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Major proposed changes to unusual pricing to target price inflation


polar

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My opinions:

1) I agree to some extent. However, I would like to give people an opportunity to use currently outdated sales if we'd be taking such harsh actions. As an example, I acquired a PE exe a while back. I wanted to reprice it with the only usable sale at that time, but it included two items that had no possible minis at the time (at least one of them has been repriced since). I ended up leaving it be as the sale was around current anyway back then; price is from before 2015 and would thus be wiped despite it selling for around current more recently. I imagine this example isnt an unique one, and I can imagine both owners and traders to be unhappy about such prices being completely removed. I understand the idea and agree with the motives, but am not really sure whether or not this is the right solution

Another reason why Im not really fond of wiping prices: if I'm looking at means utilized by sharks and such to manipulate inexperienced traders, they predominantly use unpriced items for their endeavors; be it their own that they overstate, or that of their victims by understating them. Wiping these prices opens a large door for inexperienced trader abusers that I believe may do more harm than good in the grand scheme of things. While currently inflated values may induce higher sales, items as such can always be repriced with said sales, limiting the damage done, so someone blindly following bptf may not suffer that much of a drawback from their purchase as values are dictated by sales. 

I feel like a sudden removal of prices (or sudden extreme drops for that matter, though if they're evidently needed I guess such desperate measures are called for) will mainly slow down the market and demotivate traders, which is one of the reasons why I am so much in favor of gradually dropping prices and keeping updates conservatively as opposed to what many traders refer to as "destroying prices" . I already encounter heavy resistance and people severely held back when it concerns BO drops or BO caps, and I imagine this to be even worse when you're going to completely remove the values of their items. Additionally, unpriced hats move significantly slower than priced hats, as many traders avoid them due to uncertainties. In a time like this where trading isnt as booming as it used to be, Im really unsure whether the clean slate idea will be worth the drawbacks.

An upside to this is that it will prevent services like scrap.tf from making big losses for automatically buying overpriced items, that then get BOdropped based on their sell order, and thus causing them to generally sell for less than they bought for. 

An alternative here could be to have a separate list only containing recently priced hats (either in-date ones or ones that were priced in the last X months or the last year or something like that. That would have my preference over the original idea.

2) See my comment on the pricing event mentioned: I would prefer to have an updating spree over the blunt removal of all values. I do not mind being brutal on the prices (as opposed to my usual, conservative nature when it comes to pricing), or to grant more leniency towards quick-succession BO drops if it is obvious that they are needed, but I prefer updating over wiping. Rationale there being that taunts that currently arent on the market did not necessarily suffer the huge inflation effect, as they did not explode in supply. The same goes for old hween taunt effects, which as far as I am aware have not been obtainable through unusualifiers, and thus their absolute and relative rarity were not affected. Again, I can imagine both traders and (predominantly) owners of such items to want to keep the values as they are in these cases, as opposed to having them wiped for - in these cases - no reason. Overall not against as long as the above is taken into consideration.

3) No, I disagree. I would greatly support having separate prices for cleans and dupes; i.e make a spreadsheet that contains duped values, similar to those mentioned in the duped mini thread we've had for a while (or still have, idk if that still exists), or treat them similar to dual quality items - completely separate from their clean counterparts. Especially in cases were someone specificly cares for an item to be clean, willing to pay good money for clean equivalents, I think it is unfair to force down the value of their items, which are being treated as a different item by the parties involved, because duped ones sell for less, especially in the classic cases (e.g burning TC, beams TC, scorch TC, moon buto, burning milkman, gfetti noh, ghosts noh etc).

Having the separate values here would mean that you have the best of both worlds: clean owners can see their items retain their clean values, and inexperienced traders that'd have to deal with dupes can find the value of the dupe displayed. I dont know how tough that would be to achieve coding-wise, but I see it as superior to making cleans and dupes equally, as in many cases, they simply are not (except on low tiers 90% of the time, but we already do not distinguish cleans and dupes there, and even there I sometimes see drops induced by dupes that consistently sell for less than their clean equivalents, just less frequently).

[edit]
Marty makes a very fair point about the visual difference between updated and outdated prices. On par with what I have mentioned before, I would like to note that there is a distinct difference between hats that were priced 3 months and 1 day ago, and hats that were priced 4 years ago, even though they are displayed the same way. It may currently be worth indicating how far outdated items are; for instance by using different colors corresponding to the year the hats were priced in as outlines or something alike, along with a green outline for anything considered in-date, and a red outline for anything still priced in buds

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I still think pricing dropping based on an asking price is on the BS side. I got screwed by this twice on the same hat. I bought a backpack with a bunch of unusuals, one of which I valued at 130 key and thought I would just quicksell it as the effect was not the greatest. I tried getting 130 pure and then someone comes in and suggest the price should be 130 and priced it down on me. I pretty much just left it at that price because of that and I traded on and off for 2 years just leaving it up. I try to dump everything I had left for items over the past month and the same damn unusual gets changed again since nobody priced it since the last time I listed it and now it went from 130 to 75, but since the price changed scrap.tf took it's unusual and listed it at 50 leaving me stuck fighting it on price without really getting the chance to properly figure out what it's worth now.

 

Just wanted to bitch because it's still BS that backpack+ 2 supposed helpers are dictating what the price of a hat I am trying to sell is. The economy is dying in tf2 and a lot of unusuals do not move fast even with good prices..

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After reading all of the comments I have somewhat formed my opinion. I also wanted to note that I am rather new to TF2 trading (started it about a year ago) so I never experienced the gold era of buds etc and I don't have much trading experience since the highest amount of stuff I have for trade is 20ish keys. But enough of me, let's get to the point.

 

 

1. Wiping outdated prices- I think encouraging price suggestors(with bonus points or other rewards) to look for sales that are way outdated would be better. Eg. If I would usually get 300 points for updating a 3 months old price, for each 4 months that the price is outdated I get additional 10% of the base points(up to a max of 50%).

 

2. Wiping taunts- idk really, never owned them and have 0 knowledge about the market but I'd say as before better to update more frequent the outdated prices than wiping clean.

 

3. Dupe=Clean?

I don't think dupe matters at all(or on low tiers at least) but still I would rather if my dream unu is clean than duped. Separate pricings seems the best solution to me at this moment.

 

.....

 

And the pricing competition seems interesting, have to find me someone with premium to team up with :D

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1) This would help in some cases but it would also do some damage, its true that many hats from "earbud" period are overpriced but there is also good number of hats that have realistic pricing. There are even examples of hats that are under-priced due to low bud conversion rate (one example would be GE Dragonborn that got converted at 7-8 keys per earbud, there are many more).

 

Some alternatives that would help (in my opinion) :

 

 - Some visual notification displayed right on top of every ("earbud period") outdated hat in the inventory, so users are aware that hat is very outdated - without checking last accepted suggestion date. Right now this type of information is available, but this change would make it common knowledge available even to less experienced traders. If this would be common knowledge i believe it would encourage people to rely more on common sense and less on price sheets for those specific cases.

 

 - Allow sales older then 3 months to price hats from "earbud period" (and only for them). Yes 6 months old price is not as good as <3 but for sure is a lot better then 3+ year old price. Once hat gets refreshed it would go back to 3 months old rule.

 

- People refreshing those very outdated hats should maybe get some extra incentives (for each accepted suggestion), for example extra reputation points. This would encourage suggesters to go "extra mile" in pricing some of these very outdated hats. Sort of like unusual pricing bounty hunt with "extra prize" for each successful suggestion :)

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I have mixed feelings. I feel the changes could do a lot good, but also cause a lot harm. I don't have a very strong opinion, though I'll share my thoughts.

 

(1)

 

I don't see this as very necessary. Most of these hats aren't being regularly traded. Most are very rare Halloween or robo effect Unusuals, or just rare in general. Outdated prices can still be informative. Overall it's up to individual traders whether to rely on these prices or not. I personally take them with a grain of salt, as many others do as well. They're simply outdated prices and should be treated as such.

 

(2)

 

I feel this would create a lot of unneeded drama. If people get upset over just one of their hats being dropped by 10-20%, just imagine what kind of reaction this would cause. It would be an absolute mess and have a very negative reaction.

 

If taunt prices were to be wiped, it would have been best done around the Halloween 2016 event with only Love and War effects. Haunted Phantasm and Ghastly Ghosts are extremely rare and aren't as influenced by the introduction of Unusualifiers. I think those should be left alone. Taunts are already seeing large cuts in value. Common buyouts are often 20-30% under backpack.tf price and traders generally do not want to accept them. Dropping them to a realistic value is generally a slower process than it should be, and wiping them may be helpful in having them reach their realistic value quicker, but it will all depend on how traders respond to the change. Current owners may still focus on valuing them at their old values. It would create a lot of confusion.

 

Prices for Halloween 2016 taunt effects and newer taunts (Shred Alert, Bad Pipes, Most Wanted, etc.) are mostly accurate. These taunts are generally very cheap compared to the old effects and most buyers can afford them... Aside from the taunts price very early on around the event, though this could be said for almost all new items priced during their "hype".

 

I think the outdated prices are more of an annoyance, than anything.

 

(3)

 

I feel traders are even more fussy about dupes than ever. There are even some buyers that refuse to buy duped Unusuals altogether, even if the Unusual is only worth 10 keys! This is not difficult to find either, it's all over the place. I think it could be a good change for duped Unusuals, as they need a lot of love. Trading would be much, much easier if no trader ever cared about duped Unusuals. Aside from a (nerdy) collector's purpose, I don't think there's much good reason to devalue them. At this point devaluing duped Unusuals is a tradition which most traders do not know the origin of. "Duped Unusuals are worth less because duped Unusuals are hard to sell because duped Unusuals are worth less."

 

This could be harmful to Unusual pricing. A good portion of sellers are very willing to take a bit less than the "suggested value" to sell their duped Unusual, especially when competing with clean sellers. It could lead to prices being dragged down more and more with each suggestion. Of my own personal experience: at times clean sellers have sold faster than I do, even when I was advertising my duped version for ~10% cheaper. This is mostly why I personally do not like paying the same value for duped Unusuals. There is a noticeable difference when selling them, even when the hat is <30 keys in value.

 

It'd be nice to allow more pricing based on duped sales, but there is too much stigma against duped Unusuals. The massive label "This item has been duplicated." on history pages is what I believe largely contributes to the stigma. I'd say a very good portion of traders would not know how to tell if an Unusual is duped or not if it weren't for that label. If the label wasn't present, they may not care either. It's good to have information, though.

 

Traders in general are too history-obsessed, and to many of them buying a clean vs. duped could be like buying name brand vs. generic brand (in the case of prescription drugs, they both work identically).

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(3)

 

I feel traders are even more fussy about dupes than ever. There are even some buyers that refuse to buy duped Unusuals altogether, even if the Unusual is only worth 10 keys! This is not difficult to find either, it's all over the place. I think it could be a good change for duped Unusuals, as they need a lot of love. Trading would be much, much easier if no trader ever cared about duped Unusuals. Aside from a (nerdy) collector's purpose, I don't think there's much good reason to devalue them. At this point devaluing duped Unusuals is a tradition which most traders do not know the origin of. "Duped Unusuals are worth less because duped Unusuals are hard to sell because duped Unusuals are worth less."

 

This could be harmful to Unusual pricing. A good portion of sellers are very willing to take a bit less than the "suggested value" to sell their duped Unusual, especially when competing with clean sellers. It could lead to prices being dragged down more and more with each suggestion. Of my own personal experience: at times clean sellers have sold faster than I do, even when I was advertising my duped version for ~10% cheaper. This is mostly why I personally do not like paying the same value for duped Unusuals. There is a noticeable difference when selling them, even when the hat is <30 keys in value.

 

It'd be nice to allow more pricing based on duped sales, but there is too much stigma against duped Unusuals. The massive label "This item has been duplicated." on history pages is what I believe largely contributes to the stigma. I'd say a very good portion of traders would not know how to tell if an Unusual is duped or not if it weren't for that label. If the label wasn't present, they may not care either. It's good to have information, though.

 

Traders in general are too history-obsessed, and to many of them buying a clean vs. duped could be like buying name brand vs. generic brand (in the case of prescription drugs, they both work identically).

 

+1 on what was stated here (For 3.) I really think that if trader's couldn't tell if an item is duped, then people wouldn't know the difference between the two, which would be ideal IMO. I think this would be better for unusual trading. However I can see some detriments to this, such as possible community backlash or other methods of finding out if an item is duped somehow else and using this to buy items for cheaper and keep the duped= less mindset.

 

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1)  Have mixed emotions about this porposal. It would help prevent sharking based on outdated price. Also feel its up to the purchaser to research the item. Determine if it is worth the outdated price or not. On the other hand unpriced Items are also used to shark. Not sure this would actually fix anything. Worried removing the prices on many items could create turmoil within the community. Its a slippery slope, hard to determine the outcome. After much thought, leaning towards not removing old prices. 

 

2) Completely disagree with this porposal. Believe it will have a profound and negative impact on the economy. People will freak out and lose faith in the pricing system. Potentially resulting in a complete crash of the economy. The most important thing to me is keeping people's faith in the pricing system. Once people lose faith, will cash out in hordes and completely tank trading. Suppose I payed 150 keys for a taunt back in september. Now you wipe the price, making the buyer feel like they just wasted 150 keys. The Second a trader feels they have "wasted money" will not continue to spend more on the game. If you did implement this would exclude retired effects like ghosts and phantasim. Also all new halloween taunts and taunts that didnt have an unusual version of pre update. Feel like valve really screwed the pooch on the unusualifiers. All they had to do was make them for the taunts that didnt have an unusual version of previously. 

 

3) This porposal I mainly agree with. Would put a stipulation for anything over 200 Keys dup sales cannot be used to reprice. Unless no clean version of hat exists or a clean version hasnt not been listed or traded in 6 months. Something along those lines.

 

Do appreciate what the Admins of bp are attempting to do. Would recommend to procede with caution and care. the potential for negative impact on the trading economy is significant. Thanks for all the hard work the staff of backpack does! With out yall the trading community would be pure choas!

 

Life Of Riley.

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:

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

 

 

 

(2) Wipe all prices on unusual taunts

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

Unusual Pricing Event

 

Gonna put my comments here

 

1) Definetly a good idea, some hats are worth more now, some hats are worth less, and u hate seeing that 1 of 1 cmoon from 4 years ago be higher then burning.

 

2) I don't agree with this idea, I'd rather just have them updated from now

 

3) I like this idea, but only on mid-low tiers. Unusuals Above >350 keys i think we should still distingush between duped and clean.

 

As for unusual pricing events, i know this is not what u meant but this would be sick if you had like a day and whoever did the most suggestions that day or whatever in the 24 hours, would earn a prize of keys or hats or premium or something.

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 u hate seeing that 1 of 1 cmoon from 4 years ago be higher then burning.

implying an 1/1 C.moon cant be higher than burning even though it is not uncommon that that is realistic ;p

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I really like the intention of all these changes , but my biggest concern is with more unpriced unusuals , we will have more sharks and bp.tf prem will be abused to a whole new level and high value taunts are going to be getting ripped like anything , it still hurts to see a dbd head prize go for some cancer 60 key unus and then the seller asking 500 pure or more in unus.

 

When it comes to duped unusuals , regardless of what the mods/admins decide , Please make the Duped warning less scary , and replace it with something more neat like "2 Items with this code exist , this does not result in any visual changes of the unusual and is not glitched etc", the glitched aspect is imp in order to perhaps help out those scammers who want to check if my item is glitched or not.

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duped matters. still does and always will to me and others

 

We're not saying that dupes suddenly don't matter. The point we are making is that we are concerned that they ONLY matter because they are displayed as such on the site and due to arcane beliefs that no longer make sense. 

 

Let's say we stop displaying items as duped so the only way you could tell if an item was duped by manually clicking through each owner in the history or by checking whether hats on the market have the same level. Do you still think dupes would sell differently from clean hats? 

 

If your answer is "no," that means that dupes don't matter. If your answer is "yes," then they do matter and should be priced separately.

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