Opinion Piece: Trading Community

Discussion in 'General / Off-Topic' started by Jin&Tonic, Dec 16, 2013.

  1. Jin&Tonic

    Jin&Tonic Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
    Staff Member Owner Universal Staff Discord Staff

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    Note: This is my personal opinion and not the opinions of any organization/community that I am affiliated and/or a part of. Also keep in mind, this is my opinion on some factors that affected the trading community, not everything is going to be here, and it also may be wrong, it's simply my opinion.

    Trading has evolved changed. And will never be the same.

    The beginning of trading was the introduction of a digitally based item exchange (and therefore currency exchange). It was a new concept, now you could get that weapon for a few other weapons, rather than $5 on the store. And unusuals upon their release were frequently traded for weapons or a few hats.

    Items held a lot of value in what they represented or how they looked. This weapon was useful, it's not as common, it should be worth more. This hat looks nice, it should be worth more.

    But as more and more drops came about and items got released, we noticed a stabilization. Weapons became a scrap or .5 scrap, instead of usefulness, it was their craft value. The same slowly happened to most hats. And Unusuals, once everyone realized rarity, demand went up, supply was low, so cost raised.

    Trading was fairly stable. For many users it was a way to get that happen or hat they wanted to have while in a match. For others, the game's main purpose had changed and they wanted to engage more in trading than playing. So for money, so because trading to them was more fun. I personally got into trading because I liked trading communities atmospheres better than gaming communities. One was focused on the exchange of ideas/items and one was focused on playing and to me, I liked the friendly nature of trading rather than the competitive nature of gaming (although I did both).

    With the introduction of newer items and hats, you saw a higher price on them, even weapons, for a period of time and slowly the market regulated. Keys, bills and buds were extremely important because trade couldn't fit more than 8 items on each side. Meaning if you wanted a 16 bud hat, it required at least two trades (although I fail to remember any specific hats that high back then).

    Then you noticed a slight change of the community, more for profit traders entered and slowly you saw the term quick selling pop up. And in the past while it usually meant 10%-30% off, all of sudden you saw people expecting 50% off, and you saw scamming, and sharking. Sites like Unusual Hat Club, Mann Co Trading, SourceOP & eventually SteamRep all started to address many of these problems and help combat the scammers (and sharks).

    Then Steam Trade came out. And was met with one of the strongest mixed reactions ever. At the end of the day, it was awesome, it was unlimited trade space, it was independent of games, however, it crashed every 5 seconds and frequently failed to deliver items instantly. Which as many of you who can't stand to wait 5 seconds for a mass spycrab, you'd be driven nuts. This change though, made it more difficult to scam via quick switching, MM running and also provided a history for the trades themselves. (Quick switching less so because now item changed were logged, colors were added. MM/player running as now trades could be completed with one trade, rather than a bunch).

    But the largest change was, now I could pay 16 buds for your hat and be done with it. And instead of giving you a bud for your hat + 3 keys, I could give you x amount of keys. Imagine if you had to eat at one restaurant every day, and that restaurant only accepted 100s, 50s, 20s, but most of its items were around 1-20. And they would just have to give you change or you'd have to negotiate around to avoid this issue. Now, you could just give exact change, no matter the cost. And in the long run, this was a big change to the playing field.

    Once again, trading fairly stablized, keep in mind TF2TP & TF2OP were around at this point. TF2OP became the more popular of the two, and was known for effective trading, although even back then there were lowballers and high ballers.

    The introduction of F2Players didn't initially hurt the community that much, imo. You saw a hell of a lot more begging, and a hell of a lot more servers with F2P Blocking plugins. However, the general initial effect was, in my opinion minimal, the long term effect is devastating.

    Upon many of these accounts becoming premium or somehow starting trading, you saw a high amount of sharking, scamming and douche bag behavior and not always against the F2P, although many were sharked/scammed/ripped off. But the problem was now anyone could make a new account and 'start over' on TF2 for zero cost. And not only that, but they could make money on something they didn't pay for. And that hurt the community. Now you had kids/teens/adults all who didn't really have an interest in paying $20 for TF2, now here and realizing, if they traded, they could make a quick buck. And if they scammed, they could make money, and than just make a new account and continue scamming. And now, with Steam Trading it could be done out of game and quickly.

    And as this happened, you gradually saw a community where I'd buy a 12 bud hat for 10 buds, sell it for 11, than the next guy would sell it for 12 buds become a community where someone would try to buy my 12 bud hat for 8 buds than sell it for 18. The flawed logic was impatience. And while it's always been a part of the community, impatience has led to a even larger problem with the Trading community at large. There's a sense of impatient entitlement that hurts everyone.

    Whether it's not waiting 2 minutes for a mass server spycrab that was free to enter to begin without complaining, or wanting to sell your hat for a quick 5 buds (where in reality, that ain't gonna happen), it appears. Instead of trying to milk profit out of on hat, if people realized they can sell for a profit, do it. You may hold out for a better price and that's fine, but trying to get the maximum (or more than max) for an item every time isn't feasible. In the time you make 5 buds off a hat, I could have sold ten hats for 1 bud profit. The impatient entitlement here is that people have a mentality that x buds is my price and I will get that price, and if not, fuck you. And you may think, they're waiting, that's patience, isn't it Joe? And yes they are waiting, but they're waiting under the assumption the world owes them something, and that leads to rude behavior, it leads to people scamming, it leads to you massively lowballing others and just adding to a community of entitled and selfish greedy brats.

    I'm not saying give all your money to the poor, but don't be afraid to share a little profit. Because that little profit earns you a connection/relationship to that trader, and maybe they'll buy your hat next time for a profit, maybe not, but it enriches the trading community, a community whose fate is vital to your trading concerns.

    And P.S. Impatience also leads to a trading community where the key prices go up every other day. And while their price increase rate is actually empirically fine (evidence here: http://tf2finance.com/2013_03/ [if you thought this post was long, that's even more a wall of text]), it does however represent large changes in the community. And while you may hear traders complaining about the price of keys, I remember the days before 2.33, it has changed the market. Bills are cheaper, buds are cheaper and the trading community has more unusuals than one can deal with (much less rare than ever before, whether that may not be statistically true (since I'm not gauging all the tf2 players who don't trade, most people didn't have 5+ unusuals back in the beginning).

    All these factors are changing the trading community. Whether for better or worse, we have to adapt but we shouldn't lose our ethics, or our human touch. A quick buck isn't worth your reputation and the Internet/anonymity doesn't negate the fact that your actions affect your character.

    Be smart, be practical, aim for profit but don't let it rule you.

    Thanks for Reading,
    Joe
     
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    • Agree Agree x 1
  2. Solid Slate

    Solid Slate Ich bin Schlägermann
    Retired Staff

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    tl,dr version: Trading is quite different and more violent then when it started. Stop being profit whores and make us back into a community.
     
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  3. Jin&Tonic

    Jin&Tonic Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
    Staff Member Owner Universal Staff Discord Staff

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    Bitch, don't tl;dr my posts. It's not that though.

    It's that Trading is different, and that's not bad. But don't forget that community is the most important aspect and that greed and impatience hinder that.
     
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  4. Sugoni

    Sugoni 19 =/= 14
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    It's been 3 and a half years since this has been posted. I joined TF2 relatively late (when keys were about 16 red and after buds weren't high tier currency) I'm just wondering how these thoughts translate into the modern trade world. It does seem that trading as a while is far more volatile but it also does seem like less and less people are interested in trading from what I can tell.
    It's become almost a standard that when anyone is buying anything with pure they're gonna ask for a discount because as we all know PROFIT IS JUST ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL THERE'S NOTHING BETTER.
    I feel that while key prices are slot more volatile, there seems to be almost a standard of the buy low sell high economy with no regard to the in-between.
    That being said, this is all from a low to mid tier trade perspective as I've not been into unusual trading and the like.

    And maybe this is just me and where I've been hanging out but it seems like community has been becoming less important in trading. An example is alot of the regulars I know on our servers they come here for the community but they rarely ever trade, and from what I see there's people who come on harpoon to trade, people who come on for the community and maybe 10% of people come on for both. It strikes me as odd.
     
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