Consoomers / Consoomer Culture - Because if it has a recogniseable brand on it, I’d buy it!

[Torque Wheeler]

I wish my e-friends would shut up about a rock paper scissors game that hasn't been changed in 25 years

 

[Vingle]

Yeah, and $500 for a "private use" hair dryer is ridiculous.

Good design has its price. I don't know why you are so MATI over me liking expensive stuff.

lol, you sure about that?
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Running off to the private donors-only board to whine reeks of MATI to me.

Not really. The thread is for cringe posts, and your posts are really fucking cringe.

>Sensor somehow makes $50 hair dryer worth $500.
Whew, lad.

In the first post I've said I bought it for the design, it is not my fault you can't read.

 

[Marche]

Aside from hairdressers

My mums a hairdress and she said ur a fgt.

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

I wish my e-friends would shut up about a rock paper scissors game that hasn't been changed in 25 years

I wish my e-friends would stop arguing over overpriced Swedish hairdryers.

 

[Vingle]

I wish my e-friends would stop arguing over overpriced Swedish hairdryers.

It is within the threads topic, but ye. It's fucking gay, I don't know why it matters. Just decided to take the bait just to humour you, as the thread is a little slow now.

Sorry

 

[evrae]

I say this as someone with absurdly long hair. It is extremely easy to avoid burning your hair by not using a blow drier at all.

Not jamming the drier into your hair or holding it in place for a long time also results in a lack of burnt hair. All you really have to do is focus on roots down to tips, taking care to get each layer. I find the hardest part to not get burns is when the hair is thoroughly soaked so I'd towel dry it first (it'll set in place when completely dry unless you use products).

I say this as a guy who formerly had absurdly long hair.

Has anyone seen those guys on Steam that just collect games more than anything? I think it became a much bigger problem with the introduction of badges, since one of them displays exactly how many games you have. There are people who just buy tons and tons of cheap crap games just to up the number on the badge.
Steam badge collection in general, you see people with an utterly absurd number of levels which requires crafting badges that range in price from very cheap (~40c total for a level) to around $1 or more depending on normal or foil.
The level requirements also scale so people with thousands of levels require millions of XP to get there, keep in mind badges only give 100 xp per badge level, so you can guess just how much in total was spent for big numbers.

 

[Elysian]

Steam badge collection in general, you see people with an utterly absurd number of levels which requires crafting badges that range in price from very cheap (~40c total for a level) to around $1 or more depending on normal or foil.
The level requirements also scale so people with thousands of levels require millions of XP to get there, keep in mind badges only give 100 xp per badge level, so you can guess just how much in total was spent for big numbers.

I remember a few years back there was this guy who went by the username St4ck who got a custom steam sale badge with his profile picture on it because he spent $80,000 to level the badge up to level 100,000. He was a middle eastern prince or something and had photos taken in a really opulent bedroom with a pet chimp.

 

[evrae]

I remember a few years back there was this guy who went by the username St4ck who got a custom steam sale badge with his profile picture on it because he spent $80,000 to level the badge up to level 100,000. He was a middle eastern prince or something and had photos taken in a really opulent bedroom with a pet chimp.
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He was still going up until Steam Awards 2019 it seems in terms of badge collection, now sitting on a total level of 5000 with a total XP count of 125,287,316. This is approximately 1.25 million badge levels (not accounting for free badges like Community badges, year badges, etc). I suppose being number 1 on Steam levels to such an unreachable degree is chump change compared to an expensive car or anything else of the sort.
I remember also hearing how he was some Saudi prince or something. Those guys also tended to dominate the trading scene of CS:GO with rarer items such as Dragon Lores, Howls, as well as full blue Case Hardened knives and AKs tending to end up in their inventories as a new means of flashing their wealth, I believe even Anomaly had a full play-side blue knife that he sold off to a Saudi.

The CS:GO trading scene's association with arab princes may have been due to the prevalence of gambling and betting until Valve cracked down on it, since the TF2 scene when it was alive was mainly Americans, and I think DOTA2 was the same as well.

 

[saintJogger]

Has anyone seen those guys on Steam that just collect games more than anything? I think it became a much bigger problem with the introduction of badges, since one of them displays exactly how many games you have.

This actually helped me kick the habit of buying games on sale. It took me seeing the badge "this user has over 200 games" to realize what a massive fucking faggot I am and stop throwing money at Steam. That was maybe four years ago and I still haven't had the time to play all the games I have in my collection.

 

[evrae]

This actually helped me kick the habit of buying games on sale. It took me seeing the badge "this user has over 200 games" to realize what a massive fucking faggot I am and stop throwing money at Steam. That was maybe four years ago and I still haven't had the time to play all the games I have in my collection.

I suppose this is also why I've reduced my spending due to having over 200 games as well. This is probably also why Steam added that points shop shit which nets you points from buying shit like games or market stuff to encourage bigger spending for stupid shit.
It's additional means to encourage spending and product consumption.

Speaking of the digital trading scene, anyone remember that one trader with a Burning Team Captain (no longer the absolute rarest TF2 item, but remains generally the most expensive by being the original big item) who got VAC banned? I remember the guy put up a description that read like cope and how it was totally intentional (but it's pretty obvious he got caught in one of the big VAC waves back in the day), can't remember who it was so I haven't got screenshots. At this point this is kinda crossing over with the TF2 Community thread here, though.

In general digital trading communities are heavy consumers, they often are extensive whales and usually have the top guys prey on people with no idea of the value of their stuff, and then turn around and get mad at anyone else doing the same thing. I used to be f2p in a gacha that you could trade anything in-game in, whales would get immensely mad at people getting to the top of leaderboards through means that don't require spending at all and said whales were also often the ones who'd then get banned for RMTing. The desire to be at and stay at the top tends to be a strong driver for whaling harder and harder for certain people.

 

[Mister Uno]

Speaking of the digital trading scene, anyone remember that one trader with a Burning Team Captain (no longer the absolute rarest TF2 item, but remains generally the most expensive by being the original big item) who got VAC banned? I remember the guy put up a description that read like cope and how it was totally intentional (but it's pretty obvious he got caught in one of the big VAC waves back in the day), can't remember who it was so I haven't got screenshots. At this point this is kinda crossing over with the TF2 Community thread here, though.

I knew a dude who for the longest time had every Team Fortress 2 item you can imagine before they really went nuts on hat effects. He must of spent thousands before he realized "Ok this is going to break me." At the time I was impressed, but now I think it's pathetic.

I used to be f2p in a gacha that you could trade anything in-game in, whales would get immensely mad at people getting to the top of leaderboards through means that don't require spending at all and said whales were also often the ones who'd then get banned for RMTing. The desire to be at and stay at the top tends to be a strong driver for whaling harder and harder for certain people.

Reminds me of card games. It's crazy how much money certain cards cost just due to how good they are. Few months back I opened a card pack (Yugioh) just for fun and managed to get a 120$ single spell card. Certain others I want cost around the same. It's impressive when I find people who can make solid decks on a budget, but it's hard these days. Heard this applies to MTG and Pokemon as well.

 

[a very special boy]

I remember the guy put up a description that read like cope and how it was totally intentional

Thanks for reminding me. Hilarious.

Spoiler: Extreme Levels of Cope

If you are wondering about the TF2 VAC ban, its was an INTENTIONAL decision. I would have easily used an alternate account if I wanted to hack just to piss other people off. I'm actually glad this happened; and here is why. Some things need to be said beforehand so this all makes sense, so I'll try to be brief in each story chunk:

Since 2011ish, things have been slowly going down the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the life of JCapps. Before the downfall though, I picked up TF2 in 2009 when the first halloween update came out and introduced the gibus. No, it was not on this account, but another. That was midway in the period of time when new weapons besides the defaults were being made. Consistant updates really appealed to me since everything was always fresh . I usually was hanging around achievement/idle servers, tf2ware servers, dodgeball servers, and all those other goofy fun modded servers. I barely played on maps that was a PvP objective because I don't like failing or losing . I partially don't like winning either since someone else has to lose. So what did I do? I would spend most of my time running around achievement servers killing bots and spamming pootis, because there are no losers there. Everyone wins.

When the manncostore update came out (which introduced keys and such), thats when things got reeaally interesting for me since 1) Almost all my items turned vintage 2) You could traaaaaaade 3) Fancy shmancy particle effect hats! At this point I pretty much developed a need to be a collector of stuff . Long story short, I eventually traded up to an unusual in about 2 years, with being scammed out of some of my items on the way. It was an orbiting fire Pugilist's Protector; nothing special in general, but it was special to me because it was a personal goal that I completed . Joyfully showing off my new hat, the unexpected happened...I was VAC banned...for absolutely no reason.

I did not hack at all on that account and I had my first ever unusual removed, so I of course complained to valve. VAC bans as you know are irreversable, so nothing happened. TF2 was the insta-relief game for me, so this got me good. I never thought I'd ever get an unusual or a fancy item again if I started from scratch, so I gave up TF2...aaaaand jumped into a new account a few weeks later (this one). The game was too fun to quit, with all the new mechanics and such, like bosses, even more new weapons, and new voice lines that I'd never get tired of.

Eventually, I was motivated enough to run my own server for awhile, and even make my own maps for it! It was quite loved by many, and to this day some people still want me to reboot my server . Why I took the server down is mildly irrelevant to the story behind this account's VAC, but I just needed to mention it for later use. There is a reason why some things are being underlined, which I will also explain later.

Aside TF2, this was the beginning of the decay of my life. Not because of TF2, but for personal reasons. But with that, having more fancy stuff in TF2 seemed to destress me, after all, I did aquire the collector's craze. There were a few keys moments during this backpack building time period: 1) I've grown the distaste for not just scammers, but sharkers, phishers and price manipulators and anyone greedy as well. I would turn full Phoenix Wright whenever someone tried to pull a yoink on me or one of my friends. 2) I learned that I actually feel bad for making a profit . I actually feel bad for getting a good deal because someone else gets a worse end of the deal. I end up buying things rather than trading this to avoid this. 3) I developed an understanding of why people do certain things . This sudden blast of willingness to hear what people have to say derived from this: http://forums.backpack.tf/index.php?/topic/8051-somewhat-intellectual-conversation-with-a-phisher-rare/ . I was surprised I actually got him to talk with me. Reading this again right now still hits home, as the current USA presidential candidate who supports more affordable college plans is losing the race to corruption (No, I did not complete college). Do i support scamming? Absolutely not. But i get it .

Fast forwarding ALOT, I set my sights on a gold pan and eventually got one by paying with items. It was a massive overpay, but it was worth it. Finally having a gold pan was the biggest highlight in my life. I had a blast with that thing. I already had a houwar at the time, so i took the name of Lord Demopan since i friggen loved the idea of demopans. Everything was great. I got what I wanted...in TF2...not in my life outside of TF2. Again, more ugly personal things kept stacking up. Being the introvertive person that I am really didn't help with these issues.

So, with my life getting ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, what happened?... What if i could improve my backpack?... since you know, TF2 is the destresser...

I had to make my sets even shinier. How? Well, a sunbeams misc would look nice so my houwar would look glowy. I ended up getting a sunbeams brainiac for engi. It looked sweet as hell....But what about demopan? There is no demoman misc is there? *gasp* What if I got a shiny ALL-CLASS sunbeams misc? I did just that. I spent $3500 on a sunbeams polar pullover that monkey had. He ended up being able to pay of some bills, so that made me happy. BUT! *gasp* What if I glitched professional killstreak kits on all of his stuff too? *gasp* WhatifIhadaustraliumsforeveryonesoTHEYCANBESHINIER*gasp* WHATIFBECAMETHEGUYWITHTHEMOSTEXPENSIVEBACKPACK -
...

And it didn't stop...

...Luckily, I realised that it was TF2 that has been applying stress, not relieving it. TF2 was no longer friendly fun, but a struggle to the unreachable.

Look back at everything that was underlined. With all these new gimiks like contracts and upgradable badges, you know I need to reach the highest with everything. If i didn't, in my mind, I'd fail a goal that was "achieveable" since I could buy my way in effortlessly. I wanted this more because of my failure to reboot my server that everyone loved since. I haven't gotten to that after mentioning i'd put it back up after like 5 years since my motivational levels to do anything are at an all-time low. Not wanting to profit from my server didn't help it either. Monthly payments and such disgust me. I'd rather just pay for something once and use it, which is exactly how my server ran. I gave out admin for a few keys, and small perks per server visit were a weapon each. No vip system at all. Everyone loved the way it worked. It even attracted other popular groups and suggested a partnership. They even offered to host my server for me so pings were better. But the stress was too strong. I was demotivated because I was scared that I wouldn't be able to pay off the monthly fee of their server hosting. I was afraid that my regulars would scram once they heard of the new system the server providers had for me.

In a quick summary : I consistanly feel awful when on TF2 for 1) not providing fun to those who just want to have fun, 2) not having the best of the best backpack, because my brain registers it as a complete failure if it isn't, and 3) dumping my money into the game and hoping everything turns out better

So, I sort of recently (comparatively to multiple years) decided to find a way to stop all this, because frankly saying "I quit" isn't going to stop me from coming back. I had to do something to prevent me from trading. The first thought, coming from the ♥♥♥♥ side of my brain, was to just start scamming. Yea, there's no way in HELL I'm doing that. The next thought was..."what if i just get VAC'd?" That way no one else gets hurt in the process. However, I also had one last goal, and that was to get a burning team captain. It was the "I win TF2" hat after all.

So, I appeased the ♥♥♥♥ side of my brain and the good side

Apologies for a double post, but I should reiterate that this hat is worth about $20k. He cheated, and got VAC'd - which meant his inventory was made untradable, removing all value. He also had a lot of other expensive items.

 

[peepaa]

I suppose this is also why I've reduced my spending due to having over 200 games as well. This is probably also why Steam added that points shop shit which nets you points from buying shit like games or market stuff to encourage bigger spending for stupid shit.
It's additional means to encourage spending and product consumption.

Speaking of the digital trading scene, anyone remember that one trader with a Burning Team Captain (no longer the absolute rarest TF2 item, but remains generally the most expensive by being the original big item) who got VAC banned? I remember the guy put up a description that read like cope and how it was totally intentional (but it's pretty obvious he got caught in one of the big VAC waves back in the day), can't remember who it was so I haven't got screenshots. At this point this is kinda crossing over with the TF2 Community thread here, though.

In general digital trading communities are heavy consumers, they often are extensive whales and usually have the top guys prey on people with no idea of the value of their stuff, and then turn around and get mad at anyone else doing the same thing. I used to be f2p in a gacha that you could trade anything in-game in, whales would get immensely mad at people getting to the top of leaderboards through means that don't require spending at all and said whales were also often the ones who'd then get banned for RMTing. The desire to be at and stay at the top tends to be a strong driver for whaling harder and harder for certain people.

There's nothing quite like clicking on the Steam profile of someone who has clearly spent too much on worthless Humble bundles and seeing their game completion rate is below 15%. Think of all the mini transactions made on cards, emotes, Steam store credits, and items in other games like TF2 unusuals... just go for achievements it's time better spent

 

[moocow]

Apologies for a double post, but I should reiterate that this hat is worth about $20k.

So it turns out Valve was a pioneer of NFT's long before they were even called NFT's!

Twenty thousand dollars for a fucking virtual hat. We're never gonna make it out of our own solar system, are we?

 

[evrae]

So it turns out Valve was a pioneer of NFT's long before they were even called NFT's!

Twenty thousand dollars for a fucking virtual hat. We're never gonna make it out of our own solar system, are we?

Funnily enough, Valve never assigned a value to the items themselves officially, and I believe the TF2 crate system is the original video game lootbox. That lack of official value is how TCGs like MTG and TGO avoid gambling laws, the market of players decides the value. This approach is also how lootboxes got away with shit for very long up until governments started to take notice (the main factor behind govs noticing was probably a combination of both Fortnite lootboxes and CS:GO gambling sites).

In the case of TF2, this was kinda arbitrary? There are different series of unusual effects, and hats can be multiclass. There's an equal chance upon rolling an unusual to roll any hate in the game, and whatever effect series the crate is (correct me if I'm wrong).
The gacha I used to play, the cards had tier lists and stronger and weaker variants so the value was relative to strength. I believe the strongest card that I knew of before I left was a perfect type of a limited time collab card, I believe only 2 or 3 were ever known to exist and I think RMT valued it at a couple grand (since it'd generally shit on everything else at the time). Most I made when I quit and RMTed my gear was a few hundred from insane luck and ruthless trading experience, as I was previously both a CS:GO knife trader and TF2 unusual trader before I joined that trading scene. Forum for it died ages ago but I remember some of the ragequits from top whales on there who got banned from RMT were generally hilarious.

The people at the top in the trading scenes always determine the prices, but they also enjoy sending hilariously shit lowball offers because they always want to felt people and get more and more, these people often don't even play the game anymore at that point, they'd often just AFK in a trading server as they send and take offers on trade sites. Tradefags turn a video game into a spreadsheet where they want higher numbers and more dumb children felted.

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

I remember a few years back there was this guy who went by the username St4ck who got a custom steam sale badge with his profile picture on it because he spent $80,000 to level the badge up to level 100,000. He was a middle eastern prince or something and had photos taken in a really opulent bedroom with a pet chimp.
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Because when you need someone with a lack of good taste and tons of money there really is no substitute for an Arab.

 

[Unyielding Stupidity]

In the case of TF2, this was kinda arbitrary? There are different series of unusual effects, and hats can be multiclass. There's an equal chance upon rolling an unusual to roll any hate in the game, and whatever effect series the crate is (correct me if I'm wrong).

You're mostly right, though that only applies to hats unboxed from crates. Crates have pretty much been replaced by cases, and cases will only ever drop unusual variants of items from said cases. Also, for some reason any effects added after ~2016 can only ever be obtained from cases, so those newer effects can only be gotten on a select few hats.
There's also the fact that a lot of effects can only ever be unboxed during specific events - usually Halloween, but in the last few years they've also been doing this during the Summer and Christmas periods as well. And most of these effects are only available during that year's specific event, which is presumably done to encourage whales to unbox more for fear of missing out on getting a specific effect they wanted. Because of these factors, there's a lot of hats that will either never exist, or only have one in existence, which is how you get the utterly insane whales spending thousands on a single virtual hat with a gaudy particle effect attached.

As autism-drenched as that is, it gets even worse once you look into skins. I've spoilered this to avoid giving this thread a terminal chromosomal overdose.

Spoiler: TF2 Item Spergatory

Normally, you can unbox weapon skins from cases, and any skin you unbox has a certain percentage chance to be strange* (Generally believed to be a 12.5% or 1/8 chance), and any skin you unbox will have one of five random wears (Factory New, Minimal Wear, Field-Tested, Well-Worn, and Battle-Scarred). However, this only applies to skin collections that could be gotten from cases.
Some collections weren't gotten from cases, and were instead rewards when you completed contracts during an old update. These couldn't drop as strange. Instead, the only way you could get these as a strange-variant would be to apply a stat-clock to them, but these could only be applied to the lowest tier, Civilian-grade (AKA Tier 1 or Grey-tier, due to the colour of the item's name).
As a result, if you wanted a strange variant of a higher-tier item, you would have to go through trade-ups, where you trade 10 items of the same tier for 1 item of the next tier up, and this is where things go insane.
*this just means the weapon counts how many kills you've gotten with it, which you'd think would be part of the item by default, but I guess Valve decided to nickel-and-dime you for that too.

To give you an example of how these digital paint jobs can get so expensive, allow me to present you a hypothetical example.
Lets say you wanted a Strange Factory New Top Shelf Minigun, pictured below:

Now, this item is a Commando-grade (essentially Tier 4 or Purple-tier) item from the Gentlemanne's collection. So, in order to get this, you would need to trade up 10 Mercenary-grade (Tier 3./Blue-tier) items from the same collection, and to get one of those you'd need 10 from the tier below that, etc. Essentially, you'd need ONE THOUSAND Tier 1 items from the Gentlemann's collection, and they would ALL need to be Strange in order to guarantee that your final result is also Strange.
Keep in mind that you need to apply a stat-clock to every single Tier 1 item you use for this, since as mentioned previously, these stat clocks can only be applied to Tier 1's. Each of those can currently be bought for roughly $0.62. So just to buy the stat-clocks alone, you'd need to invest $620.00, before even getting a single one of those skins.
And about getting those skins. Even the Tier 1 versions of these Gentlemanne collection skins go for approximately $40.00 - $45.00 each. Just to reiterate, you would need 1000 of these. So that would be $40,000.00 at least, likely more.

That might seem like a lot - unless you're a Saudi prince, most of us don't exactly have that sort of money lying around to spend on a virtual gun. There's a silver lining, however. You don't need to use 10 items from that collection, you only need to use one item from that collection per trade-up. There is a catch though - the percentage chance of you getting a certain collection from a trade-up is relative to how many items you put in from that collection. So if you used 1 item from the Gentlemanne's collection, and then 9 items from, say, the Teufort collection, you'd have a 10% chance of getting a Gentlemanne's collection item of the next tier, and a 90% chance of getting a Teufort collection item of that tier. This also applies to the wears used, and whether or not a strange variant was used. So if, for example, you use 9 Tier 1 non-strange Battle-scarred items from collection X, and 1 Tier 1 strange Factory-new item from collection Y, you have a 90% chance of the trade-up result being a Tier 2 non-strange Battle-scarred item from collection X, and a 10% chance of getting a Tier 2 strange Factory-new item from collection Y.
And you have to gamble like this - there simply isn't enough items from certain collections (such as the aforementioned Gentlemanne's collection) in order to do these trade-ups solely with them, since some of these collections haven't been dropping since 2015. And every time someone does one of these trade-ups, it takes 10 of them out of the system, causing the items to become rarer and more expensive as a result. So you have to mix in items from other collections, meaning that you're always at risk of getting an item from one of the cheaper collections you used in the trade-up, potentially losing thousands of dollars in the process.

This means that if you wanted the Minigun posted above, for every trade-up you do, you have to use at least one strange, Factory New item from the Gentlemanne's collection. And this only gives you a 10% chance of getting the desired trade-up result.
And for reference, even the cheapest Tier 2 strange, Factory New items from this collection go for around $390.00. And you need at least one of these in order to get a 10% chance of getting the Tier 3 item we need, and then you'd need to do another trade-up with that Tier 3 to get a 10% chance of finally getting the Tier 4. So you need to spend at least $390.00 to get a 1% chance of getting the Minigun we mentioned above, and a 99% chance of getting something completely different which could potentially only be worth a couple dollars (or less) if you're really unlucky.

And the best part is, after doing all of this? There's two other Commando-grade items in this collection along with the aforementioned Top Shelf Minigun, and you have an equal chance of getting any of these.
So that 1% chance I mentioned in the last paragraph? I lied, it's actually a 0.33% chance. You still want that Minigun, bro?

 

[General Disarray]

Completely unsure as to where to put this: the SJW thread, food thread or ?? so I opted for this one as it encapsulates both areas.

I was mining my promotions tab for obnoxious submissions for the Corporate Pride thread, and came across this email from DoorDash with the subject: Opt Out of Father's Day Marketing? which caught my eye.

Can someone help me as to why Father's Day was chosen for this email? Who is this targeted to? Military families, niggers, ???

Just curious, your thoughts welcome. Mods please move to more appropriate forum if necessary.

 

[toggaf]

Opt Out of Father's Day

I guess they're assuming the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

 

[Fialovy]

Can someone help me as to why Father's Day was chosen for this email? Who is this targeted to? Military families, niggers, ???

I'd also imagine childless men that are childless not by choice and guys that suffer from male factor infertility too. I know they often do the same thing for mother's day for women who can't/don't have kids due to circumstances beyond their control like disability or infertility and so on.