Upborked

Clearly the spells weighed in the sale, astronomically too much it seems for an unusual that's 1/26 in existence, none will ever sell for this price again, spelled or not spelled

See, this is why spelled items should have their own separate pricing the same way strange unusuals do.

society

Oh.

Spells dont add.

Spell moment

not gonna fly

https://backpack.tf/item/223303936

https://backpack.tf/profiles/76561199125443371#!/compare/1636070400/1636156800

https://gladiator.tf/listings/6186519ba91f9e67ce3f35d4

47 keys

please don't pretend the spells aren't adding value here

mmmm what?

i like trains

An obvious price manipulation. Close because moderators will agree.

clown buy, don’t do drugs people

cry is free big mans

oh no no no PepeLaugh price suggest busta PepeLaugh oh no no no

Given the scenario here it should be apparent that this sale is the outlier here.

I know many of you consider it a meme, but to those that in all seriousness care about this topic:

Spells do not add value by default, but it can certainly be that someone paid extreme amounts for a very specific spelled copy of the hat. Not every high spelled trade is automatically an outlier, as it can certainly also be that someone wants a specific item and buys the one on the market regardless of the spells, but it is very clear that that is not the case here. The buyer has purchased multiple other spelled items for rather extreme amounts, and if that was not indication enough, his name literally states he is specifically buying pyro spells, so the spell was specifically sought after.

Then there's the duped-clean struggle here. While we still distinguish between clean and duped for the majority of the hats, it has become apparent that a hat being duped has progressively become less of an issue for many traders. I cannot stress enough that I am not saying it does not matter to anyone, and that Im not saying duped sales should be included on everything, I'm just saying that in the past 8 years it has become increasingly common for duped hats to share common trading points with their clean counterparts. Even back then, there has been an (arbitrary) threshold at 30 keys below which duped sales could be included as those hats were generally so commonly available that the impact of being duped on the value was often negligible.

There have been discussions about raising that threshold to 50 for a while now, but I think we never officially pursued such a change rule-wise, purely because it would set a new, equally arbitrary value, which would probably just imply that it default-matters on higher tier hats even though we've both seen situations with hats above 50 where clean=duped applied, as well as situations below 50 where there was a clear difference.

Because these cases are very situation-dependent (amount on the market, portion of the market that is duped, rarity of the hat in general, massdupes yes/no), it is generally best to decide these things case-by-case, with ~50 as a general guideline threshold, whilst retaining the <30 rule as it rarely happens that we see exceptions below 30 keys (only a handful of situations over the course of the ~6 years Ive handled suggestions here).

With all that in mind, we can obviously not have one rule to satisfy them all, and this suggestion is a great example of trying to find a loophole in the rules as they are and abusing the way they are formulated to justify something crazy, while in reality we're dealing with a combination of exceptions to the basic rules.

In this particular case, we have 3 sales, 2 of which are a reasonable distance from one another, and the other one deviates over 1000% from either of these sales, and the difference between the highest and the middle sale is a hundredfold of the difference between the lowest and the middle sale. Regardless of clean, duped, gifted, spelled, signed, collector, quicksale or whatever label you want to put on hats on either end of this crazy range, with such a large difference it is very clear that this sale is the outlier here, and I cant think of any scenario where I would consider this in the sales situation here.

To put it in perspective, I dont think there has ever been any unusual where a spell added as much value as it did here based on the sales both in terms of raw value as in terms of percentual value. Even for non-unusuals such as craft hats, the percentage added here would probably stand out as exceptionally high. And that's the most speculative part.

Let's view it from the other side: have you ever seen any hat where a dupe mattered this much? In terms of raw value - sure, people will resort to the burning TC as an example, but even in that very extreme situation - where there was both a very iconic high-end purchase pushing the hat's value far beyond what any tier comparison would give you, as well as at least one mass-dupe that tipped the scales between clean and duped severely - the percentual difference between clean and dupes there has generally been about ~200-300% (as an estimated average that Ive seen over time), which is nowhere near this situation. And again, that was a very, very extreme situation already.

Even compared to other mass-dupes of much higher value, the added raw value is extreme here - even an iconic mass dupe as the cloudy moon killers kabuto back in the day did not see discrepancies this extreme, and that is a much more expensive hat.

These extremes aside, lets bring this back to the sub-midtier range this hat resides in. Does it seem reasonable that on a ~40 key hat, a dupe would matter 490 keys? Or - turning the situation around - are there any ~500 key hats where dupes sell for 40 keys? Compared to the expected 10-30% discrepancies that you would expect based on what most buyers deduct for an item being duped that seems ridiculous. For a hat in this price range with an intermediate amount in existence its definitely reasonable to go by something like that to give you an impression of what would probably be reasonable.

Do you think the other two sellers that had this hat would have managed to get 500+ for their copies of their hat was not duped? And do you think the person that bought this spelled version would not have bought it if it was duped? I sincerely doubt both.

All these things considered, it should be clear that this goes much further than the classic clean-duped discrepancy, and rejecting the two sales at ~45 because they are duped here as opposed to rejecting this sale at 530 as an outlier is simply not justifiable. I can see the other suggestion passing since it would be a raise based on duped hats (which as said is not uncommon for an item of this tier where the market the past few months has solely consisted of dupes with the exception of the outlier sale), but 530 flat is not an option here.