Why have I never received a booster pack?

[TheGreatBones]

I've been a steam member for 7 years and over that time i've collected a lot of games (and exhausted all trading card drops for most) but I never once have received a booster pack. According to Steam, I should have a 2x increase in the drop rate due to my level but still nothing. Did they get rid of random booster card drops? Is there a restriction on my account? Have any of you guys been getting them?

[FatalError]

Been on steam for 13 years and gotten maybe 3-4 boosters. They are very rare. Gaben is ultra stingy. Also boosters only contain T H R E E cards iirc. So you're not missing anything. Trading cards are just another money making scheme from valve.

[Callahan420]

You own a lot of highly owned games so your chances will be smaller. Also you only have a small amount of games which limits the pool of games you can get drops from.

At level 105 I am eligible for around 400 or so games and get a drop every once in awhile.

Just remember the bigger the pool the smaller the chance.

[wuddih]

1. you do not have many games, how many of them are eligible? my recommendation for "regular" booster drops is atm is a good mix 500+ games of which most should be on the cheaper end but not massively popular ( cheaper = badge prices, not game prices, if a badge is cheaper, it is more likely to get crafted for levelling)

2. it looks like most of those games are popular games that many people own and probably are also eligible for.

booster and the chance simplified:
every game has its own raffle "lottery" for a booster.
if someone crafts a badge, a booster is generated and raffled out
you have 5 entry tickets at level 0-9, for every 10 levels one more ticket.
at your level you have 10 tickets, +100%, aka your chance is doubled.

but you do not know one factor ... how many other people are also eligible for any booster in any game? that is unknown.

but for a single game you could make a pretty educated guess.
if 10 million people own the witcher 3 on Steam, many of them are also eligible for a booster drop. lets just say all are eligible, your 10 tickets against minimum 50 million. that is 0,00002%. if you would be level 5 that chance would be 0,00001%.

i have 25 tickets. that is why my recommendation is more eligible games, not higher level because each game is its own drawpool and your tickets are applied to every pool.

on top of that, another undocumented thing, there is a cooldown, based on level, starts with 14 days. and that is the only reason why leveling up for more boosters makes some sense.

your booster cooldown is 7 days on level 50-59. if you would receive a booster, you would not receive any other booster for the duration of that cooldown.

with my 2ksomething eligible games, i pretty much get a booster the moment my 67.2 hour cooldown is done ... of course, getting a specific booster is out of the question ... i got a tf2 booster the other day, that felt pretty lucky.

i tried to apply higher level math to calculate overall chances and statistically narrow down the unknown parameters but i it never felt right, so i shelved it.

[sfnhltb]

Getting about one every other day at the moment, with 1620 qualifying games currently, so that works out at about 1 booster each 9 years per game. As mentioned though, some games generate boosters far more frequently than others based on whether badges are actually being crafted at any reasonable rate for that game, so for people with relatively few games their chances can be much higher or lower dependant on which games they have.

Then you have a relatively low steam level (post-Grand Prix anyway), and if you are posting about it that in statistics is called a "self selecting sample bias", i.e. generally only people that have been unlucky in random events tend to post complaining how rare winning is. You might also need to factor in how frequently you are logged into steam - you say 7 years but have you always been logged in at least once per week all that time (one of the other requirements for getting boosters people sometimes forget) - and staying logged in all the time on the same device doesn't seem to count as far as I can tell (only noticed once we starting working at home all the time meaning I have stopped switching between home and work pc several times each week).

[[THG] WHOLF⚡]

I got over 300 games (in library over 1000).
Been on Steam for 9 years.
Got nothing.

[Sazzouu]

Well... I have a ratio of about 3-4 BPs per week.

I made up some maths about it which comes out quite accurate unless we are talking about ridiculous numbers such as Steam Level 5000 and 30.000 Games in Library
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=466176613

[ǝsɹǝɯɯı 🖤]

chances are very very low and assuming since i got like 1-3 packs the last time but regardless, it's very unlikely (ihaveahighleveland8yearoldaccountbutstillnothingmuch)
unless you're very low and/or not having much games, could be if i were to guess??

[Kargor]

A quick look over your game list suggests that you simply do not have enough trash games.

In my experience, it's mostly the cheap trash that gets badges made, so they produce more booster packs than "real" games.

[Yasahi]

Kargor の投稿を引用：

In my experience, it's mostly the cheap trash that gets badges made, so they produce more booster packs than "real" games.

Or the more niche ones with dedicated playerbases. I don't have trash games but I get a booster pack around every 2-3 months, last being on the 27th for Stellaris.

Most of the boosters I've gotten have been for Warhammer franchise games or Total War franchise games. Both have devoted playerbases and several games with decent numbers.

[TheGreatBones]

Thanks everybody for your comments. I hadn't considered that the popularity of a game mattered but that makes sense

[crunchyfrog]

The thing to remember is this.

Booster packs are ONLY created every time someone crafts a badge. And it creates ONE booster pack, which randomly goes to anyone who both owns that game and has earned all the applicable card drops and has logged in that week.

On the face of it, it doesn't tell you that much, but this is the perspective you need to have:

Some games are more popular than others, obviously. So how this affects things is pretty simple. If a game is regularly played, it STILL might not have drops happening. Why? Because if all those users have earned their drops and aren't going to move towards crafting badges, then none are created. Doesn't matter how many play the game. If a game has been out some time, this is obviously worsened as time goes on.

Also, it's a double-edged sword too. If a game say, came out last week, and didn't do very well. Only sold a hundred copies and all are playing. Now, when ONE player crafts a badge, it will create ONE booster pack. And that booster pack has (roughly) a 1 in 100 chance of getting to you (I know, with adjustment for steam level). But it's tempered by the simple fact that with only 100 players, the chancs of the badge being created in the first place is low AS WELL.

Conversly, consider a different situation. A game came out last week, and sold gangbusters instantly. It sold 1 million copies. All again, are playing now. So, every time a badge is crafted you have only a 1 in a million (roughyl) chance of getting the pack. But that lower rate is tempered by the fact that with many more people playing the chances of other crafting a badge are higher too.

So it largely equals out a lot in the end.

So, from this you can quickly work out there are two distinct areas where drops are likely to not happen very often for you.

One, is having games that aren't particularly new. The longer they've been on sale, the more chance people who bought the game have already done their card and badge thing.

Two, is by buying games that REALLY don't sell. A lot of often younger players insist that (wrongly) buying the cheapo "non" games that a re a few pence is the way to go. The flaw here is that those games sell maybe one or two every few weeks at best. With that, you not only have almost no chance of a badge being crafted but the chance of enough spare cards being crated for anyone to get a set is also pointless.

The final smaller point, is that even though you may have a relatively high Steam level, there simply may be those others who play the game still have FAR higher levels than you, in which case they will surely come before you in the sweepstake.



Last point - if this is something you want to effectively do, you might consider buying charity bundle games. I do this. You get a lot of games for little money and the beauty is that LOADS of people go for these bundles so you also get a nice pool of people to both trade cards with and also craft badges, increasing your booster pack chance.

[sfnhltb]

crunchyfrog の投稿を引用：

Booster packs are ONLY created every time someone crafts a badge. And it creates ONE booster pack, which randomly goes to anyone who both owns that game and has earned all the applicable card drops and has logged in that week.

Well, more likely crafting a badge creates multiple booster packs (so a 6 card game badge craft would create 2 boosters) otherwise I would expect the trading cards to disappear from circulation for each game faster than they do (although as cards/boosters accumulate in accounts that ignore them and don't bother trade/sell/craft them presumably it will always go down over time).

[crunchyfrog]

sfnhltb の投稿を引用：

crunchyfrog の投稿を引用：

Booster packs are ONLY created every time someone crafts a badge. And it creates ONE booster pack, which randomly goes to anyone who both owns that game and has earned all the applicable card drops and has logged in that week.

Well, more likely crafting a badge creates multiple booster packs (so a 6 card game badge craft would create 2 boosters) otherwise I would expect the trading cards to disappear from circulation for each game faster than they do (although as cards/boosters accumulate in accounts that ignore them and don't bother trade/sell/craft them presumably it will always go down over time).

Nope, one badge = one booster pack.

That doesn't add up at all. Numbers aren't affected because you alwyas earn HALF THE TOTAL AMOUNT of cards in the set as drops, so it doesn't change anything you claim.

[sfnhltb]

crunchyfrog の投稿を引用：

Nope, one badge = one booster pack.

That doesn't add up at all. Numbers aren't affected because you alwyas earn HALF THE TOTAL AMOUNT of cards in the set as drops, so it doesn't change anything you claim.

If for example we looked at a game with 12 cards causes each badge crafted causes 12 trading cards to cease to exist. If only one booster is formed for each badge then that would mean there would be 9 less cards in everyone's inventories, and as more badges were crafted the number would drop exponentially, i.e. if 1 million people bought the game it would generate 6 million trading cards, if all 6 million were turned into 500k badges, then 500k booster packs means a drop to 1.5 million cards, then if all those were crafted it would drop to 375k, then under 100k.

If this were the case 15 card badges would rapidly get very expensive to complete as the trading cards rapidly dried up (because 12 cards are "lost" per badge craft), while 5 card badges would be far less affected (as only 2 card cards are "lost" per badge craft). This doesn't tend to match what actually happens in the market/trading scene, which suggests the number of boosters created per badge is based on the number of cards in the set rather than being fixed as you suggest.

[crunchyfrog]

sfnhltb の投稿を引用：

crunchyfrog の投稿を引用：

Nope, one badge = one booster pack.

That doesn't add up at all. Numbers aren't affected because you alwyas earn HALF THE TOTAL AMOUNT of cards in the set as drops, so it doesn't change anything you claim.

If for example we looked at a game with 12 cards causes each badge crafted causes 12 trading cards to cease to exist. If only one booster is formed for each badge then that would mean there would be 9 less cards in everyone's inventories, and as more badges were crafted the number would drop exponentially, i.e. if 1 million people bought the game it would generate 6 million trading cards, if all 6 million were turned into 500k badges, then 500k booster packs means a drop to 1.5 million cards, then if all those were crafted it would drop to 375k, then under 100k.

If this were the case 15 card badges would rapidly get very expensive to complete as the trading cards rapidly dried up (because 12 cards are "lost" per badge craft), while 5 card badges would be far less affected (as only 2 card cards are "lost" per badge craft). This doesn't tend to match what actually happens in the market/trading scene, which suggests the number of boosters created per badge is based on the number of cards in the set rather than being fixed as you suggest.

No, no. YOur maths is WAY off. Or rather your formula.



The numbers are largely irrelevant.

For example, lets' assume 10 people have a certain game, and that game has 10 cards for the set. This means you can earn any 5 as max drops. Which in turn means if everyone earns their drops, they will have 50 cards in circulation or possible to trade.

Now, if conversely a game equally sold 10 copies but only had 4 cards in a set, and you therefore only earned 2 cards, this would mean there are a maximum of 10 cards in circulation possibly.

You're getting hung up on the numbers but are missing the crucial point.

While the second one, if taken at face value, has less cards in circulation, you're forgetting something - that there are less needed to make the set. So, while in the first one there's 50 cards floating around, you may SEEM to have more about, but you need at minimum (if you're lucky) 5 more to make the set.

Versus the other example where there are 10 in circulation and you only need (again in if you're lucky) 2 to make the set.

Here's the kicker - you need 5 out of a possible 50. so 5 divided by 50 = 0.1
Compare that to 2 needed out of a possible 10: 2 divided by 10 = 0.2


So you actually stand a BETTER chance with less cards. Thought there ain't an awful lot in it.

EDIT: Actually you may be correct on the booster packs. Upon checking I may have misunderstood how it works. My apologies for that.