The 5 Most-Impactful Steam Trades in My Life

There’s something kinda nice about having all my years of gaming stored on Steam. For people like me who got into the scene late, I can pretty much track my entire life through my Steam history, traipse through old screenshots and reviews to see what I was into during those phases of my life. But at least personally, the tab with the most nostalgia is somewhat hidden away in a dusty corner of the inventory screen.

Expanding the dropbar near “Trade Offers” lets you see an itemized list of everything you’ve ever done to alter your inventory across Steam’s many applicable games. Since I got my start in Team Fortress 2, it’s a wistful and somewhat bittersweet experience to scroll through this list seeing the years and years of interactions with random Steam users, punctuated with occasional familiar names and mainstay items trickling in from all over the place. If you’ve never scrolled through your own inventory past, I highly recommend giving it a shot and seeing your own history.

I was particularly surprised by some moments that, in retrospect, had much bigger impacts on me than I expected. For all the simplicity of an innocuous Steam trade, some of them have had long-standing repercussions on my personality, my tendencies, or just led to even more experiences for years onward. It’s a very myopic topic, I know, but I wanted to discuss the 5 most important steam trades I ever did, none of which I was aware of their significance at the time.

Despite being the oldest trade on this list, it’s also the one that took the longest for me to realize the impact it’d have on me. The focal pickelhaube was the first hat I ever dropped in TF2, which directly led to me picking up (And ultimately maining) the medic class. As TF2 was my first-ever multiplayer shooter, it shaped my future career as a support main, and impressed upon me a cooperative attitude that extends into my non-gaming tendencies and even career. But this trade itself mostly weighs on my mind as the one I regret the most of all. Prudentlime, as veteran traders may recognize, was a TF2 Warehouse bot, and I clearly just pawned my first-ever hat away for on-site credit to buy who-knows-what. In retrospective, I’m very sad that I didn’t hold onto my earliest hat, even if I ultimately upgraded to an unusual pickelhaube, and this lesson has led to me being far more careful with future sentimental items in other games and real life.

This next trade is far more positive, and requires some explanation. At the time, I’d gone on SPUF and complained that some noob had traded me uncraftable weapons, when my goal had been to use them to craft new things. A SPUFer named “The Medic” added me and mentioned she collected uncraftable medic weapons, so she traded me a clean one for an uncraftable amputator. This person is, of course, the same Medic you all know from over 2500 articles and counting, and I don’t think either of us could have ever known the friendship and shared work output that would result from that small innocuous trade. It’s fitting that our first interaction was an act of kindness on her part, as she’s one of the most selfless and hardest-working people I know, and I couldn’t have asked for a more fitting introduction.

On the other side of the coin, this was the first (and only) time I ever got strong-armed into a trade I didn’t want. This user sold me a strange part for a fair price, then claimed I’d ‘underpaid on purpose’ and started pressuring me to send him a name tag to make up the difference. I was a pretty nice kid at the time, and didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I also didn’t want to lose the name tag as I’d saved up for it to use on something I cared about. But for 20 minutes he needled and criticized and threatened me until I gave in and sent it over, whereupon he immediately blocked me and never spoke to me again. At the time I lacked the world experience to realize how minor the interaction had been, and felt terrible for days afterward. But in hindsight, this interaction hardened me in a way that was honestly healthy for my future. Most people lose a lot more than a single name tag to learn how to stand up for themselves, and I credit this user with a ton of my personal growth in handling hostile situations, especially in much-higher-stakes situations involving real money or item ownership.

…though, of course, I needed a second dose to really drill it into my head, and I’m insanely lucky I learned it from Big Bass. He added me looking to buy my strange Machina (one of the most expensive stranges in the game, even now it goes for triple-digit dollars), but said I needed to “trade it over to him before he paid” to “see if it looked good in his inventory.” I was incredibly trepidatious of this odd request, despite him pointing to his years of trading credentials and +reps on his profile, but my urge to sell outweighed my caution and I made the trade. I can still remember the massive pit in my stomach that formed within milliseconds of passing off the rifle; what a fool I was! I’d just lost my most valuable item with no recompense, from the least-believable reason ever, and it was nobody’s fault but my own childish naïveté– but then he traded it back! Said it didn’t really fit, thanked me, and that was that. I still can’t believe he was actually telling the truth, and I’d just learned a very expensive lesson about trust for free. He may have been legit, but I dealt with plenty of scammers after that who weren’t able to get the drop on me because of the minor heart attack I’d suffered at his benevolent hands.

To end this on a positive note, this trade taught the value of hard work by starting me down one of the longest roads to obtaining a desired item in my TF2 career. I’d already fallen deeply in love with the Sticky Jumper (as evident by my preponderance of dedicated articles), and it had always bugged me how there were no special qualities or reskins I could get to spruce mine up. But when Collector’s became a thing, requiring 200 unique versions to craft into a single red-text weapon, I despaired on multiple occasions whether I’d ever be able to obtain so many. Repeatedly I even regretted making the opening trade, as it had been both expensive and time-consuming to snap the chemistry set up. But that hefty starting cost was partly why I persevered, camping trade servers, begging SPUFers, and haunting trade sites, so I could not be more happy once the grind was over and successfully completed. Even today my Collector’s Sticky Jumper is my favorite item in my whole backpack, and I think part of that was the satisfaction of putting in the work to earn it.

Now I know, if you’re a reader of this blog, there’s a very good chance you have some trades of this ilk in your own personal history. You’ve been gaming a long time, why not take a brief walk down memory lane and see where it takes you? The things you recall along the way might surprise you, I know it did for me. We can’t always choose the moments that have a big impact on us, and most people probably wouldn’t consider Steam trades a particularly-dramatic source for any core memories in someone’s backstory. But oftentimes, that’s just the way it is.