Live data from Hacker News

Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

polygon.com

41–50 of 617 posts

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#41
post #36

Interesting that a whole economy is based on fake supply constraint. Or is making butterfly knife really hard? It seems like NFT before NFT.

it's not a fake supply CSGO knifes actually currency run by shadow banks providing RMB USD convertion. Google for "挂刀"

This should be a top level comment, it is the "ah hah" that suddenly makes everything clear.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#42

> Counter-Strike's player economy There's a what? I guess once you've maxed out wasted hours of time playing it, you start wasting money too? Less absurd than NFTs though I guess

> wasted hours of time playing it What would you dictate that humans do instead to not be wasteful with their time? Comment on threads about games?

Any ranked matchmaking game is designed to addict you by the prospect of being ranked as elite. They have a number of insidious methods to keep your ranking low, some are even patented by the game companies themselves!

For example, if someone is getting too high, it’s nothing to pair that person with a known deserter for 1-3 games to drastically slow their progress.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#43
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. If you play 1000 hours of a sport, you will at least be stronger, more coordinated, more agile. But the downsides are more about repetitive strain injury and the possibility of screwing up your joints. Different benefits and downsides. Of course, a lot of guys are suckered into sports-related gambling these days too.

You don't think that you get better at CS the more you play it? Better coordination, better accuracy, etc?

you don't get better at real life the more you play it

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#44
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, this is already the case in some countries. In Belgium or Netherland, it's straight up banned, and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one)

>and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one) That still feels like gambling, but rather than gambling on what the current case contains you're gambling on the second one might contain.

And in France specifically, the first case you open is guaranteed to not be a good item. So it's essentially the same system but with an additional $2,50 entry fee

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#45
post #35

$20,000 for a fake knife!? And I buy an item, a real one, and find later there was a cheaper price by few bucks somewhere else and I feel like an idiot.. crazy!

I can't even imagine how rich someone must be in order for a $20,000 imaginary knife with only cosmetic value to seem like a rational purchase.

They are doing it for speculation. They buy it for 20k and sell for higher to profit

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#46
post #9

Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that real life value.

But children can buy a cereal box that has some "rare" card.

Close to 0% of children do their own grocery shopping and buy their own boxes of cereal

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#47
post #5

I play CS. This is good. The gambling economy and the creator economy of people pumping their marketplaces and gambling sites is really toxic. It extracts money from kids, all for a nice skin. Making them more affordable is going to make this more fair and sensible.

Remember back in the day when we just downloaded skin packs from some random Geocities website with obnoxious red text on black background and after going through the install.txt written in broken English/Italian, lo and behold your AK47 now had a proper arctic camo skin and it was so much cooler?

What was wrong with that? Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#48
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think that you get better at CS the more you play it? Better coordination, better accuracy, etc?

you don't get better at real life the more you play it

Playing football for 1000 hours doesn't make you better at any other job (i.e real life).

Don't be so close-minded; playing games is not different from any other activity.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#49
So high prices induce new supply in a market to relieve shortages and the “economy is in free fall”?

Sounds like it is working as it should. Those with oversight fixing supply in response to price signals when the private system is unable to.

Wouldn’t it be nice if those in charge of the economy in the real world made the same sort of intervention.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#50
post #22

Valve employs an army of economists (notably Yanis Varoufakis as alumn) to make these decisions. It was certainly purposeful and will balance itself out.

this is what I think. The change is that 10 of the highest-level weapon textures can be traded for a knife texture: the result is that the supply of knife textures goes up, but the supply of high-level weapon textures goes down significantly more. It's not so much a depreciation of knife textures, as a distribution of this value down the chain of item rarities.

It is 5 covert skins not 10
Post reply on HN