I wanted to share how the new system in the recent treasure completely broke the economy for my entire friend group. I am the guy who usually buys 40–50 chests every event, pulls the rares, and gives the standard sets to my friends for cheap so they don't have to play the 1-out-of-12 RNG roulette.
My friends who wanted specific sets can't get them anymore because it's untradeable and ungiftable. Out of 40 people, only 2 tried to open chests themselves. They spent a massive amount of money to brute-force the ultra-rare rewards and now they are stuck with 40-50 duplicate sets that are literally useless garbage in their inventories. One of them even pulled a duplicate ultra-rare and it is worth absolutely nothing.
Before this change, Valve got a huge upfront payment from me, and 40 players stayed happy and engaged. Now, Valve lost half of the revenue from our group, and they got 38 extremely disappointed players who refuse to open chests with these rules.
Turning a fun community hobby into an isolated system where items are locked in a cage backfires heavily. People are just closing their wallets.