The key/ref ratio.

[piman]

As you guys might know, the ref/key ratio is getting pretty ridiculous now. During the last year or so, I've noticed that the price went up almost 30 ref.

There are two ways to fix this problem:

a) introduce a shitload of keys into the economy

or 

b) destroy a shitload of ref

In my opinion, option b is preferable, as there is already a little-used method of getting rid of ref: crafting hats and weapons

This can be easily automated by a bot, which can run 24/7 and can craft hundreds of items an hour.

I am a programmer, and already make and sell trade bots. I could easily create such a bot, and run it 24/7 on my own server.

However, this process will be extremely unprofitable, as it costs 3 ref to create a hat worth 1.33.

So, this bot would need to run purely on donations of ref and keys, along with the potential sales of it's craft hats.

I could also make it open-source, so people could run the bot themselves.

 

[Zeus_Junior]

Well yes its very easy to do so, the only issue is getting people to throw away such an amount of refined that it'll actually make a dent.

But I doubt that will happen

[Vrakos Anthrakir]

2 hours ago, Piman said:

As you guys might know, the ref/key ratio is getting pretty ridiculous now. During the last year or so, I've noticed that the price went up almost 30 ref.

There are two ways to fix this problem:

a) introduce a shitload of keys into the economy

or 

b) destroy a shitload of ref

In my opinion, option b is preferable, as there is already a little-used method of getting rid of ref: crafting hats and weapons

This can be easily automated by a bot, which can run 24/7 and can craft hundreds of items an hour.

I am a programmer, and already make and sell trade bots. I could easily create such a bot, and run it 24/7 on my own server.

However, this process will be extremely unprofitable, as it costs 3 ref to create a hat worth 1.33.

So, this bot would need to run purely on donations of ref and keys, along with the potential sales of it's craft hats.

I could also make it open-source, so people could run the bot themselves.

 

Why would any individual throw away their metal now in order to make that metal (that they won't have because they threw it away) worth more in the future?  Besides, how would you convince the community to throw away metal at a rate higher than the rate at which it's created?

 

Neither option is preferable (or worthwhile considering), there's nothing the community can do to 'fix' the ratio, only valve can do something (implement a worthwhile metal sink, etc.)

[HyperToe™]

The key to ref ratio isn't bad at all. If you think about it, it's all about inflation. Keys were 5 refined at one point when I started trading and it was for a good reason, not that big of a player base and not as much time for everyone to grind out refined. The multitude of hat drops and weapon drops in this game in the past decade is crazy enough to legitimize the fact that keys are 50 ref now.

 

If you have anyone to blame, blame the Venezuelan gov't for their actual crazy inflation.

 

Case study: RS Gold

[SoranoGuardias]

Ehh this time last year the price was around 45-50 Ref. You on LSD or some mess?

[Bob the Unsymmetrical]

6 hours ago, Piman said:

During the last year or so, I've noticed that the price went up almost 30 ref.

4 years ago when I left the game, the key was nearing 20 ref, so no... the price didn't rise by 30 ref in a year.

 

6 hours ago, Piman said:

destroy a shitload of ref

I will be repeating what everyone have said, it would require almost a million ref to make a dent in the economy, so Valve has to do something.

[Scott Bakula]

2 hours ago, HyperToe™ said:

Keys were 5 refined at one point when I started trading and it was for a good reason, not that big of a player base and not as much time for everyone to grind out refined

 

Also, drop rates were lower and it took more weapons to make refined (3 weapons to make a scrap instead of 2) back then too, so people couldn't make refined as fast as they can today.

[Wsdea]

11 hours ago, Piman said:

As you guys might know, the ref/key ratio is getting pretty ridiculous now. During the last year or so, I've noticed that the price went up almost 30 ref.

There are two ways to fix this problem:

a) introduce a shitload of keys into the economy

or 

b) destroy a shitload of ref

In my opinion, option b is preferable, as there is already a little-used method of getting rid of ref: crafting hats and weapons

This can be easily automated by a bot, which can run 24/7 and can craft hundreds of items an hour.

I am a programmer, and already make and sell trade bots. I could easily create such a bot, and run it 24/7 on my own server.

However, this process will be extremely unprofitable, as it costs 3 ref to create a hat worth 1.33.

So, this bot would need to run purely on donations of ref and keys, along with the potential sales of it's craft hats.

I could also make it open-source, so people could run the bot themselves.

 

 

Why even bother crafting hats when you can just right click and delete your refined metal ?

[solpan]

2015 wants its thread back.

[Cryte]

Awhile ago I was discussing ways for Valve to deal with this as well. We came up with the solution of Valve introducing new craft hats into the economy. I don't know how well that would work now, considering it would take so much to actually affect the economy.

[Slam]

Any time I see a "we need to destroy a bunch of refined to fix key prices!" thread or suggestion it always confuses me, because you see:

 

https://backpack.tf/stats/Unique/Refined+Metal/tradable/craftable

 

At the moment there exists roughly 7.5 million refined metal. Let's say there's 50K active non-bot players that play TF2 at least 3 times a week for any amount of time, and let's say of that population, you manage to get 1,000 total people in on a "let's destroy as much Refined as possible!" mission. Each person would have to destroy, on average, at least 1,000 refined metal just to put a big enough dent into the supply to get the Key to Refined ratio to start going down. That's about $40 per person, or $40,000 worth of refined metal you'd need to destroy just to lower the supply by any meaningful amount, and if it became a serious effort, refined prices actually would skyrocket just because people would realize "Hey, I can make easy money off these fools.", thus making it more expensive to accomplish this feat, and if people drop out and nothing comes of it, then a bunch of people that were trying to make money off the rush to buy refined metal will flood the market with refined that they lost a gamble on, and the selling rush will accelerate Key prices once more.

 

If you got a group of the 100 "richest" TF2 players together to all chip in $5,00 each towards this goal, however, you would be absolutely genius and I'd want to know your secrets, because nobody that trades frequently is willing to throw away hundreds of dollars for something that very likely may not work and, if it does work, does literally nothing for them. Key to refined ratios going down only benefit people trying to trade at the very low end, which is becoming more and more rare as 99% of bottom-end trading that's done with refined is now ruled by bots. If key prices were 3 refined per key again, bots would simply keep going as they are and make it impossible for reasonable profit to be made by low-end traders down in the "<1 key" trading region.

 

Of course, this is actually assuming that the numbers on the stats page are correct, and that ALL refined metal in existence was in circulation. It's just impossible to truly know what percentage of that refined metal is actually in circulation and not in dead backpacks or sitting on bots that are only buying very specific things that they never manage to get.

 

Either way, there's literally no tangible benefit to be had from having key prices go back down, 99% of the problems that low-end traders face have to do with bots, not key prices, and the sheer amount of effort that would have to be put forth by the entire TF2 community to get to a point where refined metal is in short supply is enormous.

 

 

[creepio]

I thought about a crafting recipe for keys involving refined metal and "gold ingots" which can be drops in MVM and specifically casual/competitive mode. They would be untradeable to encourage both trading for refined and playing the actual game for the ingots.

 

Of course, Valve would charge $20 for a "Prospector Pass" in a community-driven update and instead of them being random drops for users in the specific game modes, they would be tied to objectives, limiting the number you can actually acquire.. crippling the ref sink potential.