Booster Packs For Dummies

[grbolivar]

1- RANDOM, they are randomly distributed between all eligible people, so please don't ask when you'll get one.

2- You need to have gotten all your drops for one game and "used Steam" (not really sure what that means) in the past week to be eligible for a Booster Pack. Your eligibility will appear on your "My Badges" page on your profile, just click on "How do I earn card drops?" and it will tell you if you are eligible.

3- They are given out by Valve, NOT dropped by any game and NOT given by the Steam client. You DON'T need to idle or even open the Steam Client at all, if you got a Booster it will appear on your inventory.

4- Boosters drop drop hourly, all the time (Confirmed by Valve on this thread).

5- There seems to be a hidden "base drop rate" that increases the higher your level. At Lv50 your "base rate" doubles.

6- There is a chance to get a Foil from a Booster Pack.

7- The more Trading Cards eligible games you have, the better the chances to get a Booster Pack. It's all set up so that you are better off to have all your games on one account, instead of spreading them between accounts. (Confirmed by Valve on http://steamcommunity.com/groups/tradingcards/discussions/1/864971287458420101/#c864971287458869735)

8- It is not known how many Booster Packs are distributed at any given time as the number of booster available depends on the number of badges crafted, as Booster Packs are also a medium to control supplies of cards.

[WarPigeon]

They did mention earlier that they were thinking of increasing the drop rates for users with higher levels though. I wonder if they went through with it.

Hopefully not.

[grbolivar]

引用自 WarPigeon：

They did mention earlier that they were thinking of increasing the drop rates for users with higher levels though. I wonder if they went through with it.

Hopefully not.

Some investigation on the market of people selling boosters may shed a bit of light on this.

[Invertex]

"They are randomly distributed, as there are people on the market selling Boosters that don't have even a year on Steam and no badges crafted, so those parameters were not considered in the distribution, most likely they were just randomly given."
That itself isn't proof, because as we know, there are plenty of people who buy and resell things on the market, especially when they are new items and prices are drastically fluctuatiing.

[grbolivar]

引用自 Invertex：

"They are randomly distributed, as there are people on the market selling Boosters that don't have even a year on Steam and no badges crafted, so those parameters were not considered in the distribution, most likely they were just randomly given."
That itself isn't proof, because as we know, there are plenty of people who buy and resell things on the market, especially when they are new items and prices are drastically fluctuatiing.

The sole existence of a person with no badges crafted selling a Booster Pack on the market is proof enough that the amount of badges or cards used were not considered during the distribution. E.g. this user has a Booster Pack listed on the market right now http://steamcommunity.com/id/jihualz009

Look around the market you'll find all kind of people selling Booster Packs, new users old users, with 2000 games with 10 games, badges no badges. That points to random distribution.

PD: investigated on the market and all of the people selling Booster Packs have at least the One Year Of Service badge, meaning all of them have at least one year using Steam.

[僕の名前 (仮)]

there are plenty of people who buy and resell things on the market

why would someone buy booster pack for $15 if nobody buy it now and wait till it drop to reasonable price.

[Minimum ∞]

It's not about who is selling them. It's about the frequency of who is selling them. If there is a much higher frequency of high level people selling than low level people then you can assume that there is a bias. As of right now there aren't that many people selling boosters. More data is needed before we can really theorize how the system works.

[Darth LisandreL]

What is difference between «XYZ Booster Pack (Booster Pack)» and «XYZ Booster Pack»?
For example: http://steamcommunity.com/market/search?q=Dota+2+booster

[grbolivar]

引用自 Minimum 0.1：

It's not about who is selling them. It's about the frequency of who is selling them. If there is a much higher frequency of high level people selling than low level people then you can assume that there is a bias. As of right now there aren't that many people selling boosters. More data is needed before we can really theorize how the system works.

Just look at this profile: http://steamcommunity.com/id/jihualz009 he has only 36 games of which only 3 has Trading Cards, he has no badges crafted and no cards on his inventory so most likely he is not interested on the Trading Cards and sold/traded them, yet, he has one Booster Pack listed on the market.

[CowboyCoffee]

If you have received card drops in a game, and have no card drops remaining, then you may receive a booster. The only requirement is that you have logged in to Steam in the last week."This was posted by al one of the valve employes. Another employee said that Packs are given randomly but the longer you go without getting one the more likely you are to get one. He also said the FAQ and other pages with this Booster information is being worked on they had quite a bit to do and will be done soon and it will most likely be released tommorow.

[WarPigeon]

引用自 grbolivar：

引用自 Minimum 0.1：

It's not about who is selling them. It's about the frequency of who is selling them. If there is a much higher frequency of high level people selling than low level people then you can assume that there is a bias. As of right now there aren't that many people selling boosters. More data is needed before we can really theorize how the system works.

Just look at this profile: http://steamcommunity.com/id/jihualz009 he has only 36 games of which only 3 has Trading Cards, he has no badges crafted and no cards on his inventory so most likely he is not interested on the Trading Cards and sold/traded them, yet, he has one Booster Pack listed on the market.

But we still don't know how many people with no badges received drops compared to people with a very high steam level.

Until we have more data it's entirely possible that they went through with the "higher steam level = higher chance of drops" system.

[swenor]

Booster Packs should be dropped by the game. They should be distributed to active players for a particular game. Why a person that shows little to none interest in cards/items should receive those Packs? Most likely such a booster pack will rot in their inventory.

[Invertex]

引用自 swenor：

Booster Packs should be dropped by the game. They should be distributed to active players for a particular game. Why a person that shows little to none interest in cards/items should receive those Packs? Most likely such a booster pack will rot in their inventory.

I'd guess to try and get less active people interested in these systems and using Steam more, it's marketting.

[Scram]

引用自 al：

Booster packs are dropping all the time. If you got card drops in a game and have no drops remaining, and you've logged in in the past week, you may get one of those booster packs.

You don't have to do anything, it doesn't matter what you did with the cards.

[phaethon-]

My read of it was that it was a one time thing to compensate for users that may have used all of their card drops before they were eligible for foils, in order to retroactively make up for the change they made which allowed users to get foils at any level.

[₰Lin₰]

It's a system they're placing so that games that we have collected cards from don't just start collecting dust after we got our card drops for them. I for one was confused on how they'd expect me to continue to get cards for a game such as Borderlands 2 after I've already crafted the badge once, since at that point It's less trading for me and more "buying".

Booster packs will be distributed "randomly" after you have obtained all your card drops from a certain game. So it'd be safe to assume the more games you payed to play and had card drops for, the more likely you are to get a Booster Pack.

What I find highly unlikely is that they are not automated distributions. I'm pretty sure that's not the case. There's millions of users on Steam so it will be no surprise that for the beginning, there's a lot of people that don't have Booster Packs yet a decent portion that do. If there was any sort of bias, we'd have seen it through the research other users have provided for us as well. If level 1 Steam users are getting Booster Pack's it's a pretty good sign it's an automated and randomized distribution system.

It's just safer to say Booster Packs will "eventually" come to us all, multiple times, throughtout the week. Or just 1 a week. We'll discover more when the FAQ touches down.