The Team Fortress 2 economy has been sent into a tailspin after a sudden, unexplained action taken by a player who once owned one of the game’s rarest items. Screenshots floating around various social media sites show a fan named Gregarious deleting their Golden Frying Pan mid-match. The act of destruction was reportedly witnessed by multiple players when it happened. The kicker is that this is actually the second time Gregarious has proverbially blown up his envied TF2 item, and there’s no telling if he’ll be able to get it back once more.
The Golden Frying Pan is a melee weapon in Team Fortress 2 infamous for its scarcity. It functions just like a normal frying pan, except it has a special sound effect and will turn players into a golden statue once they’re killed. Getting the flaxen cookware is nearly impossible: there’s less than a percent chance of being awarded the right type of drop in Team Fortress 2, and an even smaller chance that drop will be a Golden Frying Pan specifically. Since its introduction in 2013, there are only 435 Golden Frying Pans in existence. That doesn’t make the GFP the rarest item in TF2, as the distinction would likely apply to the Golden Wrench, of which only 100 have been awarded. But it’s not far off, either. The value of a Golden Frying Pan fluctuates, but as of this writing, a typical one is valued at around $6,700 USD. What’s more, the value of a GFP has risen dramatically in the last year. In 2024, you could purchase a GFP for just under $6,000. With one less pan in the mix, the value may fluctuate further.
So, why in the world would anyone delete an item like this? Well, in the past, the destruction of ultra-unique items like the GFP has occurred for the sake of charity. But it sounds like a different case for Gregarious. The first time around, Gregarious baffled the TF2 community after evidence of the pan’s destruction initially started floating around, especially after it became clear that he had recovered the item by pleading his case to Steam support. There’s video of the pan getting deleted, and screenshots of Gregarious somehow having the item once more not long after. Based on second-hand accounts, the deletion occurred while Gregarious was under the influence.
This time, reports that Gregarious deleted his Frying Pan are backed up by tracking websites that show him having the GFP up until at least early August. If you check his actual inventory on Steam, however, the pan is gone. In effect, the deletion has taken the value of Gregarious’ backpack from $7,400 USD to a mere $28.
The phenomenon of intentionally deleting your own items spans well beyond Gregarious, however. Since Golden Frying Pans are so rare, players who own them are sometimes swarmed in the game by incredulous spectators, and if not bothered by those same players after they log off as well. After all, some people spend ages trying and failing to get the right drop, or they spend thousands of dollars for the honor of owning a pan with the Midas touch. Seeing one in the wild is an event in itself. The first person to outrage players for deleting their own frying pan might be Auricom5, who, in 2015, surprised everyone by ridding himself of a golden pan mid-game. Flabbergasted TF2 fans swarmed his profile with hundreds of comments.
Now, if you load up his Steam page, his status reads, “Are you still mad?” For a good while, this was appended with “Stay mad,” but currently that part is crossed out. He’s still getting comments on his actions from over a decade ago to this day, literally. The last post referencing the incident happened within the last 24 hours.
Valve did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but officially, the Steam policy on item restoration is that the platform won’t do it. “Items often exchange hands multiple times before a restoration request and this means they cannot be restored without duplicating them or removing them from another innocent user’s inventory,” Valve says. “Duplicating items has a negative impact on everyone who trades or uses the Market by lowering the value of items.”
The Team Fortress 2 community has had plenty to say on the matter. Gregarious’ Steam profile was full of comments from random onlookers this morning, but the player has since locked his profile down. According to his profile page, the notorious player has put in over 10,000 hours into Team Fortress 2.
“Single-handedly fixing the golden pan economy by reducing their amount what a hero,” one player wrote on a TF2 community-led forum.
