Is the Steam Auction a Bad Omen?

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chemystery

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If you haven't seen it you can cash in the trading cards and emoticons you have for gems and use the gems to bid on games they put on the auction block. I personally can't afford anything even if I cashed all the items I own. I'm no economist but is this a bad thing? Did they find out that the market was flooded with items and are trying to get rid of as much as possible? My current theory is that they are trying to empty the market a bit so they can start making "set 2" of cards for games. Any ideas duders?

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fisk0

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#2 fisk0  Moderator

Explains why someone bought a bunch of the dumb summer sale items I put up on the marketplace for $0.03 several months ago.

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Junkerman

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Hmm, I'm not sure... I too would like to hear the opinions of some market minded forum-goers.

I've made a total of 3 dollars for free requiring no work or investment on my part just by playing the games in my Steam library... I'm not sure I understand the point of this whole niche economy thing but I cant see it having a negative impact as its entirely optional. I wont turn my nose at 3 free dollars, but I don't really care if I lost it either.

Now if only I could get the copy of Dungeon Siege I bought with it to work!

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I_Stay_Puft

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#4  Edited By I_Stay_Puft

From what it sounds like they're essentially giving users what they want. I remember Rorie on one of the bombcast he was a guest on mentioning immediately selling any cards he would receive cause he wasn't into the badge / card market. With how cheap games are now a days this is probably giving players who are probably not into badges other options. All in all I'm going to assume that people who aren't interested in badges and cards or interested in what steam has to offer will keep on selling them cards.

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49th

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I don't know, it seems like a good idea for getting rid of extra emotes that just sit in your inventory or on the market for months.

I think it's one layer too deep for me though, the amount of gems you need to bid on anything decent is pretty high and it feels weird bidding on games with such an abstract fake currency.

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chemystery

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Second optional question. Do you think that this will replace the Winter sale?

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BisonHero

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#7  Edited By BisonHero

Yeah, I guess they realize that there is an insane surplus of emoticons and backgrounds and whatnot. It turns out people kinda like leveling up their Steam profile even though it means nothing, similar to how your Gamerscore number means nothing. So you craft all these badges to level up your Steam profile and get these badges, but the emoticons and backgrounds are WORTHLESS except for that one emoticon that looks like (or is?) cannabis.

I guess this is a good way to purge the aggregate Steam system of all the inventory items people don't give a shit about, since prior to this the only place you could dump them was the marketplace, but there was no way to destroy them. I feel like Valve is basically trying to trick all of the Steam Marketplace "power users" who don't mind wasting disposable income, and tricking them into basically buying up all of the emoticons and backgrounds from the marketplace that nobody wants from the marketplace, and turning them into gems to bid on a game or something.

The whole thing is weird.

Also, man, there is no rhyme or reason to what gem amount various cards are worth. Some of them are worth 1 gem, others are worth 32. Seems completely independent of the value of that card on that market, or the number of cards yielded by that, or the total number of cards needed to craft one badge for that game. Might have something to do with either how many of that card are currently listed on the market (its scarcity), or (prior to this auction) how often that card sells in a given week (its demand?).

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ShaggE

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#8  Edited By ShaggE

Nah... THIS is a bad Omen:

Woof...
Woof...

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FinalDasa

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#9 FinalDasa  Moderator

I think its a decent way to purge those lame items I had just sitting in a fake inventory serving no purpose.

I don't have many gems but I'm hoping I can pick up a smaller game with them.

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Slag

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Second optional question. Do you think that this will replace the Winter sale?

well the rumor for that is that it will start on the 18th/19th. So I'd say no

I think this is merely an attempt to see if they can make the community market more productive for them.

Not enough scarcity of good which means prices are too low for the middleman too. They need to drive transactions to make money and very few people going to bother to spend much effort selling if they are only getting a few pennies per sale and then potentially have to deal with a 1099 on their taxes if they make too many transactions on top of that.

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1337W422102

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#11  Edited By 1337W422102

If someone wants to blow enough money to get gems to buy anything worthwhile without realizing that it'd be cheaper to just buy the game they want on 75% off sale, it's their fault for having poor judgement. Plus, this way, I'm finally moving all the crap out of my inventory, and so can you.

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chaser324

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#12  Edited By chaser324  Moderator

Seems fine to me. It purges junk from people's inventory and the marketplace, and it likely benefits Valve by reducing the supply of stuff on the marketplace which will increase prices during the inevitable Winter Sale rush on cards.

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ThunderSlash

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#13  Edited By ThunderSlash

It seems kinda pointless to convert your Steam items. The ongoing auctions right now cost like 1000 times more than I can craft out of my existing inventory. Sounds like a better idea to just go to the Steam Marketplace and buy the 1000 gem sacks for 3 cents each if you really want to partake in this meta game thing.

But yeah, this really seems like something Valve created as an inventory sink for the people with excess stuff.

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blzzzrrttt

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As a jobless heathen with no reliable source of income who has made upwards of $70 using the Steam Market I feel like this is a good topic for me to chime in on.

With this whole Gem stuff it seems like Valve is trying to flush out all the emoticons/backgrounds people aren't using seeing as their gem conversion rate is much higher than the average trading card. Trading cards are in most cases way more valuable than most of the "rewards" you get for crafting them into a badge because someone is usually after them. The only emotes that are worth anything are special emotes (pot leaves, hearts, skulls etc.) and letters that let you spell stuff and the only backgrounds worth anything have anime ladies on 'em. Seems like Valve has payed attention to this up to this and is making these once worthless items have some sort of worth in order to feed money back into the system.

Just in case you don't know this but Valve (as well as the devs of the game the card/whatever is from) takes a small cut of every market item sold. If you look at the most popular items being sold right now you'll find CS:GO backgrounds (which have also gone up in price slightly). It seems like every big sale is a way for them to test the waters with this stuff but this one is the most ambitious yet. I just went through and got rid of all the emotes and backgrounds I haven't used and I have about 3,500 gems. Which isn't a ton seeing how any games that's probably worth getting requires tens of thousands of gems but with some smart play you could probably end up getting a small indie game for free over the course of this event.

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I_Stay_Puft

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#15  Edited By I_Stay_Puft

I think its a decent way to purge those lame items I had just sitting in a fake inventory serving no purpose.

I don't have many gems but I'm hoping I can pick up a smaller game with them.

Truth, but still no options to purge these Dead Island Epidemic Beta Keys.

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BisonHero

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@blzzzrrttt said:

I just went through and got rid of all the emotes and backgrounds I haven't used and I have about 3,500 gems. Which isn't a ton seeing how any games that's probably worth getting requires tens of thousands of gems but with some smart play you could probably end up getting a small indie game for free over the course of this event.

At least half of the available games seem to have bids above 10,000 by this point, though it's not that hard to find games in the 6,000 to 10,000 range. It's pretty rare to see something much lower than that. And we're only a few hours into this thing being live.

Also, it's kinda buried in the FAQ, but gems can also be turned into booster packs of your choosing, if you'd rather just turn your extra emoticons and backgrounds back into more cards.

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billymaysrip

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You can buy gems on the steam market place, and a bundle of a 1000 was going for something like 11 cents last time I checked. So if your average 10 dollar game is sold for 90,000 points, you've saved some money. Granted, by December 15th, all of the bids will be much higher than they currently are, but I've bid for a number of 10-15 dollar indie games for only a couple thousand points. Also, by the 15th, the value on the bundles of gems will have probably dropped, so bids will get even higher.

I don't think this is a bad omen for Valve at all - most likely Valve saw that trading cards and in-game items had a lot of volume on the market place, but the actual rewards for badges like emotocons and wallpapers were worthless and had low sale volume. This is one way to give arbitrary value to those useless steam items. Now people have an incentive to buy and trade once useless steam items. I think this a genius move by Valve to turn a worthless commodity into something of value.

I've sold off most of my steam items except for some of the dumb chat icons I use and my profile background. Hopefully I can get a deal on a game using these damn gems.

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blzzzrrttt

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@bisonhero: True, but with a new auction round every 45 minutes over the course of 3 days there's a bunch of chances for you to get something if you save up a good amount of gems.

I had no idea about the booster pack thing though, looks like you can only do it once a day (which makes sense) but I might just stick to that if things don't pan out too well on the auction. Also, none of the language on the booster creator page explicitly mentions the Holiday event, maybe they plan on making it permanent at some point?

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bwheeeler

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It seems crazy. I'm starting to lose my grip on what the fuck Steam actually is.

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PDXSonic

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I could care less for this kind of sale, as I have put no time or caring into any of the trading cards/badges/etc and would just rather have a regular Steam sale.

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BisonHero

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So I bid on something for the fuck of it, and it gives you the following message after you confirm the bid (there are 100 copies of each game that they're giving away, so I assume the 100 top bids at the end all get the game?):

"If you win the auction, the difference between the winning bid amount and your maximum bid will be returned to your inventory."

I don't understand what that means, because what does "win the auction" mean? If you're the top bidder at the end, there will be no different between the maximum bid and your bid, and you will just spend all your gems. So "win the auction" must mean "your bid was in the top 100, so you get a copy of that game".

If the top bid is 10,000, and your bid is 1, but only 90 people ever bid on that game, do you get the game and get back 9,999 gems, more than you ever put in? You'll lose the 1 gem you bid, but then get the game and 9,999 gems, for a profit of 9,998 gems.

Or more realistically, if the top bid ends up being 15,000, and you bid 9,000 and end up in the top 100 for that game, do you get the game and 6,000 gems, for a net loss of only 3,000 gems?

Is that how auctions work now?

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TreeTrunk

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#22  Edited By TreeTrunk

A sack of 1000 gems costs 3 US cents (lowest it can go) LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm not gonna take part it's complicated and I have too many games in my backlog already, I just bought two bundles today one from humble and one from indiegala!

It doesn't make sense for this to be replacing the Winter sale, I think that will start the same day MGSV ground zeroes goes on steam.

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BisonHero

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#23  Edited By BisonHero

@blzzzrrttt said:

Also, none of the language on the booster creator page explicitly mentions the Holiday event, maybe they plan on making it permanent at some point?

I believe the FAQ on this dumb auction event indicates that gems won't just cease to exist once the auction is over. They'll stay in your inventory, and the implication is that the booster pack creator will always be there as something to spend gems on. It does certainly seem more reliable than randomly bidding on games, when you're just going to lose those auctions to the Steam nerds that have level 400 Steam profiles because they've spent hundreds of dollars on useless Steam trinkets.

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TreeTrunk

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#24  Edited By TreeTrunk

@bisonhero: If you win the auction, the difference between the winning bid and the maximum bid is zero (0). So zero gems will be returned to you :)

Are you sure all 100 games will go to the top 100 bidders in 1 hit? I think I read somewhere if you don't win, the amount of gems you bid will automatically go to the next auction.

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Onemanarmyy

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@bisonhero: I think it's possible to set an maximum amount of gems that you are willing to give up for the item, so that you won't get overbid by 1 cent at the last second.

So let's say the auction for a game is 90.000

you put in a bid for 100.000g

If no one else bids, you will get the game for 90.001 gems, and 9.999 gems will be returned to your inventory.

If someone overbid you by a gem, it would automatically renew your bid as long as it stays within your maximum bid.

This is just how i perceived it by quickly reading through the rules, i might be wrong.

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BisonHero

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@onemanarmyy: @treetrunk: Oh my bad, I glossed over the part where there are 45 minute rounds once this thing kicks off. Thought it was just one deadline, and then the top 100 bids for each game just got a copy.

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AdequatelyPrepared

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I'm not participating in this stuff, if only because I would be going against people that play the Steam metagames more than the games they actually purchase.

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BisonHero

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#28  Edited By BisonHero

@treetrunk said:

A sack of 1000 gems costs 3 US cents (lowest it can go) LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm not gonna take part it's complicated and I have too many games in my backlog already, I just bought two bundles today one from humble and one from indiegala!

It doesn't make sense for this to be replacing the Winter sale, I think that will start the same day MGSV ground zeroes goes on steam.

It's not replacing the Winter the sale. The page on Steam about the Auction contains this line:

"The Auction runs 15 Dec @ 10:45am to 18 Dec @ 1:00pm when the Holiday Sale begins."

But yeah, the math for gems is weird. When you sell something on the Steam marketplace for 3 cents, Valve gets 2 cents of it and you only get 1 cent. So if you sell 3 dumb Steam trinkets, you'll make a total of 3 cents. You can then spend that 3 cents on 1000 gems. If you were to individually convert those 3 dumb Steam trinkets into gems, at best you might get 300 gems (nothing in my inventory seems to be worth more than 100 gems).

Unless gem price increase considerably, it seems easier to just sell your emoticons and backgrounds and either keep the money, or spend the like 20 cents or whatever buying gems. Directly converting things into gems doesn't seem worth it. I honestly think it's weird that Valve is even letting people sell the gems, because if guy-who-has-money-to-waste wanted 1000 gems, he'd just have to buy emoticons and backgrounds manually off the marketplace, then turn them into gems, he'd have to do minimum 10 transactions at 3 cents a piece, and Valve is getting 2 cents from each of those transactions. With a sack of gems, he is doing one transaction to immediately get 1000 gems and Valve only gets 1 transaction to skim off of.

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LaszloKovacs

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This seems really dumb, but then everything Valve has been doing with their weird economy hasn't made sense to me since the first day they had TF2 hats.

I don't really care about what they do with it, but it does make me wonder what the hell is going on over there. It is all new skins and announcers for DOTA, and knife-making? Or do they still care about game development?

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gike987

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#30  Edited By gike987

I had some cents in my steam wallet which I used to buy 4 sacks of games. Looks like I can now use them to bid on some awful game.

It's pretty obvious Valve is only doing this to get rid of the surplus of old emoticons and backgrounds that nobody wants.

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bacongames

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#31  Edited By bacongames

Huh, there was a hot period there were dupers were having a time and put 1.8 million sacks of gems for pennies each. The orders were getting clogged and people are now being banned (although the bottom on gem sacks was dropping before that). The funny consequence is that for some period of time here, the value of most booster packs have fallen into the range that cards sometimes usually go for. I have a few bucks in my wallet I've been meaning to get rid off so I'll bite while the market is good for it. Besides I'm totally okay with the system being devalued because it's all digital cards and badges anyway. Even if I like the shiny bastards on my profile.

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mike

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#32  Edited By mike

I did pretty well for myself tonight before the Steam market just broke down altogether. Gems have bottomed out at $.03 per 1,000...you can craft a booster pack with that for a minimum of three cards and a chance at a foil. I got three foils tonight just in an hour or so of buying and selling, not to mention the other cards I was able to sell or craft into badges (and then get more stuff to sell or craft.)

It was a lot of work for maybe a $6-$7 profit, but hey, that's a Steam game or two for the upcoming sale. Going to try again once Valve gets their servers stabilized and see if I can craft some more booster packs tomorrow for fun and profit...honestly though, if I thought of this that means tens of thousands of other people are doing the same thing, and the fun is probably over.

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BisonHero

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@mb: @gike987: How did you even buy gems? Marketplace seems hella broken, always says the item is already sold.

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the_kempire

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@bisonhero: They just made the gems not marketable and non tradable. Hope everyone made hay while the gems were $0.03

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mike

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@bisonhero: They just made the gems not marketable and non tradable. Hope everyone made hay while the gems were $0.03

Where did you see that? I haven't been watching news, but the market is more broken than ever right now.

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onarum

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#36  Edited By onarum

some people used an exploit to duplicate gem sacks, each sack is worth 1000 gems, they over saturated the market with them and also made some outrageous bids, like 7 million on a single item... valve took the event down

I think they effed up their market pretty bad... people are now making booster packs left and right using the dupped gems, and then they'll oversaturate the market with cards... GG valve, nicely done, what a fucking stupid thing they did.

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the_kempire

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@mb: Click on a gem sack in your inventory.

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BisonHero

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@onarum said:

some people used an exploit to duplicate gem sacks, each sack is worth 1000 gems, they over saturated the market with them and also made some outrageous bids, like 7 million on a single item... valve took the event down

Man, the internet usually finds way to exploit every sale gamification event that Valve does (see how rigged the Red Team was in the last one until Valve updated the rules), but I would've expected Valve to just roll things back on this one or something. Really interesting that they've temporarily pulled the event entirely.

Still, Valve had to do something, because instead of incentivising people to turn their emoticons and backgrounds into gems, it actually made more sense to just continue selling those on the marketplace, and use the cents you were getting from them to buy 3 cent bags of gems, since the dupers had devalued the gems so much. That's not what you want to happen, when the entire point of the event is to get rid of emoticons and backgrounds nobody wants.

I still think Valve should have actually attached a better reward to crafting a badge. Backgrounds are silly because SO MANY of them look awful, and you can probably find 1 or 2 that you like and never need another one. Like 99% of the emoticons are useless and don't convey any emotion or convey anything at all, it's just like "here's Alyx Vance's face from Half-Life 2". OK, thanks. And having a slightly larger friends list is useless for the vast majority of users. The only thing of any value you get out of crafting badges is a very minutely boosted drop rate for getting booster packs.

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onarum

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@bisonhero: yeah the whole badge crafting thing is useless... I got some nice bgs but those are very rare, they usually suck, i got to lvl 30 before I realized how stupid it all was...

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mike

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#40  Edited By mike

Many Booster Packs are selling for between 3 and 9 cents right now...talk about a market crash, that is less than the value of the three cards in them, not even considering the 1% chance of a foil.

At this rate, in a week every booster pack on Steam will be available for 3 cents.

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onarum

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#41  Edited By onarum

@mb: yep, considering this is valve I don't expect them to acknowledge their fuck up, but I'm curious to see what they'll do about it.

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mike

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The Russian bots are going to have a field day with the three cent booster packs, if they aren't already. It's a race now to put in advance buy orders at .03 before the bots snatch them up.

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BisonHero

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@onarum: Yeah, it's hard to get much higher than level 30 unless you actually start buying a LOT of cards. I'm in the mid-20s, and even now, needing 300 XP (3 badges) to gain one level feels like a lot. The people in the hundreds are real nutcases.

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ThunderSlash

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Did anyone else's sack of gems disappear from their inventory? I guess Valve is trying to fix this mess.

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President_Barackbar

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Yeah I don't even pretend to understand what the hell Valve is doing with their weird Steam economy stuff. It probably makes sense to someone much smarter than myself, but any time I see people talking about Valve's latest weird experiment I feel like they are speaking some kind of weird alien language.

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mike

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#46  Edited By mike

@thunderslash: Yeah, they're gone from mine.

This whole situation is so fascinating. I wonder how much of what has been happening tonight are just unintended consequences. I can't wait to see an economist on Reddit or something do an analysis of the effect this debacle has had on the Steam Market.

Two and a half hours of work, I made $6. I'll probably buy Broforce with it.

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TrafalgarLaw

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#47  Edited By TrafalgarLaw

I'm guessing you're right. In preparation of the Steam Sales on the 18th they're expecting a huge influx of new card drops. The card dropping system probably stresses out the system too much (or is in some way interfering with the marketplace) and they're looking to get rid of a lot of them.

I'm guessing Steam is backtracking on a gimmick (the card designs are hideous) even they can't handle anymore.

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BisonHero

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@mb: I wonder if they're just going to rollback like, EVERYTHING from the past few hours, and for all the people that bought stuff, just add the appropriate funds back into their Steam wallet.

Obviously the people who duped millions of gems are getting super banned, but there a bunch of people that bought those illegitimate gems legitimately on the marketplace, but obviously they can't relaunch the event with all of those users still having tens or hundreds of thousands of gems they bought for like a dollar, because it completely disincentivises anyone breaking down emoticons and backgrounds because you'll never be able to compete with the people that bought gems from the marketplace.

And yeah, not sure what they're going to do with all of the booster packs that were crafted with gems, and all of the cards/badges that now exist on various accounts as a result.

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ThunderSlash

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@bisonhero: That would be the right thing to do. I mean I only lost like 30 cents out of this, but I bet some people bought a shit ton of gems in order to play with the auction stuff.

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#50  Edited By BisonHero

@trafalgarlaw said:

I'm guessing you're right. In preparation of the Steam Sales on the 18th they're expecting a huge influx of new card drops. The card dropping system probably stresses out the system too much (or is in some way interfering with the marketplace) and they're looking to get rid of a lot of them.

I'm guessing Steam is backtracking on a gimmick (the card designs are hideous) even they can't handle anymore.

I don't think it has much to do with the card dropping/crafting system being a stress on the system, or being a space concern on their servers or anything. I think it's just that because the emoticons/backgrounds are mostly hideous/pointless, the users assign them no value, so A) they're next to worthless on the marketplace, and B) even though they're so cheap, I think they're mostly stagnant, and the number of people buying emoticons/backgrounds on an average day is very low compared to the other kinds of items on sale in the marketplace. If no transactions are happening with backgrounds/emoticons, that's no transactions that Valve can skim money from.

So by making emoticons/backgrounds worth gems, it gives them a value again. People will (in theory) buy them to turn them into gems. That's a transaction Valve skims money from. People might then turn those gems into trading cards, which are either crafted into a badge (thus finally leaving the system entirely, a thing that emoticons/backgrounds could never do), or change hands in the marketplace. That's another transaction Valve skims money from. This auction seems like it's just a good will gesture so that people don't hate the gems and think they're being ripped off, when really the whole point of gems is to turn emoticons/backgrounds into a small amount of trading cards that actually get bought and sold on the marketplace regularly so Valve can make money.

As for why they did it right before the Winter Sale, I suspect that Valve must know a lot of people sit on their cards and don't craft badges until a sale event; if you craft a badge during normal time, you just get a coupon for a completely random Steam game you probably don't want, but if you craft during a sale you generally get a trading card for that sale. By launching the auction now, it might encourage people to craft badges now, because then they'll have some dumb emoticons/backgrounds to turn into gems to contribute to the limited time auction. Thus when the sale starts, people won't have any badges ready to craft, so they'll have to buy slightly more trading cards off the marketplace instead of getting them for free from badge crafting.