Greetings! I'm [GBID] Outsourced, and welcome to the very first post
on the new website I am working on with [GBID] Cosgrove, Essentially a
Spreadsheet that is One Hundred Percent centered on crates, hat crafting
(Soon to come), and Mann co packages (also in development :D). Both
Cosgrove and I spend WAYYYY to much time on tf2.... mostly trading.
A
few Weeks ago, Cosgrove and I started to notice that the current
spreadsheets were woefully out of tune with what crates are worth
opening, and which should be avoided. It seems as if crates and other
forms of crafting have taken a back seat to being updated, and as such
the tf2 trading community seems to be out of touch with what forms of
crafting are good, and which should be avoided.
Seeing a
need, we both set out to make a website that was entirely dedicated to
crafting; We wanted to analyze each crate, find what the expected values
are, and base crate costs on that, and not on the old antiquated
spreadsheets.
After a few days of work, we seem to have gotten the formulas down pretty well, thanks to in no small part to tf2wh.com.
Using their price listings, I found the estimated value of each crate
in terms of what you could sell the Unboxings for to the tf2wh;
Essentially I found what the unbox value of each crate was. In the
spreadsheet you see above, the first column shows what we think the
current market value of each crate is (This is what we have bought and
sold most crates for), and the second column shows the value of the unboxes
if you sell them to the tf2wh.
After we finished, we
realized that we could further expand on what we've learned: On the far
right, you should see a column called "Test Price List". If you don't
understand how this works, please look at the post called Test Price List Explained.
Okay, I know by now you're all dieing for a TL;DR version, so here you go:
TL;DR:
We think the crate prices are wrong on most spreadsheets, so we
calculated the values of each crate and published our own sheet. Hope you like it, and enjoy :)
Note: The sheet is REALLY rough right now, but all the data is there. We will be sprucing up the page as we move forward, but for not, please bear the appearance.... We are, well "staying open through maintenance :)"
Now, Regarding Impartiality:
The blog hasn't even been officially launched, but I feel it is
necessary for both Cosgrove and I to make a little statement first. We want to be as upfront with what we trade and how we trade as much as we can.
That being said, we want to say a few things. Like all spreadsheets,
these aren't canon, they aren't rock solid. We are doing our best to
inform the tf2 public, at no benefit to ourselves (We might put ads on
later, but for now this is a completely free, and ad-free site.) We both
trade crates, and we both have profited of them. We aren't hiding this
fact, you can look at our tf2outpost history whenever you want. I have
an alt I use to store crates on, and plan to get another soon. We
obviously aren't pretending to be withdrawn from the tf2 marketplace
here, we trade too much to even pretend that we are. What we are trying
to do is inform the tf2 trading public what crafting costs, and what
it's benefits are. We will try to not post opinions, form biases, or
pursue person gain as much as anyone could expect us to do. That being
said, we are human. I'm sure we will get at least some form of disbelief
or criticism for what we post here; that's fine. We both think our work and efforts
will speak for themselves.
EDIT: Blog has finally been posted, ^ still holds true though :)
~Out
