So many items with out of date prices? What to do?

[Riva Bechtol]

I don't usually do price suggestions, but is there an ongoing list somewhere to post TF2 Item names, that people can look into for suggesting an updated price? For example, I looked up Strange Battery Canteens today 5/19/2020 (last update 8 months ago), as they list for 2.15 Keys on Backpack. However,  backpack.tf Sellers are asking for 4-4.77 Keys, and backpack.tf Buyers are paying 3.68-3.7 Keys for them, right here in the classifieds. Steam Market has buy orders @ $7.61 USD and Sell orders at $9.68 USD. Marketplace.tf has Buy orders @$5.93 USD and Sell Orders @$7.23 USD.  I haven't donated to bot.tf so I don't know their exact info on these (as it's behind a paywall). Basically, all buyers across the board are paying more (some significantly) than the current Backpack price of 2.15 Keys, and have been for awhile. I'm sure others have noticed besides me. So is there a reason for so many out of date prices on basic items? Or is it that there are just not many people updating prices? 

[Slam]

Other than for unusuals, there isn't a specific place to view what's outdated and what isn't.

 

A lot of the out-of-date items that are popular or seem basic are still outdated because their prices change too rapidly or vary too widely for any reasonable price suggestion to be made. I.E. there's quite a few items I've wanted to make price suggestions on in the past that seem like an easy suggestion, but then I look at bot.tf stats and you have like 8 sales in 7 days where they're all over the place and varying by as much as a key or more, and they're all still lower or higher than the current sell and buy orders. Other times, it could just be that there's so few sales on the item relative to their amount that exist that you can't get enough evidence for a suggestion. There's plenty of 2+ key stranges that bots only sell once every couple of weeks despite thousands existing.

[Scott Bakula]

I feel the cheaper items tend to slip through the cracks more as besides not being able to tell at a glance if the price is outdated or not (like with unusuals), most don't change in price to a significant degree over time. It also doesn't help that as a person's backpack grows, they just stop caring about the price of the cheaper items and are thus less likely to suggest on them.

[Jarool]

There are a couple thousand items in the game, even excluding all the different qualities, and only a handful of people that are willing to learn, or put the effort in to update prices. On top of that, tf2outpost was a great resource for updating non-unusuals. The bot.tf stats integration is great, but if they don't have any useful sales to update something, it can be pretty discouraging. It's much easier to just use the sales bot.tf provides than to have to resort to checking marketplace sales, finding key prices on the day each sale occurred, calculating exact prices, doing the exact same for the SCM, then determining a range. It's not too hard, just a bit time consuming, and if you're looking to update a whole bunch of items, you're likely to skip past anything that doesn't have bot.tf sales.

 

That being said, if you're willing to update the Battery Canteens in particular, feel free to give it a try. You'd be fine with using sales that have occurred in the last week. Just remember to use the price keys were on the day each sale occurred, and to round to the nearest 0.05 keys when you're done calculating.

[HarryG]

There aren't many people that actively suggest prices and most of the ones that do focus on unusuals. This is likely owing partly to the fact that many price suggesters become price mods and so can no longer make suggestions and also the fact that there is not much real incentive to commit an exorbitant amount of time to price suggestions