Valve’s CS:GO trading rule changes have sparked a community uproar

Last week, Valve made a change to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's trading rules, extending the trade cool down period to seven days. The aim was to stop automated Steam accounts from trading items frequently via third-party services, but it looks like the change has sparked a lot of debate among players, with over 100,000 people signing a petition to have the change repealed.

In the blog post announcing the change, the CSGO team wrote: “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.”

According to Valve's observations, actual players will often only move items around once a week in the majority of cases. However, the team did also acknowledge that the extended cool down period would be “disruptive to some players”.

Now, players are trying to get Valve to back down on this change. At the time of writing, 114,000 people have signed a petition to revert back to the old CS:GO trading rules. The petition claims that the extended cool down period “essentially destroys trading interactions as a whole”.

So far, Valve hasn't commented on the community backlash, but with so many players speaking out, we can probably expect a response at some point this week.

KitGuru Says: Skin and item trading is a pretty major part of CS:GO, so it's not too surprising to see such a huge community uproar over these changes. Do you guys think Valve made the right call? Or should the change be reverted?

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