Don't offer items unless told/ My love-hate relationship with bp.tf

[a_tasty_serving_of]

It gets real tiring that so many people just don't give 2 shits about what you write in your notes. I know its been said ad-nausem but damn it's just grating that people can't just offer below (on tf2op) Like I'm trying to sell items, to get metal/keys, not take on more junk. And ofcourse they always have to add you. I gotta stop what I'm doing to have you waste what little free time I do have. Then they offer me random crap I hate the oh "you can just sell it, please". Please doesn't do shit for me. Having someone type or say please aloud just pisses me off. And its always a large pile of total shit

Then there's bp.tf When I first saw it I thought it was a thing of beauty and genius. Here was a site I can see exactly how much my bag is worth, Hover over a random item and see its price and even sell on the site. I was blown the fuck away. I knew immediately the spreadsheet was done in for. Then I came across its vote for price section. Seemed innocuous at first, even noble. A place where the people could democratically vote on prices with full transparency. Then as it gained popularity, people learned to game the system. I started to see unusual prices that were on a continuous downward trajectory due to increasing supply start to inexplicably go up. Then other lil things. But the thing I personally blame bp.tf for is the soaring rise in key prices.

Yeah prices got a lil wacky during haloween but after that proofs were given of the high-ballers. On tf2op, it is VERY easy to show proofs of someone selling for a scrap or 2 above normal price. Some people do buy keys impulsively. Yet, if you put up a regular offer for keys, you do get added and sold keys. Granted, you will have to wait and get keys 1-2 at at time but I've always been able to get reasonably priced keys that would seem unwise undoable if you just surf those that are auto-bumped on tf2op. AND that's part of the problem, only donator keys are showing up on tf2op as so many of them are auto-bumped. A vast majority of those who "donate" to tf2op do as a business expanse and crowd out others selling keys. So any search is nearly entirely filled with colored names.
So with bp.tf anyone trying to increase the price can easily cherrypick "proof" and make the key price go up. I understand that moderators are suppose to be there to stop wreckless traders with obvious biases. I see them trying and give them credit for stoping some of the nonsense but still, this is truely out of control. I've mulled over several possibilities for fixing this situation. Ideally, steamrep, bp.tf and tf2op would work together to force 1 key price that can be listed on servers and on tf2op. No one would be perma banned but something like 4ref is the price unless substantial evidence to the contrary as determined by a panel of admins. People still could trade on their own for whatever price they wanted but if they wanted to post a price on tf2op or bp.tf then it'd have to be the 1 set price. Its unlikely though. Herding cats would be easier than getting admins to get behind something like this.

What its like to be an admin at steamrep.

(In the picture above, Datastorm is seen mingling withCapt 9 Lives, Nyisa, Little_Lano, Z e r o & kurisutiiiiina; among others )

An inferior but realistic solution would be that only bp.tf moderators or preferably brad himself would propose key price changes. That way we don't have it where someone with literally 500 keys isn't suggesting a price increase. Moreover, it'd be nice if people with a shitstack of keys can't vote on a price increase of keys.

Oh and I also HATE the unusual effects icon on Bp.tf And even though they asked for everyone's opinion and a vast majority didn't like it its as though they just shrugged that off and pressed forward. I mean seriously, the plasma icons are bizarre as are the moon and energy ones. I mean really, a pinkish raindrop to represent purple energy?!


Tl;dr version: Don't add offering items unless asked. Bp.tf is awesome but would be better off if moderators only were allowed to suggest prices. Admins love cats and I still hate the unusal icons on bp.tf

[djdwosk97]

Well, Outpost users are (for the most part) illiterate dumbfucks who are too stupid to act on their own without using a spreadsheet as a crutch, and anyone asking for more or less is a scammer. <--Pretty much a synopsis of trading these days....

Now, as for bp.tf (i'm quite active, mainly in the forums, havent done any suggesting as of late), BUT, there are a couple flaws with what you're saying.

--Only mods should be able to suggest prices..
>This would be detrimental for 3 reasons.
#1, Mods have final say. No matter what the votes say mods can accept/reject a suggestion, and this is a good thing, since a lot of people blindly vote based on a user (blue-star vs. white star), others will vote based on what they want to happen, and others will vote based if they see a bunch of links (even if they're not valid). So, if only mods could make suggestions, and only mods could accept them.....You could see how that would be a problem.

#2, It would be too difficult to keep every item up to date (as it is its already quite hard).
As it is, there are roughly 6000 unusuals (and a couple thousand other items?), so keeping items refreshed every 2 months would be quite challenging if only mods could make suggestions.

#3, It wouldn't be as community based, and would lead to issues like the spreadsheet faced. If only mods could make suggestions, than how is it any different than the spreadsheet? aside from the fact that control is in 10 hands vs. 1 (doesn't really make a difference at that level).

As for key suggestions, I assume you're mainly referring to long218 when you're talking about people making suggestions with 500+ keys. Now, i'm not going to go into the whole issue long with carders because frankly, its not important. BUT what is important is this, people accused him of manipulating prices because he had 1000~ keys. Now, he JUST bought/sold via paypal (never traded keys for refined), so increasing the Key:Ref ratio really only hurt him as it made it harder for him to trade other items for keys. But theres not way he was benefiting by keys ref value increasing since he never sold keys for ref.

Now, about the key suggestions themselves--While Outpost does NOT constitute all trading that occurs, it is a pretty big part of it, and really shouldn't be ignored. Keys would rise on their own with or without bp.tf, whether bptf speeds it up a bit or not is beside the point--because any price guide will have some impact on the market no matter what. BUT to say keys go up solely because of bptf is quite false. Keys began rising before bptf changed its price, and furthermore, recently there weren't any suggestions for about a week, yet plenty of people on Outpost were selling keys for 2 scrap more (quite easily). So the only downside to not keeping keys up-to-date is that the smaller newer trader loses out. The bigger traders will continue to raise prices, and others will follow, but the smaller trader will just take whatever bptf says. So ultimately not keeping the price up to date would just hurt the smaller trader.

Now is backpack.tf perfect? Most certainly not....
There is a lot of room for error, and imo, any unusual price guide is going to take a lot of heat for being inaccurate due to the nature of unusuals, but the majority of the recently updated unusual prices are pretty accurate (again, not all, but most).

[OnceAndFutureKing]

W
--Only mods should be able to suggest prices..
>This would be detrimental for 3 reasons.
#2, It would be too difficult to keep every item up to date (as it is its already quite hard).
As it is, there are roughly 6000 unusuals (and a couple thousand other items?), so keeping items refreshed every 2 months would be quite challenging if only mods could make suggestions.

FYI: His suggestion was for Key price changes only, so how would this affect keeping every item up to date?

An inferior but realistic solution would be that only bp.tf moderators or preferably brad himself would propose key price changes. That way we don't have it where someone with literally 500 keys isn't suggesting a price increase. Moreover, it'd be nice if people with a shitstack of keys can't vote on a price increase of keys.

[djdwosk97]

"Bp.tf is awesome but would be better off if moderators only were allowed to suggest prices." (Tasty was referring to all suggestions, not just key suggestions--unless that was just a typo)

As for the key thing, its been discussed, but where does the "mod only suggestions" end? Whats next? Buds? Bills? Max? Ref? Limiting who can make a suggestion detracts from the whole idea that its a community based price guide. And since the mods need to accept the suggestion anyway, it really doesn't matter who suggests it.

[OnceAndFutureKing]

"Bp.tf is awesome but would be better off if moderators only were allowed to suggest prices." (Tasty was referring to all suggestions, not just key suggestions--unless that was just a typo)

As for the key thing, its been discussed, but where does the "mod only suggestions" end? Whats next? Buds? Bills? Max? Ref? Limiting who can make a suggestion detracts from the whole idea that its a community based price guide. And since the mods need to accept the suggestion anyway, it really doesn't matter who suggests it.

See when I saw that I made the logical conclusion that since he referred to only moderators making key price suggestions earlier in the post that he meant the same thing here and just wasn't as specific. Guess neither of us really knows what he meant for sure though.

On another note ...

I'm with dj on the fact that backpack.tf is not really responsible for the pricing changes anyway. I only occasionally buy keys with ref but the one or two keys I need and don't want to spend money on every week or so but in my experience it is hard to find people with keys in stock that are being sold for ref (hell it can be hard to find keys in stock from people selling for paypal) which kind of indicates a shortage in supply and thus a rise in prices is logical.