Grey Carter said:
this update really only facilitates something players were doing anyway [http://www.coregamer.co.uk/2010/10/23/valves-tf2-authoring-tools-earn-modders-50k/], and reduces the chances of them getting scammed, or shivved in an alleyway over some kind of cash-for-trilby deal gone terribly wrong.
This. And hey, maybe all of the whiny people who constantly complain about the hats might be able to get something in return for them if they find something rare enough.
I'm sure the economically naive will decry this sort of trading as madness, but consider: you have an extra copy of a game you don't want to play, or someone has a rare hat that you desire and wants a copy of a cheap $5 game, why not trade? If you lose essentially nothing in the trade or the trade is exceedingly cheap, then that's a pretty rational decision.
"But the hats are just cosmetic virtual items! They're not worth anything, not even $5! They probably took about an hour to make and the game probably took YEARS!" I hear you say. You, sir or madame, fail economics forever. Things aren't mysteriously worth how much work went into them. They're worth how much people want them and people want them based on how good or bad they perceive them to be. You only find this reasoning irrational because
your reasoning about economics is
irrational.
An extreme example proves how easily work-based worth reasoning produces completely counterintuitive and irrational decisions: If there are two products that are identical in every way, but one took twice as much work to make, how on earth do you figure that that product is worth more? In fact, if you think that product is worth more and you decide to buy it instead of the one that was produced more efficiently, you just rewarded the
worse producer. The amount of work that went into something is only relevant if it had an effect on the final product. A thing's worth is based on the thing. It is not mysteriously based on the amount of work that went into the thing (well, it is indirectly, since the amount of work often leads to a worse or better thing).
Even better, what about situations where the most complex product is clearly inferior? This happens all the time. Should you buy an objectively worse product simply because it involved more work to produce? Judging a product by the complexity of its production is silly. (Disclaimer: Again, indirectly judging a product by the way in which it was produced can be rational if the way it was produced actually
does have an effect on you as a consumer. Environmental issues are another a good example of situations where the "product" might be taken to include harmful emissions for instance. Alternatively, if you feel that employment affects you, it wouldn't be irrational to consider the employment involved in the process to be part of the "product" you're buying. Crucially, you have to think that these things have an actual effect on you for the decision to consider them in your value assessment of a product to be rational. They aren't just a priori considerations to be included in value judgment by everyone all the time just because.)
Twilight_guy said:
Also, I don't care what you think and I don't expect anyone to see the same way as me. From every standpoint I can take this is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of (related to games). Maybe I just know how baffling trading a mesh for an entire project is or maybe I just have a different notion of cultural capital versus monetary capital but this is the dumbest.
Maybe they don't see it your way because your way is completely irrational. You're not trading a mesh and a project, you're trading a hat that has a certain value for you and a game that has a certain value for you. If the hat is more valuable to you than the game, this is a rational decision. Consideration of the complexity involved in the design of the items in question is irrational except insofar as that complexity leads to a product that is more or less desirable. The complexity of the production itself is invisible to the consumer (as in "does not affect the consumer", not as in "they don't know about it") and only ever enters rational value calculation indirectly (since it will likely affect the price and features of the product - things that are
not invisible to the consumer (and maybe some of the above concerns that might be more or less visible depending on a consumer's personal feelings (which might themselves be rational or irrational))).
Also, that last sentence makes no sense. Cultural capital is just a way of discussing socioeconomic advantages a person has that come from non-economic sources (skills, knowledge, etc.). How you think this could possibly have anything to do with the value of a product is completely beyond me. If you are, as I assume, actually talking about the notion of a reward-based rather than demand-based economy, see above. That isn't how economies work and there are a lot of good reasons why you wouldn't want economies to work like that (rewarding less efficient producers for being less efficient for instance).
