Steam winter auction 2014

It's been on sale other places though, and likely will be on Steam in a couple days. And that doesn't excuse people paying 50% more than the BASE cost in gems

This bidding shit is a complete farce and Valve is just laughing all the way to the bank.

I don't know about "farce." Aside from those few random games that people are overpaying for, most of the games are a fair sale price or better, and it's eating up tons of useless background/emoticon/cards from people's inventories which make those all more valuable to people who don't collect them and just sell them off. Obviously Valve is the big winner but they're the big winner in literally everything Steam does. The market, cards, emoticons, backgrounds, etc. existing in the first place is printed money for them.

Like how they enabled selling bags on the market half way through the fucking event which of course is causing undercutting wars. Lowering the value of gems. Which is lowering the value of items that turn into gems.

Kirun_sl said:

Where do you check your backgrounds, badges, etc.? I'm assuming I have none if all I am seeing are cards?

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They are in the same inventory tab as cards. You get backgrounds and shit from making badges so unless you've done that or bought some you won't have any. You get badges for completing a set of cards and poofing them. You normally poof about a dollars worth of cards for some +gooder at Steam points and a $0.15 or less item. Certain badges can poop out backgrounds or stuff worth a few bucks apparently but the cards are higher priced as a result. It's really retarded. It's kind of like opening an old timey DoTA chest. 99.99% chance to pay $3.50 for a $0.10 cent item and a 0.01% chance at a courier. Except the couriers aren't worth shit.

Taloo_sl said:

Like how they enabled selling bags on the market half way through the fucking event which of course is causing undercutting wars. Lowering the value of gems. Which is lowering the value of items that turn into gems.

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What? Price of gems seems as high as it's been, as are the prices of backgrounds/emoticons. Was like $0.7 for a bag of gems when they hit the market, almost double that now. They rose mostly the first 12 hours and have since slowed to a crawl as far as inflation goes, but I expect more spikes one way or the other near the end of the auctions.

I've gotten 2 games for well below the price they'd be at on sale even, and have two more bid on and almost surely will get tomorrow again, under value, although not $12 savings like the first game I got. So all in all pretty happy with this whole nonsense. Even broke even crafting a bunch of badges and selling elf cards.

Amzin_sl said:

What? Price of gems seems as high as it's been, as are the prices of backgrounds/emoticons. Was like $0.7 for a bag of gems when they hit the market, almost double that now. They rose mostly the first 12 hours and have since slowed to a crawl as far as inflation goes, but I expect more spikes one way or the other near the end of the auctions.

I've gotten 2 games for well below the price they'd be at on sale even, and have two more bid on and almost surely will get tomorrow again, under value, although not $12 savings like the first game I got. So all in all pretty happy with this whole nonsense. Even broke even crafting a bunch of badges and selling elf cards.

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Looking at it more closely you're right. For some reason they never displayed in the market for me until tonight. I was searching for them but may have just been the market being shitty. Surprised bags are up that high now that I looked at the sales history. Even more surprised high gem items have gone up at similar rates.

So for $9.71 and a few of my own backgrounds/emoticons scrapped (like 10, maybe less), I got 4 games off my wishlist: Sentris, TRI, 10 Second Ninja, and NeonXSZ. At 75% off each, those would have cost me around $17, and 2 of them are early access and haven't been more than a couple bucks off. This isn't counting all the badges I crafted at little or no cost buy selling the elf cards you get each time you make one.

Hoping they do this auction thing again for sure

I idled games for cards, then converted those to cash. The return from steam wallet is a ton better than converting cards to gems. I bought gems in the sacks, and got a few 1k -3k gemmed games out of it.

Yea, cards themselves aren't worth turning into gems. It was way more cost effective to buy missing cards and craft the badge and convert the background + emoticon into gems and sell the holiday card, but that required paying attention to your costs and having Steam money in the first place. I kept track of everything and so for me it was just a more complicated, interactive sale

Edit: Selling cards and just buying gems also better than just converting cards themselves, ya

Amzin_sl said:

Yea, cards themselves aren't worth turning into gems. It was way more cost effective to buy missing cards and craft the badge and convert the background + emoticon into gems and sell the holiday card, but that required paying attention to your costs and having Steam money in the first place. I kept track of everything and so for me it was just a more complicated, interactive sale

Edit: Selling cards and just buying gems also better than just converting cards themselves, ya

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I didn't have to worry about investing steam wallet money. If I wasn't swamped at work I would have done more collecting work with it, but i just sold everything and when i got to around a buck steam funds I would buy a bag. Less muss and fuss.

spronk_sl said:

i made almost $50 steambux idling all the games i've bought over the years from bundles and shit and selling the cards, it took under 15 minutes too with steam inventory helper to sell them all. took about 4 days of idling to get all the cards, but automated with idle_master

anyways winter sale starts in 90 minutes, add all the games you want to your wishlist in case you are busy this holiday and steam will email you if any go on sale. probably better deals though offsite likeNuuvemorGreen Man Gaming

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Related to this advice, everyone should installEnhanced Steamif you don't have it. By the same guy who made idle_master and it's basically an improvement in every way. It'll show you on a game's store page (or your wishlist if you hover over it) where the current cheapest price is. Nuuvem comes up the winner a lot but there's some VPN stuff required to buy from them I believe.

I got all my games but none were in the "last" auction that finished as the sale went live. I got my copies when their round of auction ended. I'm guessing it's the last auction that fubar?

The auctions were all supposed to end same time sale went live so I'm not surprised there's some issues.

Ended up with four indie games for about $2 after selling everything I bought at 3-5 cents and didn't poof. Went to bed rather than win something with my last 2000 gems and ended up with a foil when I made boosters just now so might even be a wash when I sell cards.

Shit was so weird though. People were bidding over $1,000 in gems for that fucking profile that expires. Even near the end last night it was in the $400 range.