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General and Gaming => General => Topic started by: desocietas on December 11, 2014, 08:06:00 pm

Title: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: desocietas on December 11, 2014, 08:06:00 pm
There's a crazy thing that Steam is doing in the days leading up to their Holiday Sale (which starts at 10a PDT Dec 18):

http://www.vg247.com/2014/12/12/inaugural-steam-holiday-auction-lets-you-trade-guff-for-games/

I don't have a lot of extra stuff to turn into "gems" but I'm sure Foxhack is all over this already...

In a way, it's kind of nice to have a way to turn the trading cards into something besides just a few cents (and the gem value doesn't seem to correspond to the market value of the item).

So... yeah, if you don't care about your trading cards, lemme know ;)
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: davifus on December 11, 2014, 08:36:43 pm
I never really understood the concept of the cards. How you make money off these.
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: kamikazekeeg on December 11, 2014, 09:05:02 pm
I never really understood the concept of the cards. How you make money off these.

Cards either get bundled together as a set to create items for your profile or give emoticons for chat.  You can sell extras on the marketplace and it's based simply on demand and whether the cards can be used to create things people want.  I'm sure you could make some money off of them, but not gonna get too much for them usually unless you have something particularly rare.

I like this auction idea, though I doubt I'll find anything, but it does allow me to clean up the junk in my inventory that I don't want lol

Though the amount of gems needed for auctions to get anything of substance seems ridiculous.  The best things in my inventory are the backgrounds and they are only 100 a piece.  Game costs looking to be up into the tens of thousands.
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: foxhack on December 12, 2014, 12:56:53 am
The market crashed HORRIBLY, there was a glitch that allowed people to get millions of extra gems... which led to thousands of gems being sold off at 3 cents a pop... which led to people making boosters en masse... which led to people driving up the value of these auctions... which led to the market for everything crashing.

I lost... a lot of money on this. I tried to play the market and got burned.

All I can do now is get boosters and sell them off to make some money back.

Please do not fall into this trap. This is why I don't gamble often.
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: kamikazekeeg on December 12, 2014, 01:40:01 am
Geez, that shut down it down completely.  I'm glad I didn't do anything for it other than amass 1000 gems from backgrounds I didn't want, but that is nuts it go so royally abused so fast.
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: foxhack on December 12, 2014, 01:53:30 am
and now all the gems I had are hidden and i can't turn them into boosters

good job valve

I can't evne get back what I spent on this crap

agh. ;_;
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: desocietas on December 12, 2014, 02:22:31 am
Ughhhhh I'm so sorry!  I was bewildered why some of the auctions were going for so high - I couldn't imagine how people had amassed as many gems as they had in such a short amount of time.
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: foxhack on December 12, 2014, 02:39:42 am
The gems are back, I started ragecrafting badges, got three foil cards which got me three bucks back.

I'm considering selling off all these holiday cards now to make back all my cash.
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: kamikazekeeg on December 12, 2014, 03:20:43 am
Are the gems supposed to be back in my inventory? I don't see them at all.  I wonder if they are going to bring it back or just reimburse people with a game or something...I didn't technically lose anything, but it sounds like a number of people did lose money on this.
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: foxhack on December 12, 2014, 03:33:37 am
I decided to ragecraft all the badges I had, then sell all the cards I got from the promo, and I got back the money I spent, AND MADE TWENTY BUCKS ON TOP OF THAT.

BOOYA.
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: kamikazekeeg on December 12, 2014, 04:02:44 am
I decided to ragecraft all the badges I had, then sell all the cards I got from the promo, and I got back the money I spent, AND MADE TWENTY BUCKS ON TOP OF THAT.

BOOYA.

Well at least it worked out for you, but I'm currently 1000 gems out.  I wasted like...50 cents dammit! WHERE IS MY REIMBURSEMENT! RAGE!
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: foxhack on December 12, 2014, 08:40:16 am
I still have 360,000 gems to deal with. :o

(I got hit by the glitch that caused this... then bought 100,000 more gems... so stupid.)
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: tripredacus on December 12, 2014, 12:33:58 pm
I think I've made 13 cents, ever, selling those cards.
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: kamikazekeeg on December 13, 2014, 02:24:14 am
How the heck are you supposed to get enough gems to win something here? If I wanted something like Shadows of Mordor, it's currently at 60,000 gems.  To get that many gems, I'd need to recycle like 600 backgrounds minimum.  Even if I bought them at the cheapest, which is like .06 cents to .10 cents, the costs would be just as much as buying the game practically, even more at a certain point.

I think I'd be better off just selling cards and backgrounds right now to make a few bucks over this auction time since backgrounds tend to sell for like nothing lol
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: foxhack on December 13, 2014, 12:40:02 pm
How the heck are you supposed to get enough gems to win something here? If I wanted something like Shadows of Mordor, it's currently at 60,000 gems.  To get that many gems, I'd need to recycle like 600 backgrounds minimum.  Even if I bought them at the cheapest, which is like .06 cents to .10 cents, the costs would be just as much as buying the game practically, even more at a certain point.

I think I'd be better off just selling cards and backgrounds right now to make a few bucks over this auction time since backgrounds tend to sell for like nothing lol

You're not. No regular user is going to win any of these auctions.

They designed this to get rid of the hundreds of thousands of items that were sitting in the market and that would not sell; It was wiped clean of cheap emoticons and backgrounds. The people who have all those gems are those that had an incredible surplus of stuff in their backpacks, or alternate accounts.

My gems got reset to 24,000 (and 5K in an alt). I used those 5K in the alt to get cards to finish up more badges, and I'm sitting on these gems, thinking of what to do now.
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: bobster on December 15, 2014, 02:49:08 pm
This is interesting, but I'm not smart enough to see any way of getting seriously involved in this!
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: foxhack on December 15, 2014, 04:54:43 pm
And now Steam had made another change to the market, which means it will now be much tougher for me to spend the money I got during the sale. Basically, we use TF2 keys and trade those with people from other regions for games to save money. But now we have to wait a week for the keys to become tradable. So now I'm stuck with fifty-odd bucks I can't spend at my whim because hell if I'm going to pay the stupid high prices some companies are having during the sale. :|
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: retroone on December 15, 2014, 04:56:28 pm
Will the badge still be craftable after the sale ends?
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: foxhack on December 15, 2014, 05:09:20 pm
Will the badge still be craftable after the sale ends?

The holiday badge? The cards expire on January 2, so no.
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: desocietas on December 15, 2014, 06:55:07 pm
Will the badge still be craftable after the sale ends?

The holiday badge? The cards expire on January 2, so no.

If anything, there's a gem badge that you can get just for changing one item into gems. Level 2 happens when you bid on something, level 3 attained when you win an auction.
Title: Re: Steam Holiday Auction
Post by: foxhack on December 15, 2014, 07:08:24 pm
I actually won an auction for something I wanted! Yar's Revenge. It cost me the equivalent of 75 cents. XD