What do you think about the new price of keys in refined metal?
Brickinator: I don’t trade keys so I have no idea.
aabicus: Sweet, I sold my strange festive Ambassador for 6 keys, and now those keys I’ve ignored are worth eight keys! Or something. I’m not a math major.
Now of course I don’t like the rampant inflation, but it’s not like we haven’t seen it coming. This has been a steady uphill climb ever since Halloween 2012 when the keys rose as expected but then didn’t go back down. At this point, I find the most intelligent move is to either eschew key trading entirely or get as many keys as you can and hold onto them. I don’t see a real way to fix the problem, so instead I learn to live with it. And I’m aware that it’s far easier for me to do that as someone who keeps getting keys for things because of all the crap in my backpack I’ve had for years and don’t care about.
Medic: Keys are what, 8 refined now? I gave up caring when they reached 6.6 refined, simply because that’s a lot of refined. I could get four hats for that amount of metal and with the new price, I could get even more. Problem is, there will always be refined, which can be made for free, and you will always have to originally purchase a key from the Mann Co. store. Price rises are going to happen but we’ve reached the point where it really is just going up because the people with 25 billion keys said so.
While I’m not someone for conspiracies, I do think that Backpack.TF and TF2Outpost have created this strange feedback loop. 99% of the ‘evidence’ used to increase a price comes from TF2Outpost, which is known for having higher-than-average prices and a large number of automated bots. The price gets accepted and people on TF2Outpost start posting prices that are a scrap higher than the brand new accepted price, which then gets posted as evidence.
Inflation was inevitable, but it went too far too quickly. Oh well, at least a single key will get a new player a lot of nice hats.
John Caveson: At first, I hated it, but, after a while I realized that it was actually good for me and newbies who buy their first key. They get more bang for their buck. With only $2.49, I could get several hats worth of metal that would normally take me months to get. Plus, it lowers other items worth >1 key, thus less money and time. All in all, it’s only bad for people who idle metal.