This is a bruh moment.

I really don't think artificial inflation by one person should be taken into account by this site, especially taking into consideration the fact that the item's price cannot logically be reconciled with this price. You can craft a Vaccinator at any time for one reclaimed and 3 quick-fixes. The current maximum price of a Quick Fix on this site is .16 (and that is arguably high right now, there are sellers for .11). so .16 x 3 is .48 +.33 = .81. That would logically make this .81 if we were to reconcile it with the pricing on this site.

Honestly, this borders on attempted price manipulation on the part of the person artificially inflating the price (especially considering it seems like they asked you to make this suggestion, I would argue that's direct evidence of price manipulation in the comments of this suggestion), and I don't think we should encourage hoarding to generate a price that is irreconcilable with not only the crafting system but the rest of the economy for an item.

I also am going to go out on a limb and say that the claim of buying 11,000 vaccinators at 1 ref in the comments is just false. There isn't any proof, and the person explicitly says in their steam profile description that they won't list any information about their alts.

That's not withstanding there are apparently 40 sales at 1, and about 200 sales below .81 (which I might add aligns neatly with what I just said)

Downvote.

honestly I don't know how it's that big of an issue, like if this guy goes away the price will go back down eventually, until then its reasonable to raise the price as there is an infinite source that gobbles it up

and i just remembered that the dude complaining has made several collector item suggestions raising the price greatly based on simple buy orders...

trade drama at its finest

Market manipulation smh 😂

Now sell them for 2 ref

Another suggestion and another mental breakdown.

Wendell

man, couple days ago my steam nickname was sentry buster

Okay so there are a couple of issues with this suggestion.

The first one is the range. From the data you provide here, 0.66 is clearly the vast majority, which would've advocated 0.66-0.77 more than 0.77-1. The second one is the time-sensitive component of this suggestion. Looking back a little further, we see sales scattered from 0.11 to 2 ref, indicating a severe lack of stability

https://gladiator.tf/sales?item=Vaccinator&at=2023-01-17T05:00:35.858Z Only 10 days earlier, 100s of sales at 0.22, outweighing even the 0.66 sales in the grander scheme of things.

But the real issue with this suggestion is the nature of this particular collector's approach. I'm not necessarily against a suggestion that is based on one person's purchases who is simply buying out the market - as mentioned, in such a case, that trader IS the supply and demand, and it would be no different than someone buying one 1/1 hat. I do however have an issue with suggestions based on items that were marketed into a raise the way it was done here. It is very safe to say that the only reason this many data points surpassed the logical threshold for such an item is that people were indirectly paid to buy them. It may seem like these sales are all from a wide variety of people, but they're all headed towards the same person in the end, and everyone that purchased them inbetween (or, well, 99.9% of them) are just surrogates catering to one person's demand. Note that one might argue that these sales are from prior to the event; this does not hold, as it is very clear these sales are 100% event-induced. Just looking at the classifieds from that time reveals that the buyers that may have enticed the suggestor to remove .66 from the range here are people listed in the comment section as those that stored vaccinators for this event.

This brings forth several problems, the most obvious of which is the misrepresentation of the (realistic) sales volume. This works in two ways: first, the real amount of data points will be roughly half of the total displayed amount of data, as the sales listed in this suggestion (in particular the ones used for the range) are all only a means to pass them on to someone else. This is basically mass-middlemanning; if someone lists a hat for 100 keys worth of cash, but the buyer insists on using a middleman for trust-related reasons, it results in two exchanges, but only one actual sale, e.g. say I middleman this sale at a 10% commission, I would basically buy the item for 100 keys and then resell it to the buyer for 110, we don't really have sales at 100 and 110, we only have 1 sale at 100. Aside from that, it also boosts the number of sales far beyond what one could logically expect from such an item; people go out of their way to buy more than they would ever buy just to satisfy the event. Both of these dent the entire principle of using the common trading point, as it artificially shifts the common trading point.

But it brings more issues than just that. The middleman-example alluded to above is an example of a reasonable trade with a fee that is on par with the total value of the trade. In such cases it's easy to just ignore the fee (as it was only added as extra for additional services) and go with what the seller intended to get and received in his trade. Say we wanted to employ such a strategy here, we'd run into a problem. While not explicitly labeled as a fee or commission, the giveaway event hosted here most definitely constitutes such additional payments, as they are extra incentive paid to other people to do the work (in this case finding the weapons) for them.

Let's break down how much those fees (or their analogous payments) are here:

1000 vaccinators at 1 ref means 1000 ref, which equals about 15 keys rounded up (taking into account the relevant time).

36 keys were given away per 1000 vacs, meaning that for every ~15 keys spent on vaccinators, 36 additional keys were paid for them as well.

This does not even take into account that several of the gatherers directly flipped for profit (as you can see they bought for .77 too), but it should be apparent in a moment that that difference won't matter for the outcome here, but the statistics provided below should be even more extreme.

This means that per 1000 vaccinators, not ~15 keys, but ~51 keys were spent, which would equal 3.4 refined per vaccinator on average for the buyer. Not only that, but it means that the people that sold them to him basically got paid 2.4 refined per vaccinator. Subtract that from what they paid for it themselves, and you will find that they paid -1.4 ref (so negative 1.4 ref) per vaccinator, leading to a "real" range of sales values between negative 1.4 and 3.4 refined, which simply cannot work under any circumstances.

Using the fee reduction trick also does not work here. As mentioned above - removing the fees from the value of the actual trades here results in a negative value. Needless to say, this does not work. You could then argue that in this particular case it should only matter how much was paid because that's the only option left (which should never work, but for the sake of argument, let's assume thats the case). You would then get a value of 3.4 ref per vaccinator, which is a lot more than what they are clearly readily available for on the market (even aside from being craftable for much less). This would render all these sales outliers, even though that would be statistically impossible with the data provided.

Do note that this is NOT an allegation of market manipulation against the collector in question. As per the statistics above, they would need to raise in value more than suggestions on craftable weapons would allow before a profit could be made, so if anything, it is a bad business decision (as are most collections).

With all the above in mind, this should be closed.