Today is the end of The Unusual Trading Community (UTC), and the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ end of the legacy that was UHC (The Unusual Hat Club).

Mann Co. Trading (MCT, http://manncotrading.com), has graciously offered UTC members and admins a home on their servers. MCT is a very stable community, founded quite some time ago by a long-time fellow SourceOP Trusted Seller, Pink Taco. They have integrated our bans, backed up our forums for record-keeping, and will be handling any appeals should the need arise (if you need to appeal, appeal at MCT, not SteamRep). Many active UTC admins have been offered a place to admin there as well, so if you recognize them or other old members, be sure to say hi!

Also, if you have any questions (or just want to say hi), feel free to add me.

I would like to thank the MCT staff in the transition, particularly MCT's Penguin the Fluffy who has done the lion's share, as well as MCT's Secret Taco, who I understand has helped as well. Primary thanks on the UTC side goes to another long-time UHC admin left standing, Vintage Cobra, and to dmtdude as well, who also funded UTC's hosting for a long time. I can't take credit for anything -- the work I did mostly amounted to agreeing and looking for someone to hug. Penguin and MCT have been very respectful of the UHC/UTC legacy, our admins, and most of all our community.

I requested the opportunity to make this posting, because I wanted this to be my way of saying my final Goodbye to these communities, to these memories, and to these years I've spent with them.

That's all you need to know.

However, if you would like to read on, I would like to tell you a love story. I hope this brings smiles to your face, as you remember these times in similar fashions. I don't expect everyone to have the same memories, or even the same feelings, of course, but this is my personal love story for UHC/UTC...

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I was one of the most avid traders when trading first was released in 2010 (although I started playing shortly after TF2 was released in '07). Back then, the only options for trading were SPUF, SourceOP, and (most commonly) sitting for hours on trade servers. But because so few unusuals existed, there weren't really any traded in servers.

Most people didn't have access to any hats at all, let alone unusuals. Unusuals were a thing most people had never seen, and many had never even heard of. Of the few fortunate enough to have seen them, few had seen all the effects. There weren't screenshots on google, let alone videos on youtube.

People neither knew how much they were worth, nor how much people liked them, nor how much they *themselves* liked them. Some people thought plasma was the best effect, others thought hearts. For quite a long time, people angrily refused to believe they were any more rare than normal hats!

Unknown to me, a while earlier, a fellow named J-o-h-n created The Unusual Hat Club (UHC). It was during this time I stumbled upon their server while I was hopping between various trade servers, trading hats and weapons. Suddenly I join and there they are -- hearts, ghosts, sunbeams -- so many different effects, so many different hats, and all on one server!

It was at that point that I asked the question pretty much anyone who has ever been on an unusual server *hates* to hear: "How much does an unusual cost?". An admin named Cloudy friendly and helpfully responded to my question, explaining that different effects and hats make an impact on price. Various players asked admins questions about prices, effects, etc too. Soon, another player asked for assistance with a more-than-8-item trade (i.e. a middleman -- at the time, trades were limited to 8 items each), and all the admins helped out. Cloudy was soon to become of my best friends in TF2, if you couldn't guess.

As I watched this process, it became incredibly clear that UHC was not "just another trade server" -- and I don't mean because it had unusuals :P -- its culture was largely driven by these admins, and the culture they put forth is what made UHC different. Helping newbies, being friendly, introducing people into the world of unusuals, answering price checks, and donating time to middleman trades to help people avoid the rampant scamming in 9+ item trades (or less often, paypal or game-for-item trades), not to mention insanely trustworthy (it was obvious if they could be trusted with a $100 hat, they weren't going to risk their reputation to steal a 1-ref hat, and this was true). These admins were very different than any I had dealt with, and that's saying something, because by this time I had already been playing TF2 for 3 years, and had visited pretty much all the trading servers there were.

That's not all there was to UHC though, it had a fun and relaxing environment too, with wonderful regulars who helped others as much as the admins in many cases, and were just generally nice people to be around. The regular calling out of sales offers, current offers, and buyouts every few seconds was the norm on chat, while others debated the desirability of certain hats and effects, or just oooh and ahhh over them. Many people would buy hats because they liked them, not to make profit -- shocker alert! ;) Between actual fighting in the arena circle, people would rocket jump around the map or push AFKs into the water. Some people were always trying to figure out how to get to the secret basement compartment. Later on there were regular spy-crabbing competitions, some for thousands of dollars in unusuals, and even later on the spycrab plugin with the bouncy ball and the sound effects. Over the months, thousands of players sticky jumped (or later on, engy-wrangler-jumped) into the platform in the sky, revealing the trigger to jump on to play the first 30 seconds of the "It's Not Unusual" song by Tom Jones playing (my favorite -- btw, if anyone has a video of this happening at UHC, send it to me! I couldn't find any...). At it's peak later on, there were 4 32-player servers, completely full during rush hours, with wait times up to an hour!

I applied and became an admin, and followed the in example of Cloudy, Fildy, and others of helping people. I spent hundreds of hours simply middlemanning trades, investigating reported scammers and banning them if appropriate, running spycrabs, researching prices for newbies, and helping people in any way I could. Many weekends, I literally spent sun-up-to-sun-down middlemanning trades for people. How many hours did I spend there? Well over a thousand, for sure. Of that, hundreds were spent helping others, rather than doing trading of my own.

We went through the lows of having accounts hacked and unusuals stolen, to dealing with 4chan DOS attacks due to banning some scamming members of theirs, to having middleman accounts locked (until Valve knew what they were for), to the highs of people finding their "dream unusuals", and various quests, such as my own collecting of all 14 unusual-effect Napper Respites (including one effect which required someone in Russia to re-install TF2 to trade it to me!).

We ran Hats for Help for the Japan tsunami victims (days *before* TF2 announced a program by the same name, btw....hmm...I wonder where they got it? Hehehe, oh well, at least they linked us on the blog ;)), the first real charity drive in TF2. Many great people, including ourselves, donated unusuals, hats, keys, whatever, which we sold and sent 100% of the money (in the thousands USD) to the Red Cross.

We never charged or asked for tips for being a middleman, and made sure that was very clear to any who asked, lest people choose not to use one for multi-part trades, and risk being scammed. Sometimes, when I hopped over to normal hat-trading servers, I would overhear conversations like "since the deal is for more than 8 items, let's go to UHC to get a admin to middleman for us", and that would make me so happy!

Was my time at UHC worth it? Of course, I helped people.

How much money did I make? Not a dime.

I never traded for profit, I kid you not -- I actually traded for fun. I don't need money -- I am very blessed financially. All I have ever wanted was to help others -- a "thank you" for spending my time in a middleman trade meant far more to mean than a tip ever did or could -- and it made me happier than buying or selling the most expensive unusual, and many other admins and members who helped others (even though they were trading for profit), felt the same way. Sadly, the thank-you's were rare.

Even still, if I could pass one bit of wisdom to future communities, it would be about what actually makes a community exceptional. I recently had the privilege to meet Robin Walker. There's a lot of great people in the community today, so I asked of there were any new ways they had considered to thank people. He said they felt the community-made items, such as hats, which allow people to sell in the store and make money in-game, make those people happier than anything like the difficult-to-distribute community weapons ever could. Mr. Robin Walker, sir, I couldn't disagree more. Money and financial incentive is *not* what makes a community great, and quite honestly, I'd question if that's even giving to the community at all -- that's a sale.

What makes a community great, is you as a member being genuine, contributing if/where you can, out of the graciousness of your heart, even if all you have to offer is cheering someone up when they're down.

So now we fast-forward.

The Unusual Trading Community (UTC) was the successor to UHC. When the owner of UHC quit in the summer of 2011, he did not want the UHC name to be attached to a group he couldn't control, so he asked the admins to create a new group with a new name and carry on if we wanted to. Of course we wanted to, but many admins, friends, and community members had moved on by that point to other games, and many more left when the group switched.

More still have left over time. The server wasn't fully maintained, as the head admin, the second-in-command, and many more admins and community members became inactive, even with valiant attempts at restarting it.

And now the server has been just sitting there, dead for weeks. Forum threads and server IP banners stand open and unresponded like half-open doors in an abandoned home, left to the imagination of what it used to be like when bustling.

The transition to MCT gives a home, and I am *truly* grateful for that. But it's a home with another group. A different group. A final resting place for our memories to linger and transform.

It's not UHC. It's not a successor to it. It's not trying to be, nor should it.

Nothing will ever, truly, be that home again.

Goodbye, Unusual Trading Community, thank you for your time. Goodbye, Unusual Hat Club, thank you for your warm embrace.

Love,
David Schwegler
"Commander Schwegs"
Admin, Unusual Hat Club, Unusual Trading Community