Valve’s games are known to host extensive trading markets for a myriad of cosmetics. Counter Strike has its weapon skins, while Team Fortress 2 has hats. TF2 has been around for a while and even then getting rare cosmetics is a matter of luck or price. The very last update seems to have introduced an item drop rate issue: Players were finding crates with guaranteed Unusual items, the highest rarity of unboxed crate items. These items have special particle effects and a unique name tag but not every item can be Unusual. The TF2 Wiki quotes about a 1% chance of getting one from the crate series that can drop them. The rarest of these items have gone for thousands of dollars on the Steam Market.
What if these items were dropping every single time? Players flash flooded the market with inflated crate prices, and item sellers were more than happy to oblige. The chaos was such that inventories and trading were briefly disabled, and now these unboxed Unusuals have been blacklisted from trading. The Team Fortress team is still contemplating the fate of the new items:
Update on the Unusual situation: All Unusuals from the bugged crates have been marked as non-tradable for the time being. We are evaluating what steps to take with these items and will have another update for you after the weekend.
— Team Fortress 2 (@TeamFortress) July 26, 2019
While popular trading sites such as Scrap.tf have resumed operations and trading is working for every legitimate item, you have to wonder what Valve will do. After all, this is a major market shift for very real money in a video game. We’ll update this post when we hear more.
— Uncle Dane (@danekevincook) July 26, 2019