Project Introduction

I doubt many people will even visit this page, but here goes:

On October 10, 2007, Valve Corporation released Team Fortress 2, a cartoon first-person shooter that pits the Blu team versus the Red team in a battle to steal each others intelligence, capture important control points, and demolish the opponent's base. Since it's release, Valve has been releasing expansive updates that have added new items, new game modes, and new achievements to the game. One such update was the Mann-Conomy Update, released on September 30, 2010, that introduced new items, a Team Fortress 2 store, and most importantly, an all-new trading system. With this system, players could now trade any of their items to any other player who owned the game, the most popular items traded being hats for any of the nine playable classes. With the release of this update, I was able to obtain a lot the hats that I was never lucky enough to find. And after a day of playing with the update, I had gathered a respectable number of hats.

We all know the story of Kyle MacDonald and his one red paperclip that he traded and re-traded until eventually, after 14 transactions, he had traded his way to a new house. To be honest, until the TF2 update came out, I had no idea who he was. It wasn't until after I had received another hat in TF2 and Scott referred to me as "that one paper clip guy" that I did some more research. After talking about him with my friends, they decided that I should start the same project that Kyle did, only in Team Fortress 2. And so, "one red blutsauger" was born.

The goal of this project was to take the most worthless item in Team Fortress 2 and trade it and re-trade until I received the most sought after item. I chose the Blutsauger as my starting item due to the fact that it was the first item players received after the first class update, being awarded for completing the Medic Milestone #1 achievement. According to TF2Items at the time of this project, the most wanted item in Team Fortress 2 was the Chieftain's Challenge, an Indian headdress hat for the Soldier. And so, with my goal in front of me, I began the project. The rules were: I wasn't allowed to explain to anyone what I was doing. I had to trade my items just by haggling and finding the right buyer. I couldn't ask for hand outs or anything.