"You're putting words in my mouth." I know better than to play the game, "Guess what I'm thinking." I didn't say that you said he could get 465 keys. You said he could buy 465 keys with 900 usd. True statement. I said he cannot get 465 keys because doesn't get 900 usd after fees. Also a true statement.

Speaking of mind-reading. We also aren't in the business of guessing what each individual buyer and seller values their keys at or guessing how much people pay extra for the safety of cash trading on marketplace. As marketplace gets more and more popular and easy to use, more and more people are just buying keys there, so we can't assume that someone who sold a hat there is going to buy keys from an outpost seller at 1.90. For the sake of clarity, we just take key values as they are on the site the items are traded. The difference there is within our margin of error in terms of estimated unusual value. I've always considered our suggested values to be +/- 15% of the "real" value, and using a key value of 1.90 vs 2.05 is within that margin of error.

You're right about the fees game being a mess - it works both ways. That's why we don't have people making ranges in suggestions like these based on every possible calculation from both the buyer's and seller's side. We just take the average price of keys which accounts for both.

Lastly, regarding the issue of using marketplace at all. We try to capture pure values on items. You know as well as I that pricing high tiers can be a shitshow. There aren't that many pure sales and it can be seen as unfair to drop a few high tiers using pure sales and not others that have their only sale as a huge overpay in unusuals. In my eyes, this is not an excuse to not use key or cash sales. It aggravates me when I see a hat getting a price of 1100 keys when it's obvious that no pan owner would accept it on their trade 1:1 and every hat owner would accept the trade 1:1. It's obviously not worth the same as a pan even though it's getting listed as such. As marketplace gets more and more popular and more people list their unusuals on their, more hats will get "fairly" priced at their pure values. We obviously have to be careful about using b/o drops and giving all hats a fair chance to sell at a high cash value but we always look at how sales relate to other sales, offers, and b/os in suggestions. Just look at this suggestion. It would likely not have been accepted at 440 flat, but factor in the 550 sale and it's obvious that 500 is a lot closer to pure value for this than 750.

@everyone: There's also a beams peak for 400 keys on opskins. Clearly suggested range is better than the current. As a pure value, it might still be too high.