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[Metalax]

Feels like busy work to me. Some bids are already in the 25k range. At least there's maybe something else I can do with all the crap building up in my inventory I don't care about.

Indeed, as bids roll over between auction rounds they are all going to be won by the trade-lords who had backpacks of 10s of thousands of cards. Still it will hopefully allow me to clear out the junk worthless backgrounds/emoticons that I don't want and get some booster packs from them.

[BurnedToast]

Yeah, I just saw that you can craft booster packs with gems. Gems are also not deleted after, they can always be used to craft booster packs.

I also noticed you can also trade "sacks of gems" which are 1,000 gems on the market... for roughly 25 cents at this point (though it's changing rapidly), so the average cost per gem purchased directly is about 40 per penny.

That makes the bid prices much more reasonable, I guess.

Remember that Valve hired an economist exactly for reasons like this. They need to control their created economies. They're just making it look fancier than a company buying back their own shares.

Somehow they got companies to donate games to them for this sale, or so it says. So not only is it fancier, they are buying them back for no cost to themselves.

[Rolan7]

Huh.  Seems that if I wanted gems, it'd be much cheaper to sell four 6-cent cards and buy a bag of gems.  Those four cards I'm looking at are worth only 25 gems each, which I guess is better than a lot of cards offer.

Economies are weird.

[Metalax]

I don't think anyone mentioned this but they have also just confirmed that the winter sale starts on the 18th. As the winter sale trading cards expire on the 2nd january, the sale will likely run up to new years day.

[umiman]

Huh.  Seems that if I wanted gems, it'd be much cheaper to sell four 6-cent cards and buy a bag of gems.  Those four cards I'm looking at are worth only 25 gems each, which I guess is better than a lot of cards offer.

Economies are weird.

What you're looking at there is called arbitrage.

Basically you'll see potential avenues for profit like those and people will take advantage of them until market forces bring the numbers closer together.

[Rolan7]

I bet people are going straight for the "Turn into gems" button, as the interface suggests, instead of checking the prices and realizing that there's a glut of gems on the market.  Though that also suggests that they're converting cards into gems and then trying to sell the gems.  Possibly because they belatedly realize how many gems they'd need for an actual chance at a prize.

I sold four lousy cards and got a bag of gems to hold on to.  Gems are pretty 

The real cost of this nonsense is how long it takes to sell each card.  It's a little fun, though, so it can balance out.  That said, today I learned I've had 8 cards sitting on the marketplace for several months, so obviously I don't care enough to check... hardly ever.

[Metalax]

The booster pack crafting is now up and running. You can select any game you are currently eligable to recieve a booster pack for. Prices seem to range between 500-1200 from what I've seen so far. It also seems to be possible to craft packs for games such as free to plays that you may never have recieved cards for.

edit: prices based on number of cards in the set. 1200 for 5 cards, 1000 for 6 cards, 750 for 8 cards, 667 for 9 cards, 400 for 15 cards.

so some simple maths shows getting boosters for 6, 9, 12 or 15 card sets cost 2000 gems each full badge, while it costs more for those outside those numbers but you end up with some cards left over.

[n9103]

What's funny here is people that equate cards to having any intrinsic value to Valve.
Equivalent to buying back shares? ... You really think that don't you?
The only value they have is the fees they get to charge on every transaction.
This is more like ebay for Valve, than some method of avoiding a takeover or reducing their publicly visible debt.

Poor analogies aside, almost all the cards I've got had been going for closer to or over ten cents, and none of them are at or below five.
Being that there's a large surplus of gems, both being listed and being bid, the bet course of action (assuming the holiday cards don't matter to you) would be to either ignore this altogether, and cash in on the increased card price in a few months, or check the listings in a week or so and trade in your cards in for gems if it looks like the majority of titles aren't severely overpriced. I'm gonna guess they still will be though.

[i2amroy]

This is actually pretty sweet. I can pick up a bag of gems for like 10 cents, then turn around and turn it into an Exceed cards through booster packs (which are all hella expensive, the cheapest Exceed cars being about 25 cents a piece) and still have about 150 gems left over because each pack only has 3 cards in it.

[mattie2009]

Spoiler: my steam christmas auction experience (click to show/hide)

[i2amroy]

I know right?

[Shooer]

And the gem market has crashed, literally.

Also is anyone else getting a sinking feeling this may become like MS points and become a new controlled currency?

[Rolan7]

Spoiler: my steam christmas auction experience (click to show/hide)

I had this happen at least 6 times in a row when trying to buy my gem bag.  Eventually I tried visiting in an actual browser instead of the Steam one, and that worked first try.

Edit: Never mind, I tried to buy some more gems and had to try it 4 times through Firefox.  I guess it's just bad.

Edit2: Obviously it's weird that there can be "5142 sales starting at 0.03 cents" and "37214 requests to buy at 0.10 cents or lower" at the same time, but reasonably speaking it takes some time for a sale to actually process.  What's really screwy is that it can give you that "Maybe the listing was removed?" crap just for posting a bid.  There's basically no computation involved, it's not like it bills your account integer until the transaction actually goes through.  It's just adding your bid onto a pile.

[Toaster]

is there any reason not to buy ****tons of gems, and use them to make booster packs, given that cards go for more than the gems do?

I only have eight cents in my Steam wallet?

[i2amroy]

Hmmm, question here, but does anyone know if buy orders will partially complete? Like for example if I say to buy some 100 bags of gems at $.05 each will it start grabbing any it can find 1 at a time? Or will it try to wait until there are 100 bags up for sale all under $.05 and buy them all at once (which would never, ever succeed do to the huge purchase/sale numbers right now).

Just wondering if I should be just making one huge buy order or trying to make a bunch of smaller ones.