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The team at Valve working on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive have now put an end to the selling and trading of new container keys.

In a post on the official site, the Valve team said as of now all keys purchased in-game are tied to that Steam account so you can't trade or sell them on the Steam Market. Existing keys are not affected but they will eventually run out of course. The question is, why? Well, according to Valve "worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains" and "nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced" so they're putting a stop to it.

While this may affect some legitimate users, it's going to be tiny compared to the overall amount that were being sold. This comes not long after adjusting how the loot boxes for French players work and the same changes for buying/selling keys will likely be added into Team Fortress 2 at some point as well.

Additionally, a small patch for CS:GO went out yesterday to fix a UI issue sometimes displaying CS:GO Weapon Case as genuine quality, along with two fixes for Danger Zone: players can no longer avoid damage with an invalid player name and drones cannot grab cargo if they're set to self destruct.

Find CS:GO free on Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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10 comments

TheSHEEEP Oct 29, 2019
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“layers can no longer avoid damage with an invalid player name”?
How did that even work?
Liam Dawe Oct 29, 2019
Quoting: TheSHEEEP“layers can no longer avoid damage with an invalid player name”?
How did that even work?
*shrugs* I guess a parsing bug somewhere with names that then blocked damage calculation...
Eike Oct 29, 2019
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Quoting: TheSHEEEP“Players can no longer avoid damage with an invalid player name”?
How did that even work?

When you lookup the player by name and don't find it in some list due to a very broken name?
Strange bug indeed. :D

Some repect to people playing around with such stuff and finding out.
None to those exploiting it afterwards, though.


Last edited by Eike on 29 October 2019 at 10:33 am UTC
WorMzy Oct 29, 2019
Quoting: TheSHEEEP“layers can no longer avoid damage with an invalid player name”?
How did that even work?

Certainly seems like an odd bug, I wouldn't have thought the player name would be involved in any logic, that's what player/steam IDs are for.
fagnerln Oct 29, 2019
To be fair, it's really strange the usage of the market to buy keys, it's cheaper in game, and I don't get why someone will buy a key to resell it a few more cents as steam have some % (30%?) on it.
Liam Dawe Oct 29, 2019
Quoting: fagnerlnTo be fair, it's really strange the usage of the market to buy keys, it's cheaper in game, and I don't get why someone will buy a key to resell it a few more cents as steam have some % (30%?) on it.
As I understand it's due to regions and pricing, with some able to get them on the market cheaper in USD than their native currency directly in CS:GO. Something like that anyway.
pb Oct 29, 2019
Quoting: fagnerlnTo be fair, it's really strange the usage of the market to buy keys, it's cheaper in game, and I don't get why someone will buy a key to resell it a few more cents as steam have some % (30%?) on it.

Money laundering? Say you owe someone $100 and you'd like the payment to be unregistered. You buy xx keys (or some other virtual items) and give it to them ('trade' with nothing in return), then they sell it on the market. Of course they can't withdraw money from the steam balance but there are other ways, I've repeatedly seen people offering to buy you a game with their wallet money for 80-90% of the current price paid to paypal etc. I thought they were just looking to withdraw the money made on trading cards, but who knows really.

Also, don't know about cs:go, but tf2 keys are a common 'currency' in game trading. For example game X costs 1 tf2 key etc. Some steam forums are full of that.


Last edited by pb on 29 October 2019 at 9:55 pm UTC
GustyGhost Oct 30, 2019
Another Freudian trick extinguished, which make developers focus more on building a treadmill than on making an actual game. I think I can hear the world's smallest violin.
Sol33t303 Oct 30, 2019
Quoting: fagnerlnTo be fair, it's really strange the usage of the market to buy keys, it's cheaper in game, and I don't get why someone will buy a key to resell it a few more cents as steam have some % (30%?) on it.
Don't really know about other games, but keys have always been used as a sort of currency when trading.
The reason for this is because steam puts a cap on how expensive you can sell an item for on the Steam market ($500 I think?), when you are getting into the VERY rare skins and other items, things can start going over that limit.

The way around that was to basically pay for the item in keys. Those keys are either then used (if the reciver of the keys is feeling lucky), or then all sold on the market. AFAIK not uncommon to see people then sell their account before doing anything with the keys to sort of "withdraw" money from their account.
Philadelphus Oct 31, 2019
Quoting: pbAlso, don't know about cs:go, but tf2 keys are a common 'currency' in game trading. For example game X costs 1 tf2 key etc. Some steam forums are full of that.
Yeah, I don't know about CS:GO as I don't play it, but from what I understand this happening to TF2 would pretty much drop the economy in its tracks. I guess we'll see what happens.
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