>>719026209
I am not certain, but what I do know is that the people who run the trading platforms like traders.tf have an incentive for market manipulation for a real world profit.
Some of the users do run idle bot farms that collect item drops and process it into refined, or hats. They also turn a blind eye to scams and phishing attacks because they bring items into the their trading networks. Both accelerate the depreciation of the value of refined and your hats.
Even ignoring the market manipulation, TF2's economy was doomed to depreciate with time, that is sort of a long term inevitability with a digital currency that is based on player activity, look no further than TIX on Roblox, it went from being worth around $0.001 when it was introduced in 2009/2010 to like $0.00005 when it was removed in 2017.
Some will make the argument that because the value of hats is inherently tied to the value of 2 refined, that this is inherently a good thing because it is easier to get a bunch of hats with less real world money. Although I can't completely disagree with that, I have two major criticisms. The first one is that if for some reason you decided to invest in your TF2 backpack it is likely worthless, unless you had items from 2010 to 2013, and you basically wasted your time participating in that side of the game or community if your explicit intention was not using it to merely get an item you wanted or liked. The other criticism I have is that some of these tradefags that try to manipulate the market are generally some of the most toxic and malicious people in the TF2 community and frequently harass users because they have a specific item in their steam inventory that they want, and many of these people are not above committing real life fraud or scams to get a specific item that often worth literal pennies just to further consolidate their control over a niche portion of the market to inflate their backpacks by another $100 for an item they will never sell.
