It seems a random guy tricked Valve into removing a glitch that will crater the TF2 economy

This update was just released, and /r/tf2 is just discovering what has happened. From what I gather, some cosmetic items in Team Fortress 2 are disallowed from being equipped with others due to clipping or other conflicts. With some glitch involving using +quickswitch (I don't know anything about how you would use this console command on an item or what it would accomplish), you were able to equip two conflicting cosmetic items. I assume this is similar to the old CSGO glitch where you would edit game files to list the bomb as a melee item, allowing you to use a custom name on the bomb that would persist after the files were fixed, but I'm just guessing. TF2's real money economy is one of the oldest in games and primarily based around "unusuals," which are cosmetic hats a character can wear. Unusuals differ from standard hats in that they come with an additional cosmetic effect, such as storm clouds around a character's head, swirling hearts, or something similar. The rarer and more desirable of these hats can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars. I have no idea how large the TF2 economy is now, but it is much smaller than it once was, as TF2 has been dealing with a declining (real players) player base, rampant hacking problems on official servers, and a large bot problem. In comes an anon looking to have a little fun.

Mad lad posts this thread on /v/, showing an email he claims Valve sent him for thanking him for alerting them to a fake duplication glitch, causing them to remove a real glitch which allowed players to equip extra cosmetics or something. Someone sums it up as

so some hat prices were artificially inflated because they could be equipped in the wrong slot with a harmless bug, you told the dev it could clone items and they believed it without verifying and fixed it, and now people are screaming that their glitch slot hats are worthless?

yes

There's also this great screen cap of him letting people know he's dedicated to fricking over the cosmetic glitchers.

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