In the most recent update Valve introduced the Battle Pass for the 10th anniversary of its The International competition, and along with it trade lock was added to the game, which is essentially a week-long trading ban on newly-acquired or bought items.
There’s no way such major changes won’t reflect on the market. We’ve made a brief overview of what exactly we’ll be looking at in the near future.
How does it affect the prices?
Right now the market is experiencing a slight dip in skin prices, this holds true for both CS:GO and Dota items. This is a familiar trend and it happens every year, not caused by trade lock, but rather the launch of this year’s Battle Pass.
Every year once Battle Pass is out, the market is sent in turmoil, but soon enough it recovers. There is no reason to be concerned about it and joining the sell-off with your own treasured inventory items.
What about trading?
In item trading some things will change. Single exchanges will cause only slight discomfort, obviously caused by the fact that the newly-acquired item can only be sold in a week.
For regular traders things are more complicated now. P2P trading is cumbersome as it is, you have to find the person who wishes to trade, negotiate the price, sit through the one-week trade lock. To speed the process up, surrogate “currencies” were used. This role used to be fulfilled by high-quality (Arcana) items from Dota 2, and before them – CS:GO container keys.
Their utility in this role is based on their stable price and high demand. Now due to the trade lock, the arcana items can no longer fill those shoes of a stable currency. The supply-demand will obviously be affected by the trade lock, and the prices will no longer be as stable, so the trading community has no choice but to look for alternatives.
What does it change for CS.MONEY?
This entails no changes for the CS.MONEY trading platform, we already have workarounds for those limitations. Our site has special features in place, such as dynamic fees for trade locked items or the virtual inventory feature to facilitate the process.
By and large, trading on the CS.MONEY marketplace is not affected by the Dota update. Our users are still able to quickly and conveniently trade unwanted items for the skins you want. You can read more about the virtual inventory feature and see how it works here:
Author: M.Habinsky
