Has anyone noticed the Market Manipulation going on around Elite and Assassin Grade items?

[Spamton NEO]

Over the course of the last few months it seems almost all popular assassin and elite items have doubled tripled or quadrupled in price. Alot of suggestion to increase these seem to be very recent, i suspect some serious market manipulation going on right now using bots to jack up the buyorders. i suggest not buying anything like the batsaber, corona australis, Cats or even the burly beast It also appears to be a select few people all making these suggestions 

[Spamton NEO]

Some evidence of just a few 

[Vege]

yea I am not personally engaging in market manipulation btw

[LaughingLollipop]

Two things in play here are really amplifying the manipulation

 

1) Insanely quick price suggestion acceptance

There is nothing wrong with a suggestion being made, but the idea that an item can double in value in 3 days and get priced at that almost instantly is pretty silly

 

2) Bots shilling the buy orders

Sure someone is legitimately buying a handful of these for a high price, as soon as 1) happens the bots are all over it in droves fighting each other (and anyone else) to try and buy

Then as soon as the top is in, the manipulators slam the bots with items and they go fight each other on the way down

 

At least one simple correction could be made (if anyone cared)

Require a longer time frame of proof with a longer deliberation period before accepting high percentage change suggestions

 

[Autobreadbin]

100% market manipulation going on

 

Example Potassium Bonnet gone from 25 to 55 keys in 3 months, not the natural in the slightest. 

 

Real shame.

 

Wanted a banana hat for a good while went to check prices and boom 50+ keys! Hope things come back down again to reasonable prices at some point. 

[Creeping Python]

5 minutes ago, Autobreadbin said:

100% market manipulation going on

 

Example Potassium Bonnet gone from 25 to 55 keys in 3 months, not the natural in the slightest. 

 

Real shame.

 

Wanted a banana hat for a good while went to check prices and boom 50+ keys! Hope things come back down again to reasonable prices at some point. 

Same situation for me, except with the Hypno-eyes. Neat looking misc but not for 40+ keys.

[awsommv]

bit late

[Littlepudintater]

There is no manipulation on backpack.tf, it is a very secure and non exploitable platform. I won't tolerate such slander on my favorite website any further, don't make me step in.

[Cool Fez]

Bruh u can do this with under 500 keys. theres like 1 page of sellers on elite grades, buy them all up and rise high.

[Shelley Duvall]

of course it's being manipulated, and everyone sees it, but like i said the last time one of these threads came up, we have no re gulatory body in tf2, and even if we did, it would be made up of the same people manipulating the market. it's an inherent issue of a system like this.

[omnii]

10 minutes ago, Shelley Duvall said:

of course it's being manipulated, and everyone sees it, but like i said the last time one of these threads came up, we have no re gulatory body in tf2, and even if we did, it would be made up of the same people manipulating the market. it's an inherent issue of a system like this.

This is exactly right. No rules no governance. 

[RouzenZaker]

there are those who buy goods, there are those who sell them. if prices were stable there would be no point.

 

P. S an interesting fact, assassin grade drops much less often than unusual

[omnii]

2 minutes ago, RouzenZaker said:

there are those who buy goods, there are those who sell them. if prices were stable there would be no point.

 

P. S an interesting fact, assassin grade drops much less often than unusual

The problem with that line of thinking is that many of these elite grade items being bought and sold are equivalent to the peak prices of most people's backpacks. They have no power here because they don't have the money, so it's being done unfairly by a handful of people. Literally replicates the problems of real world economies– the only difference is we have no regulations

[🔥Master Throne Crimson🔥]

3 minutes ago, RouzenZaker said:

assassin grade drops much less often than unusual

What about assassin grade unusuals?

[Saylen]

I hope some people do a bit of digging to uncover trends in terms of who's buying everything up with the intent of price manipulation.

 

Obviously that can only be done once those who are manipulating the market do a mass dump of what they've purchased.

 

Atleast in that case there may be some who could be held accountable, unfortunately the likelihood of that is slim.

[Shelley Duvall]

By the time any rules are enacted and the smoke settles, the people will have made their money and moved on to the next questionable scheme. Sharking was the way to go back in my day. I'm not proud to say I did it a lot as a teenager, but nobody cared about it for years. The biggest and richest traders in the time got there from sharking and taking advantage of the lack of a centralized pricing structure. Now that we have that structure, those people and people like them take advantage of it to manipulate prices to their advantage. In a few years when the pricing process is somehow automated or something, they'll control the automation. You cannot escape people taking advantage of a system based in capitalism, that's inherent to it. I'm not going to expand on this beyond the pure theoretical machinations of it, not interested in a political discussion- but capitalism can only exist if someone is benefiting off of someone else.

[Alecto]

42 minutes ago, RouzenZaker said:

P. S an interesting fact, assassin grade drops much less often than unusual

In my experience of unboxing a lot of cases, I do not agree with this statement at all

[Keks]

eh it's hard to prove that it's an intentional price manipulation but it's definitely weird how fast the prices for these items are rising

[omnii]

50 minutes ago, Shelley Duvall said:

-but capitalism can only exist if someone is benefiting off of someone else.

That's literally what capitalism is- to capitalize on an advantageous position 

[Josh From Raw]

https://backpack.tf/profiles/76561199029736015?time=1632009600 The rich get richer and bp fails to punish the top 1% once again. Its only bad when a rank 50000 manipulates not a top 500 backpack. If you have money you can buy out anyone you want.

[Slam]

because muh rarity and scarcity on items that are almost exclusively bought/sold for profit and not for keeps these days

[Beaser]

The reason there is manipulation in these certain items is due to their limitations. These items come from retired cases that do not drop anymore and thus greatly increase in price as supply gets more limited. Even so rarity also takes place in the manipulative increase in prices. To start buying a market also comes with its own risk, including whether you start reselling at the right time or not.

You really do not need an expensive inventory to start manipulating a certain genre of items. In fact all you need is a status in the community. So if a famous content creator posts a notice to start buying x or telling a certain community of individuals why x is great, they will start buying into the manipulation.

[Littlepudintater]

3 hours ago, Littlepudintater said:

There is no manipulation on backpack.tf, it is a very secure and non exploitable platform. I won't tolerate such slander on my favorite website any further, don't make me step in.

stop laugh reacting this is very serious as am I. the 6 reactors in question will get an in person visit from me and my mom with a stern talking to. I'm not reading any of the replies in this thread though cuz these accusations are just so outlandish i had to step away from my computer and leave all my discord servers to de-stress for 3 days.... 

[d0mmer]

it's prob because someone made a post about how trading up using the in game system gives profit in some cases; eg. 10 flamehawks for a bread thingy was in the post.

[Josh From Raw]

5 minutes ago, d0mmer said:

it's prob because someone made a post about how trading up using the in game system gives profit in some cases; eg. 10 flamehawks for a bread thingy was in the post.

these are high tier retired crate elites that are being manipulated for the most part not actively dropping shit.