How Valve Accidentally KILLED Unusual Taunts... 

Artificially expensive items becoming cheaper is a good thing

kid named unusual taunts.

While it's true that there's a wider variety of unusuals nowadays, perhaps even way too many, a lot of them are limited (Halloween, Winter etc.) I don't really care about Screaming Tiger or the likes, but something rare like Ominous Moon from 2018 always catches my eye. Basically, those limited effects are a safe investment that is unlikely to drop in price. At the same time, anyone who wants an unusual taunt can still get a more common effect quite cheaply, which is a win-win situation in my opinion. It would be different with the hypothetical weapon scenario, of course, because there are only 3 effects.

Back in the Love and War update, Valve added unique crates that would give you a rare chance to drop an unusual taunt. Later on, they added unusualfiers and increased the likelihood of dropping one. Because of the increasing supply due to a higher likelihood of dropping an unusualfier, unusual taunts were rapidly dropping in price, eventually causing a crash. Basically, killing them. Even though Valve killed unusual taunts, they are still really cool and you can get them for cheap.

I think that weapon unusualifiers would be fine as long as they can't be used on painted weapons. That way we don't mess with the unusual weapons in circulation right now and open the possibility to unusual australiums.

Why is making something more widely available and making the market less shitty a bad thing?

Honestly I can't see item value drops being anything other than good, a couple pixels being more than ten dollars is kinda absurd. Also it only negatively affects the minority of players, benefiting the majority, so it's hard to feel any sympathy for the people who actually own them.

Meh. Price killing is only an issue for those already in the trading scene and losing money, but nobody should care about things becoming more accessible. Exclusivity and hundreds of dollars for digital items is kind of a load of BONK! if I'm being honest.

This is a very sad situation, now its very accesible to buy a unusual taunt🤧🤧🤧

Spikey you mentioned the conga was like $800 but can you make a video on the most expensive unusual skins? I feel like this is a topic that people don't talk about often, but it's actually the only unusual you can see in first person.

Nodbody really cares about the price of it, its just all about fun, also it is still pretty rare to see someone with a unusual taunt.

Unusualifiers were meant to increase the supply of the unusuals taunts as the taunts were only unboxable from two crates that were getting unusual themselves

*Describes supply and demand 101* "This is a good thing actually"

Moral of the story: eat the rich or something idk

"Won't somebody _PLEASE_ think of the rich people?!" -spikeymikey, probably

I mean good variants of effects on unsuals are still value - for example ( burning flames, green, purple Energy etc are still Worth a lot, exactly with A tier taunts still Worth loth of money

i would like a specific taunt with a specific effect for not that much

Honestly i gave up on usual taunt long ago , they are too rare to be unbox yet somehow they are everywhere on store....

i don’t mind the idea of unusualfiers for weapons but only if they were for specific ones so the current effects are uneffected by this item how ever if they did this with cosmetics i would be hugely insulted because at that point why unbox?

i wonder if bots existed before in 2016 so when someone realize unusualifers exist they began to insta sell the unusuals to every bot possible

To put it into prospective. The average of the old price is $810. The new price for the screaming tiger is about worth 5% of the old price. Yeah the price going from its old one to its current one went down in value by 95%. Ouch O-O

I want more Strangifiers to be added I want my Strange Napalmer damn it >:(

I own a pretty good unusual taunt. It’s a Minty Cypress Skullcracker taunt. Its only worth around 7 keys, however only 8 people own one, me being one of the owners.

The abundance of skin and effect combinations might lessen the impact that an unusualifier would have on weapons

0:23 i think scout have unusual australium election.

How did you go the entire video without mentioning the Crate Depression

Crazy to think that screaming tiger used to be the high tier and now it’s one of the lowest

Valve went straight for the $ grab and ruined unusual taunts. They turned up the drop-rate early on for the $$$, so often opening crates that they're just common now. Back in the day I used to trade them quite often, only to wonder not IF but WHEN the flooding would cause the unusual taunts to be worth less than the regular, non-unusual/common taunts. Thanks, Valve!

I dont know why the inusual taunt for burstchester is more cheap that the unique version....

unusuals have just been too numerous nowadays so they dont feel special, same with hats. Think we have over 1,000

I honestly wish unusualifiers were available for cosmetics, and contained old unusual effects, because with how the system works now, you can only unbox new unusual effects on new hats, so having a new unusual effect on an old hat, or a new hat with an old unusual effect isn't possible, and makes so many unusual effects useless because so many new hats are absolute garbage.

we kinda already have a weapon unusualifer their called warpaints

Now we just need keychains, followers, cosmetic items that can also wear a hat... and unusualifiers for all of them.

I dislike them a lot. Ive gotten 36 unusual items: 3 hats, 2 weapons, 31 taunts

I'm confused. It's still super rare to get a unusualfier and they can only be used on a specific taunt so it's not like they got any more common to get there's just a weird extra step you have to do to get the taunt so why did the price drop so drastically? Did they work differently back then so you could only get an unusual if you already had the taunt and if they wanted to keep the prices for these unusual's alive then why not just trade the unusualfier's themselves instead of the taunt with it? I'm just trying to understand the why.

Kinda wished they messed up unusualifiers like they messed up killstreakers.

Taunts had unusual effects? How barbaric and gaudy

So who cares if unusual are cheaper they honestly should and it gives people who don't have alot of money chance.

Taunts are a weird topic for me. When they were expensive, i never thought they justified the value. These things you barely use being the priciest stuff around didn't sit with me. The current state is a shame though, because it was inevitable. Unusualifiers were a fine system for a while but I'd say around 2019 the downsides really started to show themselves. We really needed some new basic effects years ago, (Taunt Gen 2 w/ Gen 1 retired, Hat Gen 4), to help stop getting to here.

What hud is this?

this crosshair is the exact same as mine lol

A bit of a simplistic explanation of supply and demand, really. For an example, you say that an Unusual Bombing Run has a lower demand than a Burning Flames Team Captain. That is actually not true, Burning Flames Team Captain has an extremely low demand right now. I understand that, inherently, that seems to make no sense as obviously your average player would MUCH rather be gifted a BFTC than any unusual Bombing Run, but we're talking about the demand of people actually willing to buy it. You said yourself that Bombing Run is an introduction into trading, which means a lot more people are actually trying to buy one than a BFTC, as the price of a BFTC is too outrageous for most people to be willing to actually pay for themselves. The only demand that is important in an items price is the demand of people willing to pay what it is currently worth, and the demand of people who would be willing to pay for it if it dropped slightly in price. But supply is important, the supply of BFTC is low enough that the low demand for them at their price is still high enough to keep the price at where it is. As a price starts to lower, it starts to increase demand for an item, it directly increases the number of people trying to buy the item. If the supply is high enough to meet this new increased market demand the price will lower, but if the supply isn't high enough to meet this demand the price will rebound. This is also capable of creating items in the real world that theoretically might have a high demand, but the price to produce them is so high that there is actually no demand to buy them at that price, and so an item a lot of people would want ends up not selling because the price cannot lower to what that price those people are actually willing to pay is. High theoretical demand, low supply, but still no buyers. Because the only demand that affects the market is the demand of those actually able to afford it in the first place, or those close to affording it. Higher price directly lowers this demand, and lower price raises this demand. So it's incorrect to say that as the price of an item falls, so too does its demand. No, the demand goes up, these items only fall in price because the supply is high enough that for the demand to keep meeting the supply, the price must fall to raise that demand.

I recently unboxed an unusualifier for the drunk mann's cannon and it seems to be so obscure that not even backpack dot tf knows how much it costs

okay but how do you get a 800$ taunt and decide to not sell it lmao

Imagine paying over a thousand dollars for unusual taunts just for a scream fortress update to RUIN it all! 😂😂😂😂

😢

Aren't Warpaints like Unusulafiers?

Constructive criticism - the sound effects are kind of loud and sharp to the point when they are annoying. I think they should be muted for a bit. (transition sound effects, "dropping heavy item" sound effect that appears on the screen when you show a new item).

Weird thing I noticed about your channel... in the subscriptions bar on the left of the homepage, if I left-click your channel, it leads me here as normal, but if I middle-click to pop up your channel in a new window, it pops up a completely different channel other than yours. Have you (or anyone here) noticed this issue? Also only seems to be your channel this bug occurs, the other channels are fine.

boo hoo traders can't price gouge for a video game item and now the majority of players don't feel excluded 😭

Good video

Nice

By The Way Spikey Share to your videos in R/TF2 reddit Beacuse mostly Community can see it Views Boom Blow up.

TL;DR: High prices for digital in-game items, and no way to earn those items through in-game challenges/contracts = bad The price drops are a good thing. It makes sense because *digital cosmetics shouldn't cost so much to begin with.* I think every cosmetic item in the game should be obtainable through contracts/challenges in Casual or MvM, *without* RNG. Before you finish a contract, you should know what specific item rewards you are getting. And there's more to a digital item's "value" than its rarity or its price. How about "It looks cool"? Or "This fits with my other items very well". And even with low prices, you aren't going to see the same cosmetics all the time, because a lot of players either don't care, or they got any of the other hundreds of unusuals instead of yours. No matter if I'm right or wrong, Valve should add a feature to disable unusuals and some particle effects from cosmetics on other players, or all players including yourself. Make it a list of options. They could even allow us to disable only specific effects and unusuals in multiple lists with checkboxes or something similar.

i wonder if bots existed before in 2016 so when someone realize unusualifers exist they began to insta sell the unusuals to every bot possible