Steam’s introducing a new feature it’s calling Trade Protection to Counter-Strike 2. In essence, it’s designed so that—if you find yourself victim of a con that hijacks your Steam account and trades away all your $5,000 AK and Karambit skins—you can easily reverse the last seven days of trades on your account at the touch of a button.
The feature debuted as part of CS2’s Season 2: Episode 1 (which, yes, is Valve poking fun at itself for not being able to count to three), but the FAQ says it’s a feature that other games making use of Steam’s inventory system will be able to take advantage of at some point. “When a trade involving items from a game supporting Trade Protection is confirmed, the items are delivered immediately, and you can equip and play with them in-game,” says Valve.
But wait! “For the next 7 days, the items are considered Trade Protected, and cannot be consumed, modified, or transferred. Once the 7 day period expires, the Trade Protected status expires, and the trade can no longer be reversed.” Which seems a good system: people actually trading for skins they want to use still get to use them, ne’er-do-wells trying to make a quick buck off a hacked account? Less so.
Valve pitches the whole thing as a feature to reverse malicious trades, but it doesn’t sound like there’s anything stopping you from just hitting the ‘take me back’ button if you suddenly decide you got a bad deal.
“You can review the list of your trades containing Trade Protected items, and begin the process of reversing them, directly from your Trade History page,” says Valve. “When you choose to reverse trades, all trades containing Trade Protected items will be reversed.” If you’re wondering what counts as a Trade Protected item—it’s any item from a game with Trade Protection turned on that’s been traded in the last seven days, and they’re clearly stamped in your inventory.
“All items from those trades will be returned to their previous owners and your account will be restricted from trading and using the Steam Community Market for 30 days to avoid future security-related incidents.”
There are some other little foibles to the system. For instance, you can’t tie up Trade Protected and unprotected items into a single trade: “All items in a trade need to have the same level of protection. Counter-Strike 2 items, because they offer trade protection, cannot be traded for items from games without trade protection.” Oh, and you can’t reverse trades that happened before this feature came into effect, if you’ve got regrets from last week.
With Valve saying it plans to roll the feature out to new games “as we learn more about this,” perhaps a spate of people abusing the function to rollback trades they regret will lead it to clamp down on what constitutes an acceptable use of the new function. Then again, maybe not. Valve is many things, but predictable isn’t one of them.
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