disallow buy orders higher than active sell listings on commodities

[lakeshoredrive]

the price of the key and a lot of other items are being artificially inflated, and its now actually becoming an inconvenience. trades cap at ~256 items which means you no longer can buy more than four keys at a time in a live trade. backpack.tf if they care at all for the health of the economy should not allow users or bots to create buy orders higher than active sell listings in order to improve the accuracy of sales that are used as evidence for repricing and move the scope of the market from the highest buyer to the lowest seller. ive attached an image of what i'm talking about. this post should be taken seriously and acted on as fast as possible since the higher the price of the key goes the weight of any extra metal is less on the buyer considering that adding a scrap to 53.33 is not equivalent to adding a scrap (say, six years ago) to 3 ref for your buy order to be moved above the rest. i think on behalf of the trading community this would do a lot more than help, and maybe could be removed later. sadly this suggestion is 7 years late

[sundayservice]

this seems very interesting. bump.

[humann]

yes, no.

[Serpentine]

Pricing is meant to represent the state of the market as a whole, not some biased view thats twisted to fit your narrative. In the case of keys specifically, most of the time buyorders are higher than unsolds is because the seller or buyer (or in some cases both) are inactive, not accepting their listed price, or have already sold the item and havent updated their bp. If an active buyer lists a price above an active seller in any other, theres generally a good reason (i.e. the seller is duped) prices listed above for a troll reason are already prohibited.

 

Additionally, what bearing at all does a few buyers / sellers have on something with as much volume as keys. https://backpack.tf/suggestion/5cfbee68d381721d052b33c9   sales matter more. Removing buyers above unsold would hurt key sales even more because 3-4 inactive listings would tank key > ref prices.

 

Bp staff in general have a pretty hands-off approach to what you can and cant list at because tf2 is, for the most part, a free market. They realize that if they try to dictate what you can price your stuff at, it hurts them in the long run because people are less likely to financially support a service that places undue restrictions on people who are just trying to sell their stuff. So far it's worked for them, within reason you can ask anything you want for your items and the market will dictate if it sells or not. Theres really no reason to restrict a free market, and the only ones who want to restrict it are only in it for their own personal gain because "waaah key prices are too high". 

 

2 hours ago, lakeshoredrive said:

 trades cap at ~256 items which means you no longer can buy more than four keys at a time in a live trade. 

 

 Who in their right mind uses live trades to sell keys for ref.... use trade offers like a normal person. No item restriction (or... at least, nothing below what can reasonably fit in one bp) and you can script to add pages of ref with 1 click.

[lakeshoredrive]

backpack.tf has a built in report system to prevent inactive listings... they are the result of people not reporting sell orders that don't follow through. its a pretty big exaggeration to label it as "restricting a free market", the fact you failed to see in the image i even attached to the post there are 2 bots, one selling keys and one buying, and the one buying has an order for two scrap above the seller. does this not seem wrong to you at all? i recommend you lend a though to how this affects the sellers of keys before you reply to this. (keep in mind you could witness this yourself at any point in time.. classified for keys are linked to the home page...)

[Jarool]

Not only is this a horrible idea that isn't going to affect key prices, which shouldn't be your goal here if you're trying to make a non-biased point, but this would be incredibly difficult for moderators to moderate. What you're suggesting is going to require a manual process, because there's absolutely no way this is going to be an automatic process.

 

This can be easily manipulated. "Active sell listings" can belong to users that ignore trade offers but still bump their listings. Sure you could get a mod to remove the listing, but a report requires the trade offer to go ignored for over 24 hours. Absolutely no process would be made, and by the time the listing gets removed, another couple would have already appeared.

 

Now, imagine this, but for a couple hundred common items, like all the craft hats and all the cheap strange weapons. This site has no-where near enough staff for something as silly as this. This would require probably ten times as many report mods as we already have to actively moderate every item, and dedicating 90% of staff to a problem that shouldn't exist is a dumb idea. It's fine the way it is, no need to tamper with it. Go buy the keys and re-sell them to the bots for a small profit if it bugs you that much.

[lakeshoredrive]

i guess youre right - but craft hats and stranges are not commodities 
it was kind of naive of me to assume everyone can instantly just trade their items. i was more or less imagining what the steam market does.

[SVENNEN123]

I often create buy orders over sellers for multiple reasons. 1. I dont have a computer anymore so adding the items takes too long. 2. I get a lot of tradeoffers super quick. 3. All the cheapest sellers are always out of stock. 4. Its like 0.01$ overpay so it doesnt matter at all.

[Tobbby92]

16 hours ago, humann said:

yes, no.

Maybe, I don’t know. 

[Uncle Dang]

how adorable to include my bot in there

 

I probably did that during one of the million times that someone mass bought all my bot's keys (above "current market price"), and I desperately needed to clear its inventory space. Sorry, that's just free market dynamics: if I believe the current price isn't sustainable, I'm going to react ahead of time.