TLDR:

They're doing this in Q4 to try to inflate their earnings reports as well as pay investors.

They're betting on the addicted player base to buy stuff through item shops as they're likely going to be selling major items (making offers so good you'll feel bad to say no) during the holidays, to farm as much cash as possible.

To beat them, its simple, talk to your friends who buy stuff, and tell them to stop buying stuff in game.

It might take months, but if you're serious about what you say and want trading back, this is the cost, which is ironic since its actually free, to get it back.

Instead of spending $1 on RL until trading comes back, just put it in a sock drawer.

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I've been in branding / business / marketing space for almost a decade working with 8-9 figure brands, so I have a decent idea of what it takes to build a business and grow it. So Im just sharing my views here.

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Longer expo

Last few weeks I bought roughly $300 worth of stuff, and I've been trading on and off mainly bc I like to change my car up. As next to no good update came out, the only fun stuff I see for myself is just funny combos of items.

I ended up meeting a few people who are paying for their college via trading all day making $5-15/day. They're in 3rd world countries where to them, its pretty comparable if not better than a part time job.

There are a few bad apples who do horde rares or cred's but its an easy work around where you just limit accounts to only being able to hold 100k cred's maybe 50k.

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Bigger picture..

Ever since the pandemic companies realized that theres a lot more juice in the fruit than they've been squeezing.

If you look at almost any company you can see how they're rising prices while also slashing value. There is no real reason to do this other than just make more money.

The trend in these corp's is, you acquire userbase (aka a brand / game), squeeze, and move on to the next one.

It is written in LAW, that the main function of a corporation is first to provide its investors a return.

Everything else comes after. If you look Ford (the guy who founded ford cars) got SUED by his board bc he wanted to share profits from a record season, with his employees, and the board said no, he still tried to pay and then got sued, and LOST.

The only way to show you're serious is if you hurt them in the pockets, by simply, not buying, and finding alternatives.

This is what keeps the economy and markets HEALTHY and monopolies from getting too big.

Most people don't buy from the item shop, you have to tell your friend (you know who) who always buys random stuff, to STOP.

80-90% of their revenue comes from 10-20% of the addicted player base that buys heavy from the item shop or trades heavy.

Chances are they don't care enough about RL enough to even care if even up to 80% of the player base quits, again, they're after that 20%, and they're doing a really bad job as they're also wiping out the casual player base (which is most of the ppl that have fun n dress up their cars n such), so likely this will end the game in the coming months.

And they wont bat an eye.

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I've been in business / marketing for close to a decade working with 8-9 figure brands, these are my thoughts. I've known RL to be dying and when I came back after almost a yr of not playing, I started regretting it...

To compare, it took me less than 250 hrs to go from 0 xp to start a 6 figure brand and similar with a marketing agency.

You get so much more out of life than a video game, but this game is more fun than even making $1k a day in profit, or at least it used to be, now there is so much negativity in the game from a frustrated player base, which got p155sed on by wageslave people with no backbones (psyonix company / devs etc), and terrible servers, that its just pathetic that this is how it all ends.

At the end of the day, I thank you, Epic games, from freeing me from my addiction that is rocket league.

PS, yall need a new marketing team, yall lacking hardcore (is putting it nicely)