Backpack Expanders were introduced into the game in the Australian Christmas Update in 2010, and at the same time the maximum backpack slots was increased from 300 to 1000. Using a Backpack Expander increases your Backpack by 100 slots. When you buy a Backpack Expander it has 1 use, if you buy multiple Backpack Expanders in a single purchase you get multiple 1-use Backpack Expanders (not a single one with multiple uses).

There are ~300 Backpack Expanders with between 2 and 7 uses.

The origin reported by the Steam API is 'Steam Purchase' but we know that these items cannot be purchased with multiple uses. Taking a closer look at the original owners of these items we find that many are either Valve Employees or people with ties to Valve (i.e. admins of popular community websites etc). It is therefore likely that these multi-use Backpack Expanders were given to Employees to enable them to expand their backpacks to the then maximum of 1000 slots (300 + 7 x 100).

All of these items were tradable, however, realizing the value of these glitched items some employees appear to have sold them. Valve responded by making almost all of these glitched Backpack Expanders untradable. Valve rarely modifies items in players backpacks, so this is a rare example of a collectors item being rendered almost worthless thanks to the actions of unscrupulous Valve employees.

Of ~300 glitched Backpack expanders only ~20 are still tradable. Many of these still reside in the backpacks of Employees.

These Noise Makers are restricted so that they can only be used during Winter Holiday events. They are given to all players that login during the Winter Holiday event with 25-uses, but are listed in the item schema with the attribute 'unlimited quantity' and when used the number of uses remaining does not decrement.


~200 of these Noise Makers have less than 25-uses remaining (yet they still have the attribute 'unlimited quantity' and the uses do not decrement on use).

The origin of these items is unclear, though there is speculation that uses decrement if the item is used when the item server is not available. All affected Noise Makers were given out in either the Australian Christmas 2011 or the Mecha Update 2012.

All of these glitched use Noise Makers are tradable, and the fewer uses remaining the rarer they are.