Readers of Massively OP will recall that over the past few years, skin trading in games like CSGO have made international headlines when the FTC raided skin traders for facilitating gambling and regulatory bodies hassled Valve over facilitating the facilitation of gambling. Wheee. Anyway, Valve’s apparently had enough of the scofflaws running amok with skin trading and is curbing the practice hard with a seven-day cooldown.
“Steam trading was created to allow customers to easily exchange items with each other, and each day we see thousands of customers using Steam Trading in this way. Recently we’ve been looking into ways to reduce some negative unintended uses of trading in CS:GO (such as fraud and scams), with the goal of preserving trade between players,” says the company. Specifically, it seems Valve’s goal is to thwart the third-party services that make use of automated Steam accounts to make mass trades, as it says most individuals trade a specific item just once a week.
“Unfortunately, some of these third party services have become a vector for fraud or scams,” Valve says.
Many CSGO players have taken up arms over the change, and by arms, we mean internet arms in the form of a petition asking Valve to revert the changes. As I type this, over 115,000 players have signed it. “This update essentially destroys trading interactions as a whole,” it states.
