Scrap To Unusual
Posted by1 year ago
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I thought I would share how I recently did my 'scrap to unusual' journey. Fair warning first off, I did not start with 1 scrap. I started with a campaign pass, a gleam in my eye, and a flamethrower in my hands. Starting with 1 scrap is generally a foolish idea, for a variety of reasons. Instead, most of this post will assume that you (or I, idk) have at least 1.22 ref. This shouldn't be to terribly hard really, 2 weeks of item drops or so should get you there. As I said, I started with a campaign pass, but in reality I blew it on some dumb shit early on, and started trading with about 15 ref. That will lead nicely into the first segment of my journey however..
Tf2 How To Make Profit Crafting
Getting the Campaign Pass:
I didn't do previous campaigns, so I am not aware of the profits to be made there. Jungle Inferno however gives some pretty awesome rewards. If you were previously f2p it is a great way to open up trading and at the time of writing, the Dragon Slayer skin alone is still going for around 2 keys. Combined with the purchase of night owl skins, warpaint cases, and the keyless cases, you can easily break even or profit from doing the campaign. Just don't do the Amputator contract, I will probably never get my aussie contracker because of it.
Introduction to Arbitrage Trading:
So most of this post is going to be about arbitrage trading. For those of you who haven't played other games where trading is a thing or (god forbid) never traded stocks and goods irl, arbitrage is purchasing an item in a market where it is undervalued and selling it in a market where it is overvalued or valued appropriately. The proliferation of bots in the tf2 trading community has damaged most people's ability to trade low value items for profit, but has opened up this particular medium of making some extra metal.
!!!DISCLAIMER!!!
Before I go into specifics, I want to get a few things out of the way. I am a terrible trader. I have the worst possible trait a trader can have, I am impatient. If you are patient and persistent, you can make a profit off of basically anything.
This post will assume two things about your trading expereince, you have the time to trade like this and you are not looking for a 'get rich quick' scheme. Getting my first unusual took me just under a month, with a lot of time on my hands. With that out of the way hopefully you can understand how I made profit with these methods.
These methods may not apply when you read this! Something may have changed, people may have wisened up, or maybe by simply writing this I have made these methods no longer profitable! This is only my expereince. While I hope it can help you it may not be applicable when you finally decide to read it.
Scrap.tf Hat Arbitrage:
This is the simplest and cheapest way I made profit. Scrap.tf is a bit slow when it comes to pricing, and on some things it purposefully undervalues some items. Craft hats in particular are the cheapest item. This is why I originally stated you would need at least 1.22 ref to start with my methods of trading.
So, there are these hats yo, and on scrap.tf they say they are worth 1.22 ref, right? But on backpack.tf, they are worth 1.33! Who would have thought! The trick is finding which craft hats are valued at 1.33 to the bots who are buying on bp.tf, and purchasing them at 1.22 on scrap.tf. Scrap.tf values all craft hats at 1.22, but some are worth as much as 2 ref to bp.tf bots.
As you move up in profit, the arbitrage range increases on some hats. Just be aware that the prices on both backpack.tf and scrap.tf can change daily, so what is profitable today may not be tomorrow.
TF2Mart.net Paint and Part Arbitrage:
One of the first things you learn when starting to trade is never value parts, paints, or killstreaks very highly. A few people take this too far and offer to sell items with these sweet additions for base value or just a ref or two above. This method may be one of the riskier bets, but it is a nice place to make some profit.
One automated place that doesn't value paints, parts, or occasionally applied killstreaks is scrap.tf. You can find a decent collection of painted hats at exactly the same price as standard. But what is worth it? Some of the favored colors are obviously the more expensive ones. Team Spirit, Bitter Taste of Lime, Aussie Gold, and Lack of Hue are just a few.
So now that you have a painted hat, where do we sell it? You could potentially make a sell order on bp.tf or outpost, but this is usually a wasted effort. You will be sitting on the hat forever, and the opportunity cost for a ref or two of profit isn't really worth it. So instead we are probably going to sell it on tf2mart.net
Tf2mart.net is the Russian equivalent to Scrap.tf, but they assign a value to all the additions to items. It isn't a ton, but can amount to the two to five ref you would be getting anyway. Just be careful, their credditing system is a bit weird and you can lose out if you just buy random painted items that are valued lower here. As always research the item quickly before buying.
General Key Arbitrage:
One of the most commonly suggested methods of making profit is to buy and sell keys. I have to echo that here but I have a bit of a twist on the usual bot trading plans. At present this isn’t going to work as well, and unfortunately works best when keys are at their most unstable.
Scrap.tf in particular, but most bots in general, are a bit slower to update what the actual value of a key is. Add all the key bots, keep an eye on all the sellers, and when keys are all over the place in ref, start trading them between bots and slow traders.
There is one really great way to do this through Scrap.tf. Because they are so slow and undervalue keys so much, they often have zero stock for their direct key sellers. However, they still value their items based off of their key buy price.
Step 1: By an item worth over a key that you would be making a profit off of from the arbitrage anyway. Step 2: Pay in all metals, not a key. You can do this by either not having a key in your inventory, or by selecting “Pay With Items In Backpack” and just selecting all metals. Step 3: Sell it somewhere else (likely a bp.tf bot) for a pure key. Congratulations, you just bought an undervalued key!
Tremor Trade-Ins:
Tremorgames.com is one of those sites you have probably seen over at R/Beermoney. It is an offerwall/token generation site that allows you to do surveys and the like for their coins, then trade them for tf2 items. This by itself is a decent way to get some free items if you have the time, but it isn't what we are going to be using for this.
Tremor, in addition to having offerwalls and achievement games, allows you to trade in your items from TF2, CS:GO, Dota2, and Steam trading cards for coins used to buy other items. Here is the thing though, their pricing system is all over the place. A craft hat costs about 140 coins, and has a trade in value of 110 coins. A key costs 1,899 coins! That means you can pick up keys for less than 20 ref!
Here is the catch though: They only take a certain number of items and only accept a limited variety of tf2 cosmetics. There is already some competition to fill in the needed items for their stock, so you have to keep an eye on what their bots are missing and get to them fast.
Site List:
So those are the ways I made low level profit in tf2 trading. I hope these help you out on your journey to an unusual or other dank piece of hat fortress fame. If you have any questions, tip, or suggestions to improve these ideas, lemme know!
2 comments
Posted by3 years ago
Archived
So I've been checking out trading lately, I've played this friggin game since 2007 and I haven't bothered once.
Just one thing. How are you supposed to come out on top when trading. Everyone that's into trading are very likely to know what something is worth. And EVERYONE wants to make a profit, meaning that any trades you'll make a profit from are hard to do. The exception being if you sell unique weapons for a scrap each, which seems to work sometimes. But that's a tedious process.
Enlighten me.
How To Craft Tf2 Keys
20 comments
Bluetooth dongle driver free. Gabe Newell and beard delivered approximately one interesting fact every 45 seconds or so over the course of his recent hour long talk at the University of Texas at Austin. Newell chatted a lot about success of the Team Fortress 2 barter economy and the huge amounts of direct income item makers have managed to turn around in the last year or so.
'To be really concrete, ten times as much content comes from the userbase as comes from us. We think that we're super productive and badass at making TF2 content, but even at this early stage we cannot compete with our customers in the production of content for this environment,' Gabe began.
'The only company we've ever met that kicks our ass is our customers. We'll go up against Bungie or Blizzard, or anybody, but we won't try and compete with our own userbase, because we already know that we're going to lose.'
Gabe threw out some really concrete and large numbers to illustrate his point. 'The most anybody has earned in a single year is $500,000, so they're making content, selling it to other customers, and we have a revenue share with those people and their takeaway is $500,000.
'The first two weeks that we did this we actually broke Paypal because they didn't have - I don't know what they're worried about, maybe drug dealing - they're, 'like nothing generates cash to our userbase other than selling drugs'. We actually had to work something out with them and said 'no .. they're making hats.'
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It sounds as though professional modelers from within the industry were making a killing. 'We knew that people at other game companies had employees that were making more money being users in our framework than they were as employees at their company, so we're like, 'okay, this is weird.'
'We started to see things like inflation. We started to see deflation. We started to see users creating their own versions of currencies, mediums of exchange. Countries started to create regulatory structures. In Korea you actually have to create the equivalent of a W4 form for your players to account for the virtual income they get in playing your game.'
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And that was the moment that Valve decided to hire an economist. You can read much more about the intricacies of Team Fortress 2's complex, evolving hat economy on the Valve Economics blog .
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