Users Now Cannot Combine Separate Piles of Gems to Create Sacks

[_Soj_]

If a pile of gems comes off the one-week hold you now cannot combine it with an older pile to create sacks to sell. It remains an unusable fragment of a sack.

Brilliant. Just brilliant...

The devs need to fix this ASAP !

(Edit: problem fixed via workaround posted below)

[Bjornulve]

It's been bugging me too. You can turn multiple piles into trade-able booster packs, but not sacks. I've tried waiting until the items I intend to turn into gems have their cool-down expire, but it still places them into separate piles. Go figure.

[_Soj_]

I expect the devs to fix it soon. It's too important to leave it as is...

[_Soj_]

引用自 Bjornulve：

It's been bugging me too. You can turn multiple piles into trade-able booster packs, but not sacks. I've tried waiting until the items I intend to turn into gems have their cool-down expire, but it still places them into separate piles. Go figure.

Spending gems on booster packs is WASTEFUL.

Example:

Current Price of 1000 Gems (Sack of Gems): ...............0.72- 0.74 USD
Number of Gems to Craft Caster Booster Pack:............1000
Price of Caster Booster Pack on Steam Market:............0.15 USD

Who in their right mind is going to waste 1000 gems crafting a booster pack when they could just buy it for a fraction of that on Steam Market??

The solution, obviously, is to take that 1000 gems and BUNDLE it into a Sack, then sell that and use the proceeds to buy the booster pack. Then you have money left over for other things.

Now, if only Steam would allow us to combine piles of gems into sacks again.......

[SteelScooter]

This is annoying the hell out of me. I put a ticket into support about this a week ago but received no reply. They put a hold on items to stop fraud but broke sack making in the process. Please Fix this.

[kdodds]

There are som Booster Packs that sell over $1, so converting gems to boosters is not necessarily economically foolish. This is probably why gem sacks are "artifically" priced so high. Even if the average booster is around 35-50¢, there are some that are still worth more than the going Sack of Gems price. Plus, some of these boosters will net cards selling in the 20-30¢ range, plus there's always the chance of a foil which, for these higher value packs, will net well over $1, and the backgrounds and emotes can also sell higher than average. Still a PITA, though. Creating a pack still consolidates your remaining tradable gems. Packing and unpacking tradable sacks caused consolidation for me a week or so ago, but no longer does.

[_Soj_]

引用自 kdodds：

There are som Booster Packs that sell over $1, so converting gems to boosters is not necessarily economically foolish. This is probably why gem sacks are "artifically" priced so high. Even if the average booster is around 35-50¢, there are some that are still worth more than the going Sack of Gems price. Plus, some of these boosters will net cards selling in the 20-30¢ range, plus there's always the chance of a foil which, for these higher value packs, will net well over $1, and the backgrounds and emotes can also sell higher than average. Still a PITA, though. Creating a pack still consolidates your remaining tradable gems. Packing and unpacking tradable sacks caused consolidation for me a week or so ago, but no longer does.

Steam only allows you to create boosters for games you already own. It would be nice to create boosters for any game you want...

But, even if you've got a game where the booster is selling for more than a dollar, the system would still price it high, in terms of cost in gems to craft it.

Also, a lot of those games have cards that are thinly-traded. It means there are only a few cards listed on the offer, and some of those cards are WAY overpriced, which then artificially skews the price of the booster pack to the high side. Those will crash in price if the game goes on sale because the market gets suddenly flooded with cards. So, even if you were able to craft a booster for such a game, you would find it hard to sell since, as I mentioned, the underlying cards are thinly-traded to begin with.

A quick way to verify this is to check out this useful site: steamcardexchange.net ...then click on Tools -> Booster Price List and sort it from top down. Pick a high-priced booster then go to its trading cards list and you will see which one(s) are causing the inflated price of the booster.

But, still, the point is you would not want to speculate on this booster because most of these games are fairly new and have not gone on sale yet. Once they do, of course, their card prices get immediately clipped -- and so do the boosters. How do I know this? It happened to me ! ☺

[_Soj_]

引用自 SteelScooter：

This is annoying the hell out of me. I put a ticket into support about this a week ago but received no reply. They put a hold on items to stop fraud but broke sack making in the process. Please Fix this.

I put a ticket in about this, too, and they also ignored it.

Fortunately, I discovered a workaround: after the hold expires, trade them to your secondary account and they will auto-recombine again. Then you can immediately trade them back. Works with multiple Gem Sacks, too !

[Fleder]

I got the same problem, please fix this already.

[僕の名前 (仮)]

And that sucks. Made gem crafting pretty much useless. It also litters up inventory with many crystals. It's even impossible to make new sack of gems now.

Hope they fix it until the new auction.

[waTTe]

So thats good 2 months now and nothing has been fixed.
I have gem fragments littering all over my inventory - come on steam: get your lazy asses up!

[kdodds]

Perhaps they've no plans to "fix" it as it's "working" for them by forcing users to spend them on boosters? I haven't tried it because I don't have an alternate, but I've heard you can one-way trade them and they'll be consolidated, and then you can trade them back.

[wuddih]

引用自 kdodds：

Perhaps they've no plans to "fix" it as it's "working" for them by forcing users to spend them on boosters? I haven't tried it because I don't have an alternate, but I've heard you can one-way trade them and they'll be consolidated, and then you can trade them back.

trade all gems to a friend and back again, will pile them and make them sackable.

2 months? is nothing for Valve, don't be ridiculous, heartbleed stuff took a week.

[Dr.Gibbs]

I know it isn't much, but I received a pretty cut and dry response from Valve about this:
"Thank you for contacting Steam Support.
We apologize for the delay.
Thank you for taking the time to report this issue.
We are aware of the problem and are investigating the issue further."

...at least they are able to admit the problem, now for a solution... soon.

[kdodds]

The problem SHOULD be an easy one to fix. The gems are stacked according to their "birthday". Any gems that are "mature" just need to have a date change to a fixed date, say, 1/1/2010, et voila. If the database calculates some other way, no matter, same difference, a fixed datapoint that gems achieve as they reach "maturity". It's really not that complex a fix, one minor line of minor code, really.

[Fleder]

It is not, but Valve is working hard to screw us over again with some new and incoming trade, game and country restrictions or something like that.