Steam Holiday Auction and Gems Discussion!

[Spawn of Totoro]

How it Works

http://steamcommunity.com/auction

Recycle Steam Community items like Trading Cards, backgrounds, and emoticons from your Inventory into Gems and use them to bid on games up for auction. The first auction round ends on Dec 15 @ 7:45am with a new round ending every 45 minutes until the last auction round ends on Dec 18 @ 10:00am. At the end of each auction round, the top bidder for each title wins.

Pro tip: Need more items to turn into Gems? More than 1,200 games on Steam drop Trading Cards just for playing them. Find out which of your games has drops remaining on your Badges page. Also, don’t forget to craft the Trading Cards into badges, the resulting emoticons and backgrounds have a higher Gem value. If you have nothing in your Inventory to recycle, you can also trade for Gems or purchase them on the Community Market.

The Auction runs Dec 15 @ 7:45am to Dec 18 @ 10:00am when the Holiday Sale begins.


Steam Holiday Auction FAQ

NOTE: On Thursday Dec 11th we had an issue with Gems that meant we needed to reset the Auction and start over. We apologize for the interruption. Any placed bids will need to be placed again.
All Gems created by you have been returned to your Inventory
All Gem purchases from the Community Market have been reimbursed. View your Store Transactions to see the Wallet Credit to your account.
All previous Auction bids have been canceled and the Auction has been reset.
Additionally, anyone who traded away items in exchange for Steam Gems on the first day of bidding will receive a copy of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in their Inventory.

[Arne Braun]

i still got my gems and you do still have yours. nothing lost.

[Elmasta]

引用自 Communist "Kris Kremlin" Layton：

Yeah, I wasn't a big fan of this event to begin with. I really wish Valve would go back to doing events that are actually based around being fun, and not just being excuses to push lots of stupid trading cards or other digital garbage. The old events with special holiday achievements like the summer treasure hunt and winter coal sale were the high point of Valve's sales by far, in my opinion.

I totally agree with you.

[Xylber]

引用自 Sifer2：

The part that will really blow your mind is that the gems....they never really existed in the first place. Some guy just made it all up in a computer. What you should do is buy some guns/gold, and get off the grid man.

Playing with gems we learned something for real, is it not?

[Arne Braun]

i got all my gems. havent purchasd any just by salvaging stuff

[Mar's Rain]

Thank You For Posting this : ) Yay

[manufactura]

Same here. I had arround 200K...

[BillyTheFish]

引用自 DirtyOldHobo：

引用自 Communist "Kris Kremlin" Layton：

Yeah, I wasn't a big fan of this event to begin with. I really wish Valve would go back to doing events that are actually based around being fun, and not just being excuses to push lots of stupid trading cards or other digital garbage. The old events with special holiday achievements like the summer treasure hunt and winter coal sale were the high point of Valve's sales by far, in my opinion.

Honestly Valves holiday-related deals have been rather crappy ever since they introduced trading cards as they are always the focus, which relates to having to spend more money on stuff that doesn't give you any noticeable return.

The trading cards were fine for levelling up, and there was always the chance of a rare TF2 or Dota item.
This gem fiasco was a ridiculous idea to begin with. It was patently obvious that an auction would always be won by the richest bidder - how was that supposed to be 'fun'?
Interesting to see how they go about rebuilding trust and integrity after this...

[wuddih]

that is the reason they shut it down. there was an infinite gem loophole.

[💢𝓐ℓ ¢нємιѕт💢]

引用自 leadmecca：

the integrity of the card market has been destroyed. it's just gone. some cards will recover, some will be flooded and even higher, but a lot are just flooded with supply. It's great for cheap sets but the integrity of some of the rarer sets and card costs is just gone by this stunt.

You'd have to roll back but I don't see how. You can go through and take care of the larger gem duping, but that's it. You make a statement that it's controlled and remove stupid pack crafting because you can't print the money. the games print the money, you cannot print the damn money steam! YOU CAN'T without screwing everything over and making it worthless.

The games print the money (cards) you do not let people just craft and flood cards into the market. Even bitcoin has a limit, but apparently thousands of thousands of cards just blew away entire bid lists by greedy people who pretty much didn't care what they sold at, they just needed to dump them.

Hell, you want more packs out there, double the drop rate of boosters, the community would like that and it would have served the market better in the long run.

True but things like this happen often. When a game with pricey cards is packaged in any cheap bundle it drops the prices of the cards.

Example of this is Vanguard princess.

Once the bundle keys are flushed out the price normalizes a bit.

Its same case with games that are given out for free for a day or in some site.

The problem here is that too many germs were sold out in that window so they need a mechanism to minimize the damage.

My suggestion would be to limit the number of boosters of each game that can be bought with gems.

5 booster packs of games you own will limit the damage to large extend.

[Taktisches Tomatenbrot]

yep. Christmas is OVER.

[manufactura]

Same here. 200K

[Dalsteeeeen]

Jesus Christ, mate....

[Aurelia]

引用自 BillyTheFish：

Interesting to see how they go about rebuilding trust and integrity after this...

They won't have to. I'm pretty sure there are just about as many complainers and people who don't complain vs any other time of the year. It doesn't really matter what they do, someone will always throw a fit, aswell as other people won't really care.

[Duchess]

I still have all my gems & cards I got (though they're still useless).

http://steamcommunity.com/auction: "Sorry, but there have been some issues with Gems and the Steam Holiday Auction has been temporarily closed. The elves are working frantically to get the issues sorted out, and the auction will start again as soon as they're done."

Also, there's a discussion for the auction here: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/tradingcards/discussions/3/

[DirtyOldHobo]

引用自 BillyTheFish：

The trading cards were fine for levelling up, and there was always the chance of a rare TF2 or Dota item.
This gem fiasco was a ridiculous idea to begin with. It was patently obvious that an auction would always be won by the richest bidder - how was that supposed to be 'fun'?
Interesting to see how they go about rebuilding trust and integrity after this...

What is the point of leveling up though? That is spending money for no noticeable return. Myself? If it was something people would actively see alot when I play games I'd probably craft a few badges, but this isn't like, say, buying a skin in Dota, or a hat in TF2; its more like a booby prize. Its something that looks nice but almost nobody will see it. Speaking of which, they could have just as easily integrated getting TF2 and Dota items into holiday events without piggybacking them on their trading card system. The old coal sale from years back gave you bits of coal to either increase your chances in a giant lottery to win EVERY game on Steam, or you could combine bits of coal to get either a game or a coupon. Why not add items into it? This was long before trading cards were introduced, so it worked back then, why not now?