taunt suggestions end up being b/o cap suggestions. Which is better than not capping but still makes them inflated. 

 

Starting anew means that inflated taunts will no longer be used to update other inflated taunts. B/O caps won't happen any more. Sales should be more reliable.

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1&2:

I agree, it may hurt but it is needed. (Hats+Taunts)

 

3:

Milkmans

 

After thinking about it for a bit/reading other peoples comments I would not create range in suggestions using dupe sales on higher tier hats, as rarity is more of a factor on them. I can't think of a certain point but valuing them the same as non dupes could help to kill the stigma.

 

Note:

I am suggesting anyways so I might aswell suggest for stuff like premium or items ^^

Also as already stated in the discussion earlier I think it would be cool to have groups of suggestors that work together as a team.

 

I have no idea how often I edited this unil I was happy with it.

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This post defiantly needs a poll. I completely agree on wiping price suggestions that were before the conversion from buds to keys. However, I don't see the need for redoing pricing for taunts, unless the original price was before March of 2015. As well, I never did see a difference in duped/gifted vs. clean, so I could see it as a good thing. Overall, option one should 100% happen, but I am not sure on option three.

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Personnal opinion:
 

(1) Wipe all prices on items priced before March 2015.


Completely agreed, but i'm doubtful that that would do any notable changes to the current market,given only a feeble part of the "haven't been price suggested since buds were a currency" unusuals are still being traded to this day.

9lXk07O.png     At least this monstrosity will cease to exist. 

 

 

 

(2) Wipe all prices on unusual taunts

 

Now don't get me wrong, i do acknowledge that unusual taunts's innacurate prices are being used to heavily inflate the market through the means of "technical overpay", but i have noted that low-tier taunts are completely fine and still handle a decent selling-median even though their # in existence has jumped over that one unusualifier update.

I would personally wipe the prices of taunts above the ~75 key mark

 

 

(3) We will no longer distinguish between clean and duped items in price suggestions.

 

Given the mentality of traders who -even though gift tags are as normal as name and description tags thanks to the new restore feature- still ask for "discounts" for gifted items, i highly doubt that a mere "equality" in regards of duped and non-duped in terms of price suggestions should be fair. I would only agree with this change if the database completely stopped giving "notifications" for dupe-checking (as in, if an item's duped, it simply doesn't show and acts like a clean one in it's history).

 

 

 

Unusual Pricing Events

 

Interesting way of hyping up more frequent price updates, but with any reward-based competition comes an abudance of people favorizing quantity over quality. As great of an idea it sounds,i personally believe that price updating should only be cared about as a non-profit activity. But hey, that's just a theory my opinion.

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This post defiantly needs a poll. 

 

Looking more for a quality than quantity response here - that's why no poll. I want strong, solid explanations for why these changes should or should not be implemented. Polls biased towards just forum users / active people won't provide us with the feedback we are looking for.

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I am not giving up on the buyout storing feature by the way.

 

We could only store it for unusuals, which would take a lot less memory (or whatever it's called) as there are a lot less unusual listings compare to unique etc.

 

Edit:

Also this could be deleted again after 3 months/sale is outdated please gib

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I am not giving up on the buyout storing feature by the way.

 

We could only store it for unusuals, which would take a lot less memory (or whatever it's called) as there are a lot less unusual listings compare to unique etc.

 

Edit:

Also this could be deleted again after 3 months/sale is outdated please gib

I completely agree. I still think that being able to search a past B/O in the classifieds is a good idea. This will make the suggestions way more accurate. 

 

The 'Google Cache' check doesn't always work due to it only making 1 snapshot. So if a B/O gets removed off a tf2outpost trade 1 day before Google makes the snapshot, it's basically untraceable.

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People still care about duped items. I still care, and the classifieds for some items still show that to be true (ex: burning shako, milkmans, beaks, etc.). At the end of the day, if there was a clean first-owner hat for sale, and a duped one, most people would take the clean one.

 

 

Aside from that, the proposals seem ok

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Personally I like (1), although there are some hats that are affected by this in a negative way that shouldnt be, and there wont be a way to fix that.

 

(2) I dont think they should all be fully wiped, we could have done that maybe with the halloween update right away and had stricters rules for suggesting but imo its a bit too late for that now. I can see wiping all prices that come from before the updated tho and maybe all pool parties.

 

(3) And here I kinda disagree too. I dont want to see unusual suggestions with ranges like 3000-7000 keys. Maybe price based of dupes if its 10 times as common on the market but not easily. That would probably be the case for some mass duped vintages but its no longer the case on god tier unusuals. Basically I dont want god tier unusuals to have those massive ranges or price only based of duped, and with duped vintages I would be fine basing of dupes if the clean one isnt on the market for a long time or if there is a real significant amount of duped ones there.

 

Event: I like it cause it should help fix the holes we punch with this update.

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People still care about duped items. I still care, and the classifieds for some items still show that to be true (ex: burning shako, milkmans, beaks, etc.). At the end of the day, if there was a clean first-owner hat for sale, and a duped one, most people would take the clean one.

 

 

Aside from that, the proposals seem ok

 

Not saying that they don't matter. Just saying that we won't differentiate it. Will get a range (low end from dupe, high end from clean). People who want a clean one can get it for the high end price. At least that's the rationale. Problem with it is on really high tiers where duped sells for 200 keys, clean for 700 keys. We're trying to help the most people and are still figuring out the best way to do that.

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1) Totally agree, old prices are a disaster for bp.tf traders.

 

2) Certainly you could have done this sooner, this is way too late for any wiping to be done now w/o massively disrupting the trading of such taunts.

 

3) Should be added in as support for ranges or such, but it's ridic how a duped can sell easily on a high-tier item and be dumped on low to mid-tier unusuals.

But as you say, the duped can be sold lower than market average, so if only they sell for around the suggestion/bp.tf price they should be accounted for.

 

Thanks for proposing all these changes; It's so great to see bp.tf communicate on this w/ their users, instead of enforcing them directly. I love this, and thank you for sharing these w/ us.

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Personnal opinion:

 

Completely agreed, but i'm doubtful that that would do any notable changes to the current market,given only a feeble part of the "haven't been price suggested since buds were a currency" unusuals are still being traded to this day.

 

I would personally wipe the prices of taunts above the ~75 key mark

 

 

Given the mentality of traders who -even though gift tags are as normal as name and description tags thanks to the new restore feature- still ask for "discounts" for gifted items, i highly doubt that a mere "equality" in regards of duped and non-duped in terms of price suggestions should be fair. I would only agree with this change if the database completely stopped giving "notifications" for dupe-checking (as in, if an item's duped, it simply doesn't show and acts like a clean one in it's history).

 

For the first point, Cares said the number is over 2000. It actually is a more common problem then you'd think. And the problem is not just in suggestions for those items but people using that price as a loose estimation when they trade for something else which just promotes inflation on both that hat and another hat. 

 

We're still talking about taunts. There are benefits / harms to cherry-picking. Also been proposed to leave halloween priced taunts since they are roughly stable. We'll see what more people say. 

 

See comment above regarding duped pricing.

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For #1, if an unusual hasn't sold enough to create a price suggestion in 2 years, then it's unlikely to be priced quickly. This would probably hurt more than it would help.

 

The idea behind this is to not mislead people. These old values are almost always incorrect. If they can't be updated, then that's probably for the best; it's not bad for an item to be unpriced, and we would rather an item be unpriced than have a grossly incorrect value.

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I completely agree on cases 1 and 2.

 

As for 3, the whole notion of an item being "duped" these days shouldn't affect prices at all. Few years back when users could mass dupe items and valve would delete them, dupes were considered a biggie. Now that it's come to an end, I don't see why an item being duped would affect the price at all. That said, 99% of the community still has that stigma with dupes not being likable and not selling for as much as clean. It is also a way for traders to profit off others at the end of the day. But I think it's time to call it quits and altogether wipe out that concept. Only way I see this happening is removing the duplicated tags when you check item histories on backpack.tf. That way, only thing that'd really cause much of a difference would be shorter history or longer ones, with minimal difference in prices. I see scrap.tf not discriminating between cleans and dupes and paying same prices for everything. It'd be a good idea for backpack.tf to embrace that and move forward with it. In that, I feel case 3 would be more justified. 

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There's roughly 1400 prices from before March 2015 and roughly 340 unusual taunts priced as a whole, out of roughly 15000 total unusual prices we provide. The proposal is essentially to wipe 13% of prices to further reduce "outdated creep" or price "corruption" (as in, outdated prices corrupting prices for newer suggestions).

 

We've always served as a tool to assist traders to get a fair price for their items, and most of these old prices simply aren't cutting it. We're part of the problem we're trying to solve. This change aligns with our mission.

 

I'd like to add that removing dupe warnings is a bit silly since users can always figure it out themselves, simply by observing the flow of the ids. Intentionally scrambling this to do part with the idea of dupes would be corrupt, so that's not happening. Perhaps making the dupe warning seem less scary would be a positive change though, maybe even informing the user of it being obsolete.

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Please allow for duped sales to be considered in the same way that strange unusual are considered. I mean, if you guys are going to worry about how much it being strange adds value to a hat, why not just look at histories and do the same thing? Doesn't the site already know what hats are duped or not? It seems super easy to implement.

 

On the note of wiping unusuals priced over like 2 years ago, yes please.

 

Taunts? Yes, SUPER PLEASE.

 

So overall, just do different listings for dupes and non-dupes just like stranges and non-stranges you guys are doing now.

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Not saying that they don't matter. Just saying that we won't differentiate it. Will get a range (low end from dupe, high end from clean). People who want a clean one can get it for the high end price. At least that's the rationale. Problem with it is on really high tiers where duped sells for 200 keys, clean for 700 keys. We're trying to help the most people and are still figuring out the best way to do that.

The problem with that is that people use bible.tf to lowball other peoples hats and highball their own, especially when it comes to ranges. And when it comes to high valued scorching all-classes, that is a MAJOR ISSUE.

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It seems super easy to implement

 

It's really not easy to implement. Strange unusuals are differentiated on valve's end. TF2items first came up with the idea of a duped item? It's an artificial characterization that the site has to manually go through and check. And having to check every single inventory for every item to see if it's duped or not is not trivial. 

 

The problem with that is that people use bible.tf to lowball other peoples hats and highball their own, especially when it comes to ranges. And when it comes to high valued scorching all-classes, that is a MAJOR ISSUE.

 

High pricing is where the issue is going to be. And I can see arguments for every side. Really not sure yet what we'll do here and I'm willing to hear any kind of input.

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I assume using sales sales with pure/hats from before the taunt prices got wiped would still be usable for suggestions? If this will happen ofcourse

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Some unusuals were priced in keys before the key conversion, probably very few. I feel like these should retain their prices.

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