finis

greetings and salutations

welcome to the last entry in the one-crate-per-week blog. thank you for coming along for this ride, your fascinating feedback and encouragement, and most of all, thank you for giving me a small piece of the most precious thing you own: your time.

i want to leave a proper tombstone at this link, and that is a Table of Contents of what i consider the more interesting articles from my 33 week journey (incredibly not all weeks were particularly interesting :D)

after the ToC i’ll give you some interesting numbers, some closing thoughts, and most importantly a warning.

one-crate-per-week Table of Contents:

the myths and maths of unboxing:

musings on philosophy, behavior, and their parallels in team fortress:

the tf2 economy:

it’ll be fun to revisit some of these articles in the future. i’m sure my naiveté will border on the embarrassing.

* * *

now i’d like to re-introduce you to the unusual i unboxed last week:

the name is an homage to this blog, the probability of the unusual unboxing event. the description is the opening line of O Fortuna, a medieval Latin poem which bemoans the nature of Fate and is part of a massive 11th-13th century poetry collection named Carmina Burana; best known because of Carl Orffs 1936 musical masterpiece.

the description means:

O Fortune, you are ever shifting like the Moon, always waxing, always waning

the unusual itself is nothing special but as i mentioned last week, it’s an amazingly apropos hat to unbox for this blog. while i probably could have rationalized a bubbling larkin somehow, the fact that i unboxed the ordinary version of this very hat in week 13 and proceeded to make fun of it, and the fact that i’ve been writing about team fortress for the last 8 and a half months is an interesting coincidence.

and the coincidences did not end there.

i wanted to establish a baseline value for the unusual so that i would be able to update the final yield. because stats.tf did not report any logo titanium pillars and because backpack.tf and tf2 price check did not have a value yet, i went looking to see if such a hat existed on outpost.

it did. i decided to add the owner. to my surprise he said he was just about to add me. however, he was about to add me not because we owned the same hat, but rather because he has been investigating one of the myths i wrote about in week 15 (new effects and old crates). he knew that i had unboxed a tf logo (an old effect) and that it came from crate #24. (fwiw, a survey of some sort is something i am still noodling on)

but it was only after i pointed it out to him that he realized that we had the exact same hat!

and if you think the coincidences end there? nope. turns out that the original unboxing spreadsheet that long ago got me thinking about the value of crates was his creation as well!

if only there were more weeks to write about Coincidence, there’s so much to say on the topic. i’ll give you a tl;dr version here:

we experience events non stop, 24/7 all day baby, all day. what we call coincidence are simply events which we remember because they were significant.

but that doesn’t mean we don’t stop and go woah!

* * *

assigning value to my unusual has been difficult. experienced unusual traders have said everything between 1-4 buds which is a useless range. given what other titanium pillars sell for and what a logo non robo pillar sells for i think the value is probably around 3 buds. it really doesn’t matter as i’m not likely to ever sell this hat.

it is, in all its ugliness, iconically themed given its origin and the perfect memento of the journey.

* * *

i thought long and hard about whether to continue this blog or not. i finally decided: “this is the end”.

i didn’t want the blog to become a chore to write (and read). and i didn’t want to keep unboxing. i decided to walk away a “winner” in this particular gambling scenario.

but before i sign off, i wanted to give some parting thoughts on the state of the TF2 economy and what it means to have an alter ego in a virtual reality; things i planned to write about over coming months if there were more crates to unbox.

* * *

wealth is relative. although it is sometimes difficult not to covet incredible items in someone’s backpack, just keep in mind: wealth - is - relative. i was once in a meeting with some unbelievably rich men in the silicon valley. where you and i might talk about the best price for 4 lbs of chicken, they were discussing the upside of upgrading their Gulfstream GIV-SPs to the GV. wealth is relative. don’t get sucked in by greed. greed is not good (and fuck Gordon Gecko). greed destroys relationships, economies, ecologies, and, eventually, your soul. enjoy the game of team fortress itself and don’t waste too much time in the trading world possibly stepping on people along the way just to make a small virtual profit.

* * *

pricing guides are guides; prices are not, and should not be set in stone. if you make the mistake of trusting a pricing guide, you will eventually fall prey to price manipulation. traders hoard goods and manipulate pricing all the time, a lot more than you know. and even when it is completely innocent, our most commonly used pricing guide is often misguided, delayed, and incorrectly used by too many traders.

* * *

anonymity on the internet doesn’t give you the right to be an asshole. in fact, take a step back and think hard about this: the availability of this anonymity shows who you truly are on the inside because your social inhibitions can be (and do get) put aside. how do you treat your fellow anonymous virtual denizens? do you make racist and misogynistic statements without remorse? are you a raging shithead? perhaps that’s who you really are. are you happy with yourself for being such a person? ‘cause it’s not too late to rehabilitate yourself. better yourself.

* * *

and finally… please be aware of what you’re getting into when you are gambling. remember:

i was remarkably lucky!

my chances of unboxing this familiar were not even 1 in 5 for 33 crates. don’t use my luck as a motivation to go to the mannco store and blow $82.17 on keys. i have actually unboxed more like 60 crates, the 33 are only since i started this blog. this is my first unusual. i unboxed in slow motion allowing me to trade for keys and not having to spend real world money. most importantly, statistics are always going to win once the sample size is large enough. what does that mean? a 0.66% chance of unboxing means you will get an unusual approximately every 151 crates ($375.99 in keys). the average unusual is worth $179.76.

this gentleman has unboxed 4300 crates and yielded 25 unusuals (a rate of 1 unusual every 172 crates or ~0.58%). even buying keys on paypal at $1.75 that’s $7525 ($10707 at the mannco store rate) for average return of $4494.

so please don’t use my experience as inspiration to gamble. if you want to gamble understand the risks, mitigate some of that risk by unboxing intelligently, and i hope that our journey together has helped you realize that there’s countless ways of looking at value, quality, chance, and more.

thank you for your company, your time, eyes, and thoughts.

cordially,

~bp