New weapons in common quality usually popped for everyone very quickly. And were you really unlucky it's was a matter of seconds to find a trade by crafting some metal out of unwanted items.

Was kind of a meta-game, but yes definitively paved the way for virtual goods stock market. Some social science researcher should totally investigate that (if not already done).

Example of an exchange: https://backpack.tf/

Edit: Lot apparently they also suffer from economic crash sometimes like with bitcoin https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-07-26-team-fortress-...

>Some social science researcher should totally investigate that

I mean, not quite a social scientist, but they hired varoufakis at the time to study the economics of the loot boxes among other things. Here are some of the articles about it from his website.

http://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/category/valveconomics/