Skip to main content

Steam Economy In Chaos After Team Fortress 2 Glitch Guarantees Players Rare Items

Illustration for article titled Steam Economy In Chaos After Team Fortress 2 Glitch Guarantees Players Rare Items

Steamed

Steamed is dedicated to all things in and around Valve’s PC gaming service.

 

 

Hats. It’s always been hats. Ever since Team Fortress 2 first added cosmetics back in 2009, which was (oh no) a decade ago, they’ve been equal parts a cornerstone of Valve’s oft-forgotten multiplayer shooter and a meme at the hat-obsessed game’s expense. Now, however, TF2's maddest hatters are laughing all the way to the bank.

A glitch discovered early this morning has seemingly caused earnable loot crates to start spitting out “Unusual” quality items—the rarest of the rare—at an alarming rate. As a result, TF2 items have taken over Steam’s community marketplace, where players can list items they’ve earned in games and auction them off for real money. Specifically, everybody’s selling off their crates at inflated prices, and there’s been a sudden influx of Unusual items on the marketplace, causing their prices to drop significantly.

According to the marketplace’s pricing history, crates had previously been selling for a handful of cents in most cases. Now some, depending on their possible contents, are up to as much as $13 per crate. Players are reporting that they’ve suddenly made hundreds or even thousands of dollars on crates that had been, before today, collecting dust. As for individual items, the Unusual Dragonborn Helmet—based on Skyrim—is a good example. In the past week, a grand total of three were sold on the entire marketplace. Today alone, users have sold 122, with the price dropping from between $25 and $44 to between $6 and $7.

This gold-plated hat rush has attracted players from every corner of the internet, boosting Team Fortress 2’s peak concurrent player count from the 50,000-60,000 range all the way up to 93,245 today.

Advertisement

At this point, players are wondering if Valve will roll back recent marketplace transactions or bulldoze the overnight mountain of rare hats out of existence. The company is currently investigating, and for the time being, TF2's Steam marketplace functionality has been disabled.

“Trading, unboxing, and marketing for TF will be down for a bit while we investigate the recent issue with Unusual drops,” Valve said on Twitter this afternoon. “We should have an update in the next few hours.”

Advertisement

Hopefully things will be back to normal before too long. Still, Valve took a while to step in, and regrettably, it now has a hatastrophe on its hands (and/or head).

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scythe Board Game Review

Designed by: Jamey Stegmaier Published by: Stonemaier Games Players: 1-5 Playtime: 90-120 Minutes Review copy supplied free of charge by Esdevium Games. You don’t gently put Scythe down on a table like a baby that must be coddled. Oh no, instead you thump it down with authority, the sizable box dominating the space and demanding that all present pay attention to its beautiful artwork! And then you open the lid revealing decks of cards, wooden pieces, plastic miniatures and a variety of tokens, as well as a substantial board and a bunch of other stuff. It’s a veritable feast of components. Despite its size and somewhat daunting visage, however, Scythe is actually quite easy to learn; every turn you choose one of four quadrants on your player board and perform one, two or none of the actions there. Simple. Well, kind of. Scythe is a 4X game – which means it wants you to explore, expand, extort and exterminate – set within a unique world that mixes agricultural farming with towerin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Defective, Or Effective?

The first mission of Defector is like a glorious homage to every over-the-top spy movie to have ever appeared on a screen. There’s a handler feeding you information, a bad guy to converse with and then the possibility of driving a car out of a plane before leaping out and landing in a different plane. Oh, and then gunning down a bunch of fighter jets using nothing but an assault rifle because that’s how the real world works. It’s a bombastic introduction to Defector , but then the game never does manage to reach the same highs again. It’s perhaps no wonder that it was this first level which was shown off in the demos and previews. But that doesn’t mean Defector doesn’t give it a shot and does so by mixing in a bunch of different ideas. In another of the five missions you get to pose as a masseuse, gently massaging away the suspect’s worries. There’s even an interrogation sequence involving questioning, punching and dangling the target out of a window. Hell, Defector even manages to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lisboa Board Game Review

Designed by: Vital Lacerda Published by: Eagle Gryphon Games Players: 1-4 Playtime: 60-120 Minutes Review copy supplied free of charge by Asmodee UK Jesus Christ, I have absolutely no idea where to even start with Lisboa, the latest table-hogging, mind-destroying eurogame from the highly respected Vital Lacerda. I’ve reviewed one game from Vital previously and utterly adored its lavish production values and stellar gameplay, but damn was it hard to review simply due to the way every mechanic tied to everything else. To explain one thing meant having to digress into about a billion other things before stumbling back to the original topic like a drunk emerging from a pub lock-in. It was confusing. Lisboa is just as complex and tricky to discuss, so please forgive me as I muddle through talking about Lacerda’s latest attempt to turn my already worryingly overheating brain into a melting pot of pink goo. The entire game is based around Lisbon, which is actually Lacerda’s hometown an...
Post a Comment
Read more