take down BPTF

[Kevin Kevin]

it is the main reason keys are going up

[Richter Raccoon]

Is this YOUR idea or did you just skim a big thinker's thread/guide and decide to do this?

[Mastermind]

Alright. So lets explain this bit-by-bit.

Keys cost money. 2.49 USD.
Metal is free. Obtained via crafting 2 weapons for a scrap, 3 scrap for a reclaimed, and 3 reclaimed for a refined.

Metal is created like money is printed.
Now the problem here is, metal doesn't have to stop being printed. People constantly get metal from crafting weapons, and they get approximatly 10 weapons per week. Now this equates to about 5 scrap metals, AKA 0.55 Ref. Now lets assume 1 refined equals 1 dollar of in-game TF2 currency. Keys were 2.55 ref, similar to the price in USD when they were initially released.

Here's the problem.
Now lets assume every player of teamfortress 2 would make 0.55 refined metals each week from weapon drops. Now lets do some math. According to http://steamcharts.com/ ; the all-time peak is 117,917 players playing a month. Muiltiply 0.55 by 4 for the approximate amount of metal made by each player per month, and we get 2 refined metal per player per month. So that's 2 refined per player per month, that's not a lot of "money" being printed per month, is it??? Wrong. See, now we muiltiply it by the amount of players that play per month. We muiltiply 2 by 117,917; and we get 235,834. Now I'm no professional in money, but do you think it'd be good for a country to print 235,834 dollars per month? If you do, then you must realise that printing more money will cause said currency to inflate. More money being printed is primarily used to replace old existing notes, and said old notes are usually burned or shredded. Since this doesn't happen in TF2, that means refined metal or "money" is constantly being pumped into the TF2 economy. That factored in with Keys actually costing real-world money as well as being used to uncrate and trade, along with the overall TF2 economy being tiny compared to real-world economies, it makes refined worthless.

So where does supply and demand kick in? Well, refined metal is gained from playing a videogame, and real money is earned form work in real life. I'd imagine that because of this, people would rather trade for it with free in-game metal than real-life money. This means that most people would rather trade for a key rather than pay for it. Does supply increase if people trade for it? No. Does demand increase? Yes. Not only that, but there are always people uncrating, creating a key sink and possibly causing more demand via the previous statment.

So what causes key prices to flare-up? Well, it's us. People buy keys for the current price; lets say 10.00 refined. Then people proceed to sell it for 10.11 refined. This doesn't seem to work for one singular person, but if everyone does it? Disaster. The only way to buy a key is 10.11 refined, and once everyone raises it again to gain a profit it's 10.22 refined. People actually do this. And the only reason this works, is because of the previously listed reasons. Demand only causes prices to raise. This becomes a constantly repeating cycle, to the point where keys that costed 2.55 refined now cost well over 10 refined. This is called supply and demand. Demand is almost always greater than supply for keys which leads to higher prices. This is shown in real-life, with people buying things that have a rapidly rising demand and lesser supply to make money by waiting for prices to raise or raising it themselves.

Really, all backpack.tf does is show this happening.

So refined is worthless, keys are not. Therefore more refined is needed to buy said keys.

TL; DR: inflation, supply and demand, and people taking advantage of it leads to keys costing more. Backpack.tf merely displays it.

EDIT: Of course much more could be factored in, but this is all I know and feel is happening.

[Fumo Bnnuy n Frends]

op is trolling
605 hours in TF2 and a frequent trader
nobody at that lvl is that stupid but then again i undereistmate the internet sometimes