Heads up to those who played CS:GO years ago and like money. I was a pretty active player from 2012 to 2014.
Back then I got dozens of crates that I didn't open, now worth as high as 31$CAD each. I looked it up last week and it's worth over a thousand dollars in Steam. I cashed in on almost half of it and now I have some cash to buy games for my family and friends.
Likewise for Dota 2 players. Some of those old / early cosmetics have shot up in price. A friend of mine I used to play with had a $500 item. Getting rid of them may fund your game purchases for a bit.
There are plenty of sites out there that can give you a value of your inventory. Just make sure your privacy settings for your inventory are set to "public": https://steamcommunity.com/my/edit/settings (though I'd recommend changing it back to private after you use one of the tools, since scammers will try and target you if you have public high value items).
> Some of those old / early cosmetics have shot up in price
"Back in my day" you brought your own skins, maps, and mods to your clan's Quake 2 server and they'd be automatically copied-into other players' q2base profile directories when they connected: free and fast. Making skins in a cracked copy of Photoshop 5.5 or PaintShopPro (don't forget to save to PCX!) was trivial and because nothing really mattered no-one could possibly get angry at anything.
...but now you're telling me that if I want to add custom skins to CounterStrike I have to pay other people hugely inflated sums for the privilege of something that was still free and open to all only yesteryear? And we're surprised at how toxic the "gamer" community has become over the past 15 years since tradable lootboxes, cosmetics, and microtransactions became the norm?
However, if I reflect on how much time I spent in the game in order to receive that much money it's laughable as it was easily 2 thousand hours of game play.
I have two tips:
Sell hardware and then you can get real cash. For example, use the Steam Wallet balance to buy Steam Deck Docks which you ship directly from Steam to your customer on eBay.
Personally, I used my Steam Wallet money to purchase several of the most popular skins on a third-party site and resold them there. I probably took about a 15% hit but who can complain for $400 in profit?
> However, if I reflect on how much time I spent in the game in order to receive that much money it's laughable as it was easily 2 thousand hours of game play.
but, you weren't playing the game as a job to make money, you were playing to have fun (hopefully?) so arguably the extra surprise money is a bonus.
for me, playing a game in order to make real world money would turn it into an awful grind and sap all the joy out of it
Coming from UT/CS and a bunch of other games where skins were simple mods I hate that skins cost so much real world money and so I refuse to spend a cent in protest.
Game with cool mechanics and a universe to play it in, that is worth $$$. Making your shirt green is not worth $... it is worth a colour-wheel implementation.
The threats models I have seen are easy enough to deal with inside the X ecosystem. And investing all your resources into a new system that is not backward compatible is something no serious security person would do as it leaves your existing users vulnerable
That particular scenario (listening in on other apps) is very theoretical, can you recall any attack ever using it? IIRC Windows still has the same 'ability' - and nobody cares.
I deliberately did not answer your question. I refuse to get into the weeds because I reject your premise. I don't know anything about the inner workings of these organizations. (It's really not a "simple question" at all!) It's not my job, I'm just a voter. I have other things to do.
You seem to want me to assume that because of this, I have to default to YOUR position. I'm saying, that doesn't match my broad view of the world. I have the opposite default position.
I guess what I can say, broadly, is that the US Government has a MASSIVE budget. The cruft is in there somewhere. If there's one guy who says he's gonna try to slash it, I'll take that guy and hope for the best.
> I refuse to get into the weeds because I reject your premise.
Occam's Razor would indicate that you have made an unsubstantiated claim that you cannot justify and have been deflecting, desperately. Starting discussions in bad faith, is not constructive.
> If there's one guy who says he's gonna try to slash it, I'll take that guy and hope for the best.
Ok, and then what we actually got was elon musk's incompetent "doge" organization.
This is literally my point, you have faith that there is this "bad cruft" and so you're willing to believe in, and give power to, incompetent idiots merely because they sound like they agree with your predetermined faith.
It's frustrating to watch this sort of thing happen. Regardless of the actual status of "cruft", musk and trump are famously incompetent, the odds of them suddenly developing the skills necessary to combat "cruft" are highly unlikely.
Why, exactly, do you want to throw a hail mary? Are we about to fall off a cliff? Is there some kind of apocalypse waiting to destroy us if we don't do something drastic? Have we run out of other options?
The point I'm trying to make is that the federal government is not some kind of faceless opaque entity that can be treated as a foe to be defeated. It's a big ol' complicated conglomeration of thousands of groups made of of millions of people. Yes, that is hard to wrap your head around at once, but the information is out there. It's all public, you don't need to sneak around or bribe people or whatever, you can just look up who does what, when, why and for how much.
Back then I got dozens of crates that I didn't open, now worth as high as 31$CAD each. I looked it up last week and it's worth over a thousand dollars in Steam. I cashed in on almost half of it and now I have some cash to buy games for my family and friends.
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