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Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

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

#591

Post by wildzzz »

frenzcan wrote: post #133
tetrisgm wrote: 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.

The whole skin economy around CS has gotten way out of hand. It’s less about the game and more about speculation and gambling at this point.

The quickest way to end it would be to ban gifting skins. You'd be allowed to buy and sell skins in the Valve marketplace where market caps could be in place but no more private sales. Of course you could privately buy an account that has possession of the skins you want but that would add substantial obstacles to the private market.

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

#592

Post by wildzzz »

toenail wrote: post #126
rkomorn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You lost me... What is the difference between an abandoned wallet and a non-abandoned one in this scenario?

Technically, "abandoned wallets" is not something that exists, all you have are "unspent outputs" of transactions. For QC attacks to work the public key to a private key has to be revealed, for modern addresses that only happens when you spend coins, not when you send them somewhere. I guess some people call early P2PK (pay to public key) addresses "abandoned", but we simply don't know if somebody still controls them…

Interesting. So as long as your wallet has only received Bitcoin, it's untouchable but the moment you transfer any of it, it's at risk of being emptied. The only way to protect any of the funds is to simply move it to another new wallet. We would be in a situation where any wallets (with known keys) can only be sold off in their entirety to prevent theft. However, who is going to want to buy any Bitcoin if the potential buyer's market decreases with each user exiting the market? The inherent value immediately drops to zero because each successive sale would be less than what it was purchased for. Kind of a Schrodinger's wallet, do you really own any Bitcoin if you can never withdraw from it?

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

#593

Post by dcsan »

agentcoops wrote: post #377
Bengalilol wrote: post #132

I bet this is an on-purpose move by Valve, and I view this as a sane action. [1] Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates. It is also smoothing players' frustration and shopping-spree habits in order to obtain a rare item. If you have t…

I waded through some Tik Tok comment threads on this change and it was so eye-opening: there are a shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items, thinking it was a retirement portfolio. I fear the crypto era has lead to even further diminished financial literacy at large… Blessed be compound interest and financial regulation.

RIP financial regulation. CFPB was hit early on but the dump coins were launched even before that

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

#594

Post by froggit »

therein wrote: post #588
pessimizer wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that any different? It would be fine if schools banned children from bringing cash to school. If there were a multibillion dollar bullying and gambling market going on at the school, I'd demand it.

My issue with that is that the kids are losing something because someone else is doing something. Very similar to one kid being disorderly in class and everyone losing the recess. Imagine being a kid in that room and being annoyed by the kid being disorderly, because you want to learn. Now you lost your rights because of that kid. You never did what he was doing, you never contributed to the disorder he caused, if an…

Are these schools in Stalin's soviet union? One kid causes disorder so all kids must be purged to make sure there won't be another naughty child in the future?

Believe it or not, teachers (your sao-called "power figures" here) are generally not a bunch of untrained dumbshits unable to think of kids with more granularity than as the entire collective group making up a class. They have the skills and training to identify the sources of disruptions along with ample resources available for correcting them without calling forth damnation and hellfire on everything in a 5 mile radius. Hammers are awesome, but it's not all that hard to grab a scalpel when a situation calls for a scalpel.

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

#595

Post by immibis »

charcircuit wrote: post #557
immibis wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the phrase "legitimate investment" should be reserved for situations where you spend money something (e.g. kitchen equipment) that allows you to create new real-world value (e.g. food) which you can hopefully sell for a profit (it's still a legitimate investment if that fails). It should not be used for Ponzi schemes, gambling, outright fraud, or anything of the sort. Buying something and then hoping its price go…

People find value in acquiring things they want. For example if someone wants to have a one letter username on X, there is value for there to be willing to sell one.

This is why I said "new real-world value". An X username does not have real-world value in the same way that potatoes have real-world value.

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

#596

Post by froggit »

gquere wrote: post #175
Aeolun wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone purchasing a $20k cosmetic is almost certainly not a child. If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking? That it’s a legitimate investment? The only people spending that much money on cosmetics are drug dealers.

I didn't downvote you (my account is low reputation) but your argument is weak: that some skins go for absurd amount of money says nothing of the rest of the ecosystem. There can both be children and drug dealers (ab)using the same "gaming" mechanics.

I'd be curious to find out if the overlapping subset, "children that deal drugs," are more likely to do so.

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

#597

Post by froggit »

skeaker wrote: post #439
cubefox wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players. This is an outright falsehood. Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison…

Epic, Steam's only serious competitor currently aside from maybe GoG, just had a bug in their launcher that had all Fortnite players have to redownload their entire 150~ GB game. The cost of hosting aside, the capabilities of these companies to host their own games pales in comparison to Valve, who hasn't had a single bug in downloading or updating any game in the decade and a half I have used their launcher. Conside…

I use steam to launch the games i get from epic and gog. Epic's launcher is so bad that i use their web store to manage inventory and often can't remember if i own a game on epic unless it's set to launch via steam.

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

#598

Post by therein »

froggit wrote: post #594
therein wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with that is that the kids are losing something because someone else is doing something. Very similar to one kid being disorderly in class and everyone losing the recess. Imagine being a kid in that room and being annoyed by the kid being disorderly, because you want to learn. Now you lost your rights because of that kid. You never did what he was doing, you never contributed to the disorder he caused, if an…

Are these schools in Stalin's soviet union? One kid causes disorder so all kids must be purged to make sure there won't be another naughty child in the future? Believe it or not, teachers (your sao-called "power figures" here) are generally not a bunch of untrained dumbshits unable to think of kids with more granularity than as the entire collective group making up a class. They have the skills and training to identi…

I had some great teachers, and some not so great ones. It didn't even take being in Stalin's Soviet Union to experience the whole spectrum.

Even the good ones at times resorted to those kind of measures. But it seems we agree that collective punishment is unfair.

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

#599

Post by toenail »

wildzzz wrote: post #592
toenail wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, "abandoned wallets" is not something that exists, all you have are "unspent outputs" of transactions. For QC attacks to work the public key to a private key has to be revealed, for modern addresses that only happens when you spend coins, not when you send them somewhere. I guess some people call early P2PK (pay to public key) addresses "abandoned", but we simply don't know if somebody still controls them…

Interesting. So as long as your wallet has only received Bitcoin, it's untouchable but the moment you transfer any of it, it's at risk of being emptied. The only way to protect any of the funds is to simply move it to another new wallet. We would be in a situation where any wallets (with known keys) can only be sold off in their entirety to prevent theft. However, who is going to want to buy any Bitcoin if the potent…

The attack when sending a transaction has a time constraints. It will take many any years to go from being able to crack private keys in years/month to doing it in minutes.

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

#600

Post by thenthenthen »

y-curious wrote: post #586
thenthenthen wrote: post #242

There is a whole skin stock market for exchanging Chinese Yuan to US Dollar outside of the banking system: https://www.iflow.work/

Yeah, IIRC China has some arbitrarily-low limit to how much foreign currency a Chinese citizen can possess at one time. This is clever

There is also a limit to what amount you can bring in and out. For foreigners it depends on how much tax you payed over your salary…
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