f13.net

Has anyone had any experience trading items outside of the steam market? I lucked into some pretty rare dota items and would like to potentially turn those into something beyond steam dollars. After spending a few hours researching this, I'm not sure there has ever been a legit trade before - everything seems to be tales of woe from scams. I thought someone here might have gone down this road before and have some advice.

I haven't tried it on Steam, but years of third party trading in MMOs and such has taught me that you do so at your own risk. You'd probably be better off trading your shinies for Steam dollars then offering to trade those dollars (or games bought, or whatever) to an f13er through Paypal.

Funny you bring this up, there's this young guy who hangs around with my group of friends. Last weekend, he was asking about scamming sites and how to avoid them. Apparently he plays some game with gamble boxes and digital knives. Several weeks earlier he was excited about getting some $97 knife. He tried to sell it not through the marketplace last week and ended up with nothing other than questions and no $97 knife. Definitely be ware.

I've bought/sold for tf2, but there is definitely a risk. I used to go through forums.sourceop.com and followed their rules (including creating a reputation thread) and always researched a buyer/seller before doing anything with them. Check to make sure their account isn't something created in the last 2-3 months, make sure they have some games (not just a couple of free ones), always check for public profile, check steamrep to see if they're reported for scamming, etc. Usually only takes about 5minutes to research someone and it's worth it. Always avoid deals that are too good to be true.

Basically though, the normal thing is to go through paypal and the buyer sends the money via gift with a note stating they are buying virtual goods and includes their steam name and steamID64/steamID32 and that it is non-refundable. Once you receive the money then give them the item The whole point was to try to prevent someone from doing a chargeback on paypal, though I don't think it truly prevents it if the one sending money tried hard enough but it does put the idea in the buyer's head that they just gave up their rights to do so. I don't know if that's still done right now so I'd check some threads and see if people are still requiring that in the comment/message field.

That sounds like way more effort then it's worth to me. Just take the steam bucks I say!

I thought I'd provide some followup info on this incase anyone else has similar question in the future. My research pretty much confirmed what most people here are saying - Its a huge pain to try and end up with paypal or whatever. I ended up selling my Golden Skywrath thing for a little over 200 steambucks on the market. I'm in the process of attempting to trade my Golden Doomling for hooks/other golden items with the intention of selling those. Its a chore, as most of the data says the golden doomling is worth more than the max listing allowed on steam market. Yet there seems to be very little legitimate buyer interest in trading for a golden doomling (lots of troll/fake offers to wade through.)

Having looked that up... the price on DOTA2 stuff is stupid.

The overwhelming majority of things in Dota2 are literally pennies.

The overwhelming majority of everything in every genre of collectible is pennies.