Team Fortress 2 Bug “Crate Depression” Fix Announced By Valve

Team Fortress 2 was recently affected by a bug that changed the chances of getting crates and thus almost crashed the game's economy. Valve has announced a solution.

Team Fortress 2 was recently affected by the so called “Crate Depression 2019”. This bug guaranteed Unsual Items drops and thus could have completely crippled the economy of and around the game. Now Valve has put out a statement outlining how they plan to deal with this Team Fortress 2 bug.

On July 25, the bug appeared in Team Fortress 2. It changed the odds of some of the game’s older crates. Because of this, every time a crate was opened, the player would get an Unusual item. In the past, there was only a 1% chance of getting these items.

There’s a vibrant economy built around Team Fortress 2. People trade/ pay real money in the game’s item marketplace for crates and that hats. Obviously, the bug did threaten to bring about an in game depression as there was a sudden influx of rare items. As a result, the price of rare hats crashed, while unopened crates skyrocketed in value.

Valve released a statement on Friday, trying to control the damage. In the statement, Valve said it has been considering the problem over the past week and rolled out what it believes is a solution.

Valve said their goal was

minimizing the impact on the TF2 community as a whole, while preserving the experience of customers who had simply opened a crate, made a trade, or purchased from the market on the 25th, unaware that a bug produced their item.

24 hours after the Team Fortress 2 bug appeared, Valve had already taken the step of locking down all Unusual items obtained from bugged crates. But the bug had already been exploited by a lot of players at that point.

Team Fortress 2’s player count had increased as soon as the news spread. Some players were able to earn a lot of Unusual hats.

Valve has decided upon the solution to this Team Fortress 2 bug. The first hat will be tradable, but all others are trade locked. However, if you want to get a refund on the trade looked hats, you can get a refund.

“We’ve decided that if you currently own one of these Unusual hats, the first one added to your account will be made tradable,” Valve said in the update. “Any other Unusual you have received due to the bug will remain permanently trade-locked. If you decide that you would rather not have these trade-locked hats on your account, you may instead elect a full refund on any number of them.”

According to Valve, players getting a single Unusual hat to trade is more in line with the normal 1% Unusual drop rate.

Valve said the refund would equal“the full price paid for any hats, crates or keys bought on the Steam Community Market or Mann Co. store”

The fix will be available in a week. At that point, item traceability and restoration will come back online as well. This is an appreciable step from Valve. There’s a reason why gamers view Valve’s Steam as being better than the Epic Games store.

Source: PCGamesN