
To truck, barter and exchange? On the nature of Valve’s social economies - aaronbrethorst
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/to-truck-barter-and-exchange-on-the-nature-of-valves-social-economies/
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ender7
The phenomenon discussed in the article (the surprising lack of any de-facto
currency arising in TF2's barter economy) is very interesting, because the
economy in Diablo 2 _did_ develop its own currency around a single item -- the
Stone of Jordan (SoJ).

D2's economy was very similar in that it was almost purely barter-based and
players had limited inventory space to store their items. SoJs occupied the
smallest possible amount of space in the inventory (1 square). They also had
high intrinsic value, as they were not only powerful items but also
ingredients in two important crafting recipes.

Interestingly, SoJs lost their currency status once their intrinsic value
depreciated [1]. A new mechanic, runes, was introduced, and they became the
new currency. However, to my knowledge no single rune type rose to dominate
the others and claim true currency status, so the current market is a bit more
muddled.

[1] <http://www.diablowiki.com/The_Stone_of_Jordan>

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Karma_Police
TF2 does have somewhat de-facto items serving as currency, although none of
them offer any specific gameplay advantage. They are:

* buds (limited apple Earbuds given for a short period of time): These are worth roughly 2 bill's + some keys, or 24 keys.

* bill's (Bill's Hat, also given for a short period of time for those that preoredered left 4 dead 2) worth around 8 - 10 keys

* keys worth around 2.44 to 2.55 metal

* metal

Everything else is measured around these 4 items. All these prices seem to
come from a single source. The "TF2 Spreadsheet", a google docs spreadsheet,
created by "the powers that be" which seem to have defined these prices
somehow.

It is not a perfect system though, because what generally happens is the
values are used as a starting point for a sale. Whoever's selling wants more,
declaring that the spreadsheet prices are only a reference, and they know
their item sells for more. Whoever's buying usually ridicules the seller
saying that the particular item will never sell for the spreadsheet price,
which is already outdated.

How trades are made with this system, I don't understand. For those not
wanting to deal with all the chaos, there's <http://www.tf2wh.com/>, which
seems to have a rigid credit currency set. Of course it helps that most of the
trades are done by bots, so no human interaction is required.

