That's dissapointing, I know that cards are worth very little nowadays but it still was something. Guess I won't be able to squeeze free games out of this sale then, that kinda sucks the fun out of it.
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So... I've been wasting my time gathering badges just for Summer Sale?
Greeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaat.
This better be good.
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I wonder if this was done to stimulate the price for a sack of gems? Every sale the price of gems dips then raises up (sale backgrounds, emote and cards are 100 gems apiece; high badge level=lots of background and emotes=lots of gems) but these drops have been getting larger and the recovery slower. In fact almost nonexistent for these past few months.
The sack prices have increased by a couple of cents following this news (still down by about 50% YOY). It will remain to be seen if this is was panic buying of the current stock (people might have been cautious on buying before a crash but no cards makes a crash less likely) and where the market will balance.
Personally I thought gems being at a low was a good thing. It made the booster pack creator more useful but in this turn this priced in a lot more of the trading card market and in the eyes of valve and developers cards costing between 3 and 19 cents are the exact same; both valve and developer get 1 cent apiece (assuming these isn't any rounding going on).
I guess my sets wait another 6 months to be crafted.
"it should be a fun event" - Ouch @ should. It's like the person writing that doesn't know what the event even is. Or maybe they do and know from the past that scripting them was funner than playing them.
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I think their intention was to bring sack price down because before that using gems to create booster packs was not cost-effective.
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If that was their goal giving 300 gems a day like they did in the Wintersale makes no sense.
Then again might be a case of "right hand doesn't know what lefthand is doing."
We'll see.
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I think the goal of giving so many gems (and with this pushing down the price of cards, backgrounds and gems) was to destroy the silent reserves of a lot of users.
This was an direct attack on the tradingmarked
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Nice, although I hope it won't be another event where you have to log in every day. I didn't have time to farm cards during latest sales, looking forward to whatever they'll come up this time.
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Wonder what they will do, sadly no matter what the event will be, there will always be cheaters (bots, scripts, etc.) that make use of it unless you make it spend money to get stuff, so let's wait and see what Steam has in store for us with the event.
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The whole point of their events has been scripting them, otherwise they are sadistic meaningless torture. This is why scripting has been officially endorsed and supported by Valve.
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Yes, but I read people be like 'finally they do something against the card farming' and stuff like that, but if they just give an event where you can get a simple script to do everything that isn't much different in my opinion (not talking about the card prices but the way it's obtained) so I am very curious what new thing they will give us that can't be as easily farmed/scripted because people will always find a way to exploit it and yes, seems like Valve was even fine with the whole script thing which I always found very weird, not talking about the fact that the event was horrible without it.
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The sale cards weren't going for good prices in the last sales anyway ...
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I'm curious about their plan, the trading cards became worthless anyway, I wish coal back, and free games. I wish a true battle against EPIC.
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Maybe my English fails me but "in the lead-up to the sale" only means imho that there are no cards before the event. There could absolutely be some in some later stage. Ah, we'll see later anyway.
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I think we only get something else instead of the cards, something like the token of the lunar sale
we already had a bug about 10-12 days ago which has refunded games which were bought in the Lunar Sale (4Months later^^)with the event "Coupon/Bonus" I'm assuming that they have a similar system in summer sale
just like the other day you could get tokens again and exchange them
I see a connection there^^
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While there will still be an event and rewards, we won't be featuring special trading cards, or any mysterious cards in the lead-up to the sale
I'm pretty sure it fails you :) They say "no event cards at all", also "no mysterious cards in the lead-up".
Not sure why they split it, if there are no Event Cards, then obviously there are no mysterious cards, since they have nothing to change when event starts...
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What are chances that Valve want to stop St4ck, Rena, Magic and other users from buying large amounts of event cards and leveling up so high and to make maintaining farm accounts much less financially viable?
They are defintely doing this with purpose we don't know exactly but I hope that in Grand Prix 2019 crafting game badges will bring some boost to event badge progression.
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Pretty unlikely since Valve kinda endorses them since it makes them oodles of money.
They would only dump that for something that makes even MORE money.
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You know, that's an interesting idea... Maybe some people at Valve got to talking and said hey, don't you guys feel dirty encouraging people to throw money away like this? Or maybe they are trying to make bot farms unprofitable so it disappears all by itself without their having to do anything directly...
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Or it is just they want to prevent changing booster pack drops algorithm. I mean, sittng next to St4ck and Magic chances for booster drop are pretty nonexsistent.
EDIT: Or most likely, they want to persuade more users into buying games during sales.
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Their booster drop chances are not as high as people think it is. Most people wildly misinterpret how level-related chance-improvements work.
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I don't know. It's an extra 20% on base chance per 10 Steam Levels according to https://steamcommunity.com/tradingcards/faq/ so St4ck at Level 4575 gets (1+457x0.2)/(1+19x0.2) = 92.4/4.8 = 19.25 times as many booster drops as you, 46.2 times as many as sassdrake, and 57.75 times as many booster drops as I do for each game that we all own (and have collected all initial card drops for). Furthermore, I'm guessing that St4ck probably owns a few more games than I do and has collected all the initial card drops for them, so is eligible for boosters for games that I am not, significantly multiplying this advantage.
As an aside, I think it's interesting (in the literal sense, this is not a complaint) that they use a system designed to push high and low achievers further apart and create a barrier to entry for new participants. It would be like taxing high earners at a reduced rate or rewarding a sports team for winning a championship with an increased salary cap and higher priority in the next rookie draft.
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sigh Partly, yes, but this is not the entirety of the booster drop system.
Everyone who is eligible to get a booster drop from a game enters one giant raffle once a booster drop is in effect.
Everyone starts with 5 tickets in the raffle. Every 10 Steam levels add 1 more ticket for that person. At level 0, you have 5 tickets, at level 50 you have 10 tickets, and so on.
Thing is, there are still 10,000-10,000,000 tickets in total for most raffles, so in reality, being at level 100 means you have 15/10000000 chance to get one instead of 5/10000000. Yes, you can say that "I have +200% chance compared to a level 0 peasant", but it is still so small, the difference is negligible.
The true driving force behind booster drops is the number of eligible games per account.
To put it in perspective: my main account is at level 193 and has 307 eligible products. My secondary is at level 33 and has 877 eligible products. Its average booster drop rate/month is double than my main one's.
Furthermore, having many games and high level will also mean jack shit for boosters if badges are not crafted. A booster only drops if someone crafts a badge, the cards they use up are recycled in the system. So St4ck can go to level one trillion for all the system cares, he cannot get his own cards back, so his increased chance of getting a booster compared to a random level 0 account that has the same game is only detectable on theoretical levels. He has many boosters because he hoarded a ton of games that can drop them. Any account that decides to mindlessly buy games and farm the cards can do it, this is why all large card and booster farming operation have level 0-7 accounts, since this is how you have actual high chances to get a drop, not by climbing Steam ladders.
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I don't understand why you are sighing, or at least claiming to in text for dramatic effect. Your "true driving force" explanation is not a correction, it is just reiterating the point that I made in the last sentence of the first paragraph, which expands upon the preceding sentence's mention of the multiplier applying to "each game that we all own (and have collected all initial card drops for)". If you're sighing because you think that having three times as high a probability for a booster is negligible, then I disagree - statistically, you will receive three times as many boosters (and I wouldn't call anyone a peasant as an insult). I'm also aware that it's cheaper to achieve the same odds with starter accounts than to rank up an account - the link I posted to Steam's Trading Card FAQ points out that an account needs to be ranked up to Level 50 to achieve the same odds as two starter accounts. If you're telling me that the badge crafter is ineligible for the resultant booster pack, then I wasn't aware of that, but if true this is close to statistically negligible because it doesn't affect the other 9,999/10,000 to 9,999,999/10,000,000 raffle events, where a higher level account has a higher probability of receiving the booster. I did not argue that one high level account was receiving all of the boosters, I just pointed out they receive significantly more (the opposite of negligible) than an equivalent (same number of eligible games) lower level account, and quantified this using Steam's published information.
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There appears to be something else going on with booster pack drops, though. I am unable to verify it myself, but according to https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/bht6y1/booster_pack_droprates_explained/elwb6e4/ you're only eligible to get a booster pack every so often, depending on mysteriously undocumented something-or-other...
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I have no clue, guess we will find out what's going to happen on Tuesday... Hope I haven't been piling up these stupid cards for nothing... :)
Well, ok, it's a complete waste of money either way, but I hope it's not a double waste of money. :)
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People after Epic want to join the market seriously: well at least now Steam will up their game to make sure theyre not loosing clients...
Steam: takes that one thing most people were interested in and liked and makes crap out of it
:/
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A lot of the comments here state, that sale trading cards had become basically worthless anyway. It's true that their price went down with each sale, but I still managed to get few Euros out of those events, especially when getting a foil early on and when also selling the other stuff (e.g. knick-knacks). Definitely more than I usually get from selling cards throughout the year. They better come up with something good and not just another stupid clicker game to make up for that, because without being able to turn some of the event into steam wallet my incentive to buy anything will be very low. That being said, those cards (and the backgrounds, emoticons etc.) were looking increasingly worse with each sale and the whole sale cards stuff was getting kinda boring.
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When it gets to something like the Lunar Sale(where everything points to it), then you would save much more than you can get by normal "sale trading card drops" what was it 5$€ for the first 30 spent and another 5$€ for 15k tokens? that would be roughly 286 event cards that you would have to sell how many free ones could you get last sale per day 6? for 14 Days = 84 so something like the lunar sale would be 60% more profitable Of course only if you also intend to buy games
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5$€ for the first 30 spent
And those €30 spent is exactly the problem, because it would mean I'd have to put in €30 first, before getting anything. With selling event stuff, I' much more flexible. I either would just keep the profit in my wallet for the next sale, or I would get a few Euros over the duration of the sale, which sums up with what I already have in wallet and with which I could buy stuff for €20-30 easily in the past (given that I don't buy stuff at every sale). I also have two accounts, meaning I could usually sell twice the amount of event stuff.
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That's the problem I had with the Lunar Sale as well, I got a few games but not nearly close to the €30 to get that discount so sure it's a nice thing and I welcomed it, but I found the €30 to be way to much while like you said, Steam Sale cards, even when worth very little, could still make you at least €0,50 if you did everything daily which isn't that much but it's something and completely free (besides the tiny bit of time it cost) but for now let's wait and see, maybe they will do a big overhaul and have great new stuff for this event, you never know!
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Valve is on a mission to fight trading cards farming bots, that also got apparent since they changed their model for free promotional games that have trading cards disabled now in their special licenses.
Once again the countless armies of exploiting bots destroyed the fun for us legit users. :/
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Sadly that is the problem everywhere, on the internet but also in real life, no matter what you do, there will always be (some) rotten apples that ruin it for the rest of us and with Steam cards it's no difference sadly.
I loved Steam Sale cards, you could make a tiny bit of money out of it just by checking a few games and just check Steam every day and I hope they won't change that, though I can understand the problem about it with the farmers.
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Once again the countless armies of exploiting bots destroyed the fun for us legit users. :/
Now I'm curious, what kind of "fun" was exactly destroyed by bots anyway? I wouldn't say that those special sale cards were any "fun". When sold, they were a welcome extra few cents for my steam wallet, nothing more. As for all the other cards, you can still craft badges, if that's your idea of fun. You might even get the missing cards cheaper on the market because of bots. As for selling cards: cards decrease in value because there's too many of them, regardless of humans or bots farming them. With every game adding cards, the pile rises.
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It was fun collecting them to level up your account.
I never really bothered selling trading cards. ;)
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Okay, fair enough. There's still thousands of other trading card sets to collect and level up, though. Personally, I think, those sale cards, or rather their associated badges, backgrounds and so forth, looked worse than many standard game sets. And they were looking worse with every sale. The whole thing was getting boring. So maybe it was time for something else this time, it's just they need to come up with something that's actually better first.
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If this is the price to get those filthy bot farmers cry over lost profits, I'm more than willing to pay it.
In any case, I'm pretty sure there will be something for us humans: a minigame that everybody will script the heck out of for sure, and possibly some task-based badge that everybody will automate like in the Spring cleaning event.
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Sincerely I did not like the idea of the tokens, I prefer to create my event badge in the classic mode and that of icons walpapers etc, I think steam is making a mistake with this.
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kinda welcoming any change from the dull and boring scheme of the previous sales.
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Oh well, guess I will be keeping my badge ready cards until next sale then.
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Well, I have to say that I'm disappointed. I liked trading the Sales Event cards for the ones that I needed to complete my game badges. But, I can understand that they need to do something to combat bot farms.
I guess I'll hang onto my current card sets and hope for some future event where I can get more benefit from crafting a badge than a worthless coupon.
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"special trading cards, or any mysterious cards in the lead-up to the sale"
It doesn't says there wont be cards DURING the sale, does it?
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what? I understand its about the cards. What I was referring to was about the time - valve talks about time before sale - lead-up to sale. anyway it doesn't eve matter in the end
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As also clarified in the OP now it mentions 2 things.
''special trading cards'' - The actual event cards
''mysterious cards in the lead-up to the sale'' - The pre-event cards that popped up a week before the sale. This announcement came up at the time these usually went live past sales. They are entirely seperate from the listed "special trading cards". They listed them seperately to be crystal clear... and seem to have utterly failed in doing so.
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yes, probably that's the way they wanted it to be understood
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I mean, good? Normally I just grind through whatever I have to do to get at least 1 set to get the badge.... it's not fun anymore.
Also SUPER pissed I missed this years spring cleaning... first event I missed since my account was started :(
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no special cardssss? some of my badges have been waiting since the last carded event/sale to be crafted because I tend to have no use for the coupons you get during non-sale crafting XD
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The cynic in me thinks this is because Valve crashed the cardz market too often, ran the math, and projected hat community market sales for sales-related cardz won't bring in enough profitz to warrant zero effort.
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https://steamcommunity.com/groups/tradingcards#announcements/detail/1621774363820056946
Some clarification concerning the wording.
These are two separate sentences. You can't take a part from the second and combine it with the first.
meaning: no sale cards, period.
also, additionally no mystery cards prior to sale
Saying there will be cards during the sale just not before is, unfortunately, wrong. Also:
just delaying cards for a week wouldn't really qualify as 'something different'
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