Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Items Received in Trade Have a Seven-Day Trade Cooldown: Valve

Valve may be focussing on its new card game Artifact but it doesn’t popular shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) isn't getting any updates. In fact, the company just put out a CS:GO update that makes adjustments to CS:GO item trading which ends up curbing skin gambling. Now CS:GO items received in trade will have the same seven-day trade cooldown as items purchased in-game or via the Steam Community Market. The reason Valve gives for this, is to prevent unofficial services from scamming users. These rogue services rely on quick item trades while genuine players don’t trade items that often.

Reason being, playing CS:GO nets you skins - cosmetic items for the game's many guns. These can be traded outside the game for cash. Something a few Indian sites had been doing in the past what with a cottage industry focused around using sales of CS:GO items to fuel cheaper game prices. They’ve also been used for CSGO skin gambling as well, leading to a law suit.

“Over time, third-parties have developed services that use automated Steam accounts to mimic players and make use of Steam’s trading functionality. Unfortunately, some of these third party services have become a vector for fraud or scams. Unlike players, these services rely on the ability to trade each item very frequently. In contrast, a given item moves between actual players no more than once a week in the vast majority of cases,” a post from Valve reads.

An unintended side-effect of this could be an impact CSG:O skin trading sites like cs.money. The site lets users trade CS:GO items in their inventory with Steam bots to get the skins they want for a fee. It’s something Valve acknowledges further on in its post.

“We want to make sure that Steam item trading is a useful feature that continues to provide customers with the freedom to give and receive items as they wish. However, we realise today’s change may also be disruptive to some players.”

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