IMO It would be best to provide chat screens between buyer/seller that show if- or what numbers are being discussed.

If no key-value is being mentioned I don't see how buyer can be "punished" by sellers action after the fact.

I'm also pretty sure everyone would try QS themselves for more than buy-orders in this situation

"I'll accept a range with 1 sale because I want to look like the good guy compromising instead of fixing my mistake and apologizing".

2019 knee slapper

IMO, the only proper way to price this would've been 646 flat. That said, I wouldnt've been 100% opposed to 777 being accepted instead if all the other mods had agreed to it, but what's done is done.

My argument for 646 being, there's no mini for the #2 pith. And knowing how the low craft market works, a craft #2 is worth a decent amount of keys; definitely enough for the previous suggestion to have been a good few keys higher. So valuing it at 777 without giving the pith any amount of value whatsoever would've undermined not just the pith's value, but the suggestion in general.

Should've I handled this suggestion myself, I would've faced myself with two choices. Leave it outdated due to uncertainty, or have it priced at 646 flat with the alleged B/O.

A range for this is also a terrible idea, and one that I have to disagree with polar in, but that's an entirely different discussion.

I'm not going to handle this, but I'll leave this post here for everyone else to read on my two cents. Though, if you're insistent on 646 not being accurate here, I wouldn't object to reverting the previous suggestion and leaving it outdated at 60 either.

so if the previous owner of the pith gave away all the unusuals for free afterwards, would that mean the hat gets priced at 0 keys because that's essentially what he ended with

this is the logic i see

Regardless of the #2pith devaluing the whole suggestion or not I still feel somewhat like that argument is invalid since the current accepted price devalued basically every item in the trade which is significantly worse, however I understand your reasoning so it makes sense to look at it that way.

Reviewing independently from the previous assessment here.

There are a couple of things I would like to get out of the way here:

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First of all, I would like to emphasize that we are dealing with an extraordinary situation here. I see a lot of comments surrounding this suggestion, trying to draw a parallel with other situations and/or calling on double standards. While I am aware this happens with varying seriousness, I would like to address this for those that do actually want to know rationales behind these decisions.

On suggestions for common or commonly traded unusuals, it is usually really easy to put everything in perspective: There are usually plenty of sales, current sellers, and some form of common sense to check if a value makes sense (e.g by means of tier comparison; with the side note that this should be no more than an indication and no sole reason to disprove of a value). On an item like this (or on any collectors purchase really), we have none of this - there's no other sales or sellers to compare to, and there are no logical "similar-tier" items; even if there were, there's no way to actually compare since it is heavily collector-influenced. Trying to establish a parallel with how regular unusual suggestions are handled is therefore not possible; even comparing to exceptions to rules is tricky, as most exceptions are unique in their own way.

On regular hats, multiple data points can be used to set a range where low ends can be set to indicate what one could sell it for relatively fast in pure, and a higher ends to show what one could get when being more patient. It is not uncommon to see a low end based on key sales, and high ends based on unusual sales. It should be no surprise that the general trend is that unusual trades constitute overpay, which is why they're usually slightly higher than pure sales. We actually used to have a rule in place where we would compensate for this by applying overpay to sales, where unusuals would be taken at [value]*0.9, as we strive to portray a common trading point in pure. Over time, this rule has become obsolete as the amount of overpay became more variable, so taking 0.9*value (which was a decent baseline at the time) became rather arbitrary; we've decided to get rid of the rule as it seemed to become counterproductive. Among other things, this has lead people to believe that items that sold for pure had an "unfair disadvantage" compared to items that exclusively sold for hats, but it is actually the other way round - it is actually the items that sell for hats that end up being priced slightly "too high". The same applies to buyout-capped suggestions.

As said, on commonly traded items, we believe it to be fine to rely on both as everything can be put in appropriate perspective. On higher tiers, we often have no choice, but there too - the best way to get an accurate representation of their pure selling potential (aside from having pure sales of course) is relying on buyouts. The longer something takes to sell, the more this holds. We're dealing with an item that hasn't sold in years here, and the only sale we have here induces a 1000% increase in value. In situations like those, we're always looking out for pure indicators extra carefully. In the spirit of attempting to draw parallels; here are a couple of situations that in my eyes most closely represent this one, and how a different case can mean a different approach:

https://backpack.tf/suggestion/56c9af58ba8d88ca57e62433#comment-56c9be84dea9e9de10d81778 vs https://backpack.tf/suggestion/56c7534cdea9e9071c812d73

The BoA and the crones were both offered on pans; on the crones, it was the only sale in ages and the seller from that trade offered it around on multiple pans; while not explicitly listed as their BO, it was clear they were willing to settle for less, and as such, their offering was used as an indicator to support capping the value - the alternative in these cases is usually to leave the hat outdated.

The BoA on the other hand had multiple copies moving around, but also multiple sales to back up its value - in that situation, someone offering it on a pan means much less than it did for the crones.

https://backpack.tf/suggestion/56589549dea9e97a617f7b6f (resuggestion of: https://backpack.tf/suggestion/5657207ddea9e9b2617f7a6c )

The closest you're gonna get to a situation such as the one in this suggestion - over the long course of selling, the seller has indicated willingness to take 80 even though his set BO was higher (or absent, I can't remember which of the two it was). Given the lack of other data to compare to, it was capped at 80, the most recent indicator of their pure BO.

And this:

https://backpack.tf/suggestion/5b8515ffcf6c753225019fd2

Which ended up being accepted since we were testing the waters on rule changes, among others related to the disappearance of outpost.

https://backpack.tf/suggestion/5c2e107844325a1e950780c3 it resulted in being repriced at 300 in the end again, showing that not relying on the outpost indicator was not the right call. There was some trickery involved from the suggester's side as well, but it mattered not since it got rectified.

While not being exactly the same, I agree on seeing this as the closest pure indicator we have here, for reasons similar to that of the trilby, bitey and crones.

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Secondly; the compromise offered: I am not entirely on board with setting a range based on this single sale here. I would say it's best to either take the indicator and cap, or ignore it (or call on its uncertainty and leave it unpriced). Even more than with the other examples mentioned I think the cap is the fairest solution here, which I'd favor heavily over either leaving unupdated or removing the cap. Making the range would be the 4th choice for me here, actually.

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Closely related to the above; there are comments where you as a buyer state that you believe it is unfair since you had no control over his pure expectations. I personally do not see the unfair treatment here - there are plenty of scenarios in which one person in a trade has no control over what others do; this applies to hats that have other sales and/or owners (e.g if I pay 60 but all other sales are at 50, I can't say its not fair since I couldn't control what others sell for) .If it were actively listed at 650, it is likely that the sale would've been the same; in that case you'd deal with a regular buyout cap where you have equally little control over the pure expectations of your trading partner, and that's a really standard procedure.

The only argument that could be made is that you didn't know, but does that really change anything? Arguably you would have offered less if his listing was lower, but unless you offered pure it would be very likely a lower offer would've been rejected. In the end, I don't think not knowing one's true BO should not be used as a reason to see this as unfair treatment.

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As a followup: As indicated earlier I've seen a lot of "what if.." parallels, some in particular relating to the buyout treatment. One of the parallels made is with a situation where "1000 in hats is paid but the seller was willing to take 300". This situation is no appropriate comparison; there is no logical scenario in which this happens in a similar fashion as it did here, unless the items offered are not really worth 1000. If 1000 would be a logical approximation of the offered items' worth, then you should be able to qs them to bots for more than 300; if you meant to only get 300 but then got items you can sell for 600 pure (as an example), then no, valuing it at 300 makes no sense. If you can't get more than 300 quickly out of "1000 worth of items", then you're probably dealing with heavily inflated items whose actual value is nowhere near 1000. The latter is exactly what buyout caps are for. Note that in this situation, the value the hats resold for and the given prices for the items are within a reasonable distance from one another - with the values in the example you should probably be wondering whether or not the sale as a whole isn't an outlier as a whole (and should anything like that ever happen, the answer will be yes, it is an outlier).

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Perhaps a bit trivial and probably not really related to the final decision on this suggestion, but rather a matter of semantics:

Not just in this case, but in more situations where either a sale is considered an outlier or where one is capped (or for whatever reason a hat is priced lower than they would've wanted), we often see that when buyers disagree, they (or others) refer to it as a "financial loss", or say that by acting as we do, we "cost them money". I want to stress that there is no truth whatsoever in these statements. The values displayed on this site are a suggested value; you can't go to a store and sell these for their bp.tf price in keys or their cash equivalent. Even moreso when the item was bought to keep - there is no financial loss in updating the hat accordingly or not. If you paid a certain amount of money for a hat you intend to keep, then your financial loss lies within your purchase, not within its subsequent suggestion. Arguably one should not care what their items are priced at if they bought them to keep and not to resell anyway, but whereas I can understand that collectors do actually care, there is nothing to base the notion of financial losses on here.

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And finally - petty as it may sound - I want to make a remark about the general attitude displayed in this whole ordeal. This is not just aimed at you as suggester/buyer (as a matter of fact it is primarily aimed at someone else in particular much more than anyone else), but does concern you as well. The general setup of first making a forum post to stir up commotion and then making the suggestion with a headline like this one is commonly seen when people disagree and want to soapbox, and as such does not leave the best impression.

You state that you do not insult the staff, but yet there you are, firmly stating "the admin is wrong", "accepted with no reasoning as to why" (even though there is a clear explanation on the suggestion before it was handled), "the admin has a personal bias". The latter one in particular - you either do not know what you are saying, or you are just lashing out. The person that handled the last suggestion has no personal interest in a suggestion like this passing or not; there is no logical personal bias other than your own, since you're the only one that has a personal interest here. While this may not be the way it was intended, the way this comes across is that you are actively bashing our admin's competence and integrity. Should this have been your intention - then yes, that constitutes insulting the staff. You are free to disagree with our decisions, and if you actually believe something could or should have been handled differently, or if you do not understand why a certain decision has been made, you can always contact us to try to get a better explanation, or even to get a handled situation revised if the case is strong enough. But when you do, please go in with the intention to discuss, not with the intention to blame someone.

I can understand your frustration as you could probably tell from my own comments on my knifestorm trilby suggestion I linked, and as such can understand where the reaction is coming from, but I hope you can also understand our side of the story; we take no pleasure in denying suggestions and when we handle something (whether we close or accept), we do so in an attempt to most appropriately assess the situation conform the site's purpose. In every controversial case this goes hand in hand with a lot of discussion to determine the best outcome, which results in difficult decision making. There's a lot of hard work involved, and we can't always please everyone; I'm sorry to see you disagree with our decision here, and I hope that the additional explanation has helped you better understand where we're coming from.