The Crate Depression

I would like to a break from covering the basics of trading by giving a little bit of my personal insights on how the Crate Depression affected the TF2 economy.

What happened?

The date is the 25^th of July. TF2 players are rejoicing, as the game received a minor update, adding the Summer 2019 Cosmetic Case to the game. TF2 has not received any major updates in over 2 years, as such any kind of update, big or small is always appreciated.

This minor update would probably have been forgotten if it hadn’t been for the chaos it had created. Indeed, a couple hours after the update, some TF2 users noticed that the drop rate of unusuals from certain crates was broken. Affected crates included crates #1 to #16 as well as #82, #83 and #85. Players would be guaranteed to unbox an unusual, and this has had irreversible effects on the economy as a result.

Caught in a full panic, many people in the community resorted to selling their unusuals on the community market for abnormally low prices. The Team Captain which is one, if not the most prestigious hat in TF2 was selling for as low as 40 dollars. In contrast, buy orders for the Team Captain on the community market today are at 60 dollars.  

Valve’s reaction

It took Valve almost 12 hours to fix the glitch, but the damage had already been done. Thousands upon thousands of unusuals had been unboxed, and many people were claiming the Economy of Team Fortress 2 was officially dead. Valve’s response to the Crate Depression of 2019 was to make the first unusual a user unboxed tradable. Any unusual unboxed after the first one was made untradeable, and users were given the option to refund their purchases.

While Valve’s solution fixed a large portion of the problems by trade locking the vast majority of the unboxed unusuals, the damage to the economy was still reasonable.

-Pope