Steam Holiday Auction

[desocietas]

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

[davifus]

I never really understood the concept of the cards. How you make money off these.

[kamikazekeeg]

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.

[foxhack]

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.

[kamikazekeeg]

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.

[foxhack]

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. ;_;

[desocietas]

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.

[foxhack]

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.

[kamikazekeeg]

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.

[foxhack]

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.

[kamikazekeeg]

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!

[foxhack]

I still have 360,000 gems to deal with.

(I got hit by the glitch that caused this... then bought 100,000 more gems... so stupid.)

[tripredacus]

I think I've made 13 cents, ever, selling those cards.

[kamikazekeeg]

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

[foxhack]

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.