Booster-Packs

Understanding of Booster-Packs:
How to get them
and
What to do with them

Introduction

This guide is all about Steam Booster-Packs. I am going to tell you 'What is a Booster-Pack?' , 'How to get them?', 'The mathematics behind them' and 'How to make profit with them?'.
I hope you enjoy this guide! Here we go:

What is a Steam Booster-Pack?

A Steam Booster-Pack is a small package, containing 3 trading cards of the game this package is coming from. The cards may be foil cards but in most cases they are only normal trading cards.

How to get them?

There are 3 different ways, to get these Booster-Packs. Two of them are self-explaining but there is one way, to receive a Booster-Pack, that i want to explain very detailed in this guide.

The market

This way is the most easiest way: You go into the market, look for your game and then you simply spend your money for 3 random cards. There is nothing special about it.
If you do it that way just keep your eyes open! Sometimes there are Booster-Packs that are only 1 or maybe 2 cents below the total price of buying 3 cards from that game. According that point it would be dumb to buy a Booster-Pack because you might be unlucky and have 2 similar cards.
The risk of it shrinks with the raising amount of required cards for a game: For a game with 10 required cards there wouldn't be a high risk of getting 2 similar cards. But in a Booster-Pack for a game with 5 required cards it happened pretty often to me that I had 2 similar cards.
This is like playing poker so be carefull with your wallets.

Trading with others

This one is a sub-category of "The market"

There are a whole lot of players out there. So there are also players having a Booster-Pack they don't want. You can simply trade with them.
If you do it that way let me warn you:
Some times there are scammers and stuff so check the trade at least twice before you accept it!!!
Never go higher than 3 cards for one Booster-Pack except of you use cards of a game where you already have your Level-5-Badge.
Because think of it: The best case would be that you have 3 cards you need but you cant be sure of it.
So don't accept it too fast ;)

Generate them with gems

Well I don't think this needs to be explained but:
You can make gems out of stuff from your inventory and if you have enough of them you can generate a Booster-Pack for one of your eligible games.

Booster-Pack dropping

This way is the way I want to explain a bit more in detail.
You can receive Booster-Packs by a random drop from Steam but there are a whole lot of mathematics behind this. So lets start from the beginning:

You bought yourself a game in steam, that has its own trading cards. Of course you'll play it. After a session in this game you just notice that you have some new items in your Steam-Inventory!!!
Trading crads from this game? Yes!
Every game with its own trading cards has trading cards, that drop when you have an amout of playtime (in most cases every 0.3 hours one card drops). But these dropping crads are limited (in most cases 50% of a complete set). After these drops, this game reaches a new status in your Steam account: They get eligible for Booster-Pack drops.
The first thing someone thinks is that you'll only have to wait some days or maybe weeks and then you have your Level-5-Bagde...I'm really sorry but it is not THAT easy.
Booster-Packs will be dropped, when ever someone out there in Steam crafts a badge for the game. But its a randomized drop. So if I craft a badge for Left 4 Dead 2 someone out there in Steam, who is eligible for Left 4 Dead 2 Booster-Pack drops, receives a Booster-Pack for this game. The following part will explain the mathematics for these drops according all the factors included in this.

The mathematics behind Booster-Packs dropping

As I told you in the last part, there is the way of dropping Booster-Packs for a game, where you already dropped all cards. But this time of waiting for Booster-Packs to drop is influenced by a whole lot of different factors:

1. Your steam-level
   
2. Your amount of eligible games for Booster-Pack drops
   
3. The amount of crafted badges per day in the whole community
   
4. In a follow of 3) the amount of players online per day

The steam-level

Your steam-level takes influence to the Booster-Pack dropping in a pretty easy way:
Every 10th steam-level gives you a 20% higher chance of dropping Booster-Packs.
But this doesn't mean that you will drop a Booster-Pack everytime when someone crafts a badge after you reached level 50!

The only thing the steam-level does is it takes your chance and raises it by 20% every 10th steam level. For example: I have a chance of 0,5% and I am steam-level 10 I would have a chance of 0,5% * 1,2 = 0,6%
This is just an example!!!!

The amount of eligible games

Well this is pretty simple to explain. Every single game has its Drop-Ratio and if you have multiple eligible games you have all their Drop-Ratios in addition. The ratios of each game don't have that high differences so you can say you have x-times the Drop-Ration where X is the amount of your eligible games.

The amount of crafted badges per day and the amout of players per day

These two parts are playing together and they are only important if you want to know the ratio of getting a Booster-Pack drop per day.
More players per day raises the chance of a badge being crafted.
More crafted badges raise the chance for you to get a Booster-Pack.

All these things sound pretty easy but let's have a closer look into it:

At first I will put all of our factors into words so that you can understand why I build a term like I do...
"When you have an eligible game for dropping Booster-Packs you may receive a Booster-Pack, when someone in the community craftes a badge for this game. According to this your chance for a drop raises with the amount of eligible games and the amount of crafted badges in the community. The multiplicator of your chance, which starts from 1.00 , raises with your steam-level. Every 10th steam-level gives you a higher multiplicator by +0.20. The more players are out there in the Steam-Universe, being eligible for drops, the lower your chance for drop will be."

So that was the easy part... now I will go a bit more into the matter of thise thesis:

To have a start I say that we have a Chance for any Booster-Pack drop, that we don't no for the moment, and our multiplicator created by out steam-level:
No one can say what is what in this simple term. We need to derivate WHAT is our multiplicator and WHAT is our chance for a Booster-Pack drop:

The easy part of it might be our multiplicator. We know that every 10th steam-level, our multiplicator raises by 0.20 and we know that this multiplicator starts from 1.
So we can say that the multiplicator is our steam-level divided by 10 (and rounded down!) multiplicated by 0.20 plus 1





So we put this together and we have a term that tells us a bit more than the first one...







Now to the harder part...
"Our Drop-Chance" is a variable that is influenced by the most values. For the protocol "THIS GUIDE IS BASED ON VALUES THAT MIGHT NOT BE 100% ACCURATE!"

For one specific Booster-Pack, "Our Drop-Chance" might be the amout of crafted badges a day divided by the amout of players being eligible for this badge. But we don't want to have the chance for one single Booster-Pack. For the chance for ANY Booster-Pack it would be the same term but multiplied by the amount of our eligible games.
So all in all "Our Drop-Chance" is the amount of crafted bades per day, divided by the amout of eligible players for any Booster-Pack (we use averages here because it wont be possible to calculate the amount of eligible players for each game) and finally multiplied by the amount of our eligible games...



Ok let's put together what we have so far...






(For your remembering: The stuff in the parenthesis was "Our Multiplicator" and the rest of the term was "Our Drop-Chance")
To work with averages we need to scale the Steam-Universe down to our Steam-Friendlist:

I have 165 steam-friends at the moment. So in the Steam-Universe these are the total amount of 125000000 people using Steam.
If I i go through my library and look how many friends of mine have my games (I declare them to be eligible for the Booster-Pack), compare this to the total amout of my steam-friends and make an average value of it, I will get that a thrid of my friendlist is eligible for my games (some games more, some games less).
Upscaled to the Steam-Universe this might be the thrid part of 125000000.





Let's replace this in our complete term...








Ok so far so good!
For the next part it's neccessary to be familiar with integral calculus so I just go very superficial over this part:
We need to replace "The amount of crafted badges per day" with something touchable... I mean no one would be able to get the number of crafted badges of any day!







This graph shows us the logged in players in steam, in a timespan of 48 hours, splitted up into 8 hours intervals. As you know there is a time difference on our planet. This means in normal situations when the american people have their gaming time, the european people are having sweet dreams and vice versa. The time difference-maximum is 12 hours but of course we like to play A BIT longer than midnight some times ;) And to compense this, this graph takes 8 hours time intervals, instead of 12 hours. So now you can say that the integral of this graph from 0 to 8 is nearly the exact amount of different players in 24 hours. (An integral is the acreage between the graph and the X-Axis)
In this case we have something linke 70000000 people.
But I think I don't have to tell you that not every one of them crafts a badge every day ... So we need to get an average of these people.
Of course Valve won't give us any numbersm so we have to help ourselves.
I went through my whole friendlist for this and I found out that only one of my 165 steam firends crafted a badge this day. 1 / 165 = 0.006 = 0.6%
Upscaled to the Steam-Universe this might be 70000000 * 0.006 = 420000
This number changes of course if the total amout of steam users changes!

So if we put all our thoughts together we have this end-formular....

Example

I use my profile for this example...

Steam-Level: 73 (so we take 70)
Eligible Games: 35






As you can see it's not that high. If you have a ratio of 400% for example this means that you have the CHANCE to get 4 Booster-Packs per day.
If you try this with renfield, you will get something like 300-400%. This means that has the chance for 3-4 Booster-Packs per day (only a CHANCE).

What to do with Booster-Packs?

Well in my opinion there are only 3 possibilities and you have to decide what kind of a steam user you are:

The Trader

As a trader you have the possibility to simply trade the Booster-Pack for cards or other Booster-Packs or what ever stuff you need.
Or you can just unpack the cards and trade them. The most trades are something like 2:1 so you would have a profit of 3 cards after you've traded all of the cards from the Booster-Pack.

The Collector

You need these cards for a set? You want to build a big inventory for trading in the future? Or you just love the high number shown when someone looks into your inventory (or your profile showcase)?
Well then you are one of those guys that should unpack and keep the cards for himself!

The Cookie-Monster

You can't keep stuff? You want your profit... NOW!!??
Well then it's easy: Just sell the Booster-Pack on the steam market.
In 99% it's the case that the Booster-Pack will bring the most profit for your steam wallet.
At first it looks like it would be better if you sell every single card but if you subtract the Steam-Tax you will never get the best profit from selling single trading cards.

For example "Brick Force (EU)":
One card has a market value of 0.12$. If you sell it for that price you will get 0.10$ from it.
0.10$ * 3 = 0.30$
On the other hand the Booster-Pack has the market value of 0.50$. Sell it for that price and you will DEFINATLY have a profit of more than 0.40$ what is already 10 cents higher than the profit form the single cards.

Epilog

This guide is just an abstract and really easy version of the calculation of the Booster-Packs and their dropping.
So if you want to criticise do it but don't flame or something like that. Constructive critics are better than flaming ;)
The numbers used in the calculation of the dropping are very superficic, please keep this in mind! If you get something like 300% it's not wrong!!! You have to think like it's a horse race:
The bets can be 3:1 but you CAN win on both sides it's all about luck :)

Hope you liked this guide!
DSC | B34tZ

[idiot 3]

https://youtu.be/DdmNYNkcwKE

[Hugs]

wow, this seems like an overly complex mindfuck of a system. i've been playing on steam for years and never once have i ever earned a booster pack. i had started to assume it was a depreciated feature they hadn't removed mention of or something. the odds are too damn low to even consider it a real feature of using steam at that rate

[Čenda]

Really appreciate this guide. I was not sure if the number of games contribute much, it seems it is. I have also stumbled that steam ladder (https://steamladder.com/) tracks number of crafted badges it probably it is not accurate since they have a specific subset of users.

Also it seems interesting that you get booster packs somehow periodically - if it was truly random then the time between two drops would differ much more. So I suspect that Valve smooths it somehow that it is not much random.
If there is more information about this, feel free to contact me, I am interested.

[Trey]

... ... ...kay...

[Sazzouu]

Okay, sir!

[CatMagic]

PrinceVinc you lucky little fuck stop hogging the booster packs

[PrinceVinc]

Thank you I got one only minutes ago and was wondering "why?" this explained it. If only I had such luck in stuff I actually care about...

[juraija]

there could be booster packs that cannot be sell on the market?

[Hallowizer]

Alright time to do a DuckDuckGo search for "Free Steam Levels"

[Sazzouu]

No
"Is trying" to get a free badge without common sens