TO VICTORY

You've probably all noticed that the Team Fortress economy is going through some rather brutal changes as of recently:

Keys over 15 refined
Buds selling between 10 to 11 keys

While it is worrying now, the outcome could be good by getting Valve's attention (last paragraph), so what does it mean for the future of the economy?

Buds, Keys and uncrating:

Since keys are so high and buds are so low, it basically affects uncrating. Here's why: if you uncrate there are 2 possible outcomes:
You don't get an unusual, the item will be worth a few refs in a matter of days: big loss
You get an unusual (yay!), however buds have dropped so much that your unusual won't be worth much anyway. If they keep going down, your fresh unusual will be worth a few keys at best: small loss

So given the current market trends, keys have become to valuable to use them for uncrating. But then, what are we supposed to use them for? Trading for 1 scrap more every day?
Should I sell my buds?
There are two possible outcomes here again:

They go back up in January and buying them low now would make you a potentially huge profit.
They go down in flames, get worth less than 5 keys and you lose your investment

Now, let's assume they go down to 5 keys and keep on dropping insanely.
What are people going to trade unusuals with?
Keys? You'd need a ton of them to buy any unusual. On top of that all the buds owners wouldn't have keys to keep on trading unusuals since they'd still have buds. In a nutshell, the unusual market would crash. If it crashes keys become worthless since the ultimate goal of uncrating is getting an unusual, so no more uncrating. That means the whole economy collapses.
In the event of an economy collapse it won't make a difference whether you sold your buds for 10 keys or 5 keys, since nobody will want to buy anything, keys included.

Valve's revenue drop might trigger them to act
With the keys so high, who's going to buy a $9.99 hat on tf2 store when they can buy a key for $2.49 in the store, sell it for 15 refined and buy 10 craft hats with those 15 refined?
Oddly enough, this high key price is going to impact Valve's revenue since their item sales will drop. This might be all that's needed for Valve to react and implement a metal sink that would save the market, reducing stocks of refined and mechanically key prices fall back down to more reasonable levels.


Pass the word around
Getting other community to ask for a metal sink will help getting Valve's attention for sure, Come on Gaben, bring us a good metal sink!!!

Examples of metal sinks:
Platinum weapons (with platinum skin) craftable for 100 refined
Make keys craftable for say 10 ref (after all Valve also sells hats and hats are craftable)

Before you panic:
Valve is making a lot of money from the trading economy. They have to be aware of the dire situation the market is reaching and I doubt they'd be happy to lose revenue by not fixing it. But hey, it's Valve, so I'm not going to set my expectations too high.
It's only my personal opinion
Some people say everything is fine, I disagree but all I am presenting here is my opinion, feel free to disagree, I'm not changing my views.


leave a comment below or pass the words to support, this is not personal, this is for TF2
thank you

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