Valve has been known to do seasonal promotions and events to correspond with major celebrations like the holiday season or Halloween, but this year’s Christmas Auction event is proving to be rather problematic for the Steam community market’s economy.
The premise behind the Holiday Auction was simple, Steam users complained about useless junk such as unwanted emoticons and backgrounds from badge crafting in their inventory, so Valve allowed players to create a new currency, Gems, out of these junk items. These gem items could then be converted into booster packs, which contain cards to craft badges for the user to display on their profile, along with emoticons to use in chat and a wallpaper for their profile too. Alternatively, gems could be used to bid on games like an auction rather than buying them with money on Steam.
However, when a system is a place, there’s pretty much guaranteed to be a way to abuse it. This is where the cards come into play.
You can get roughly 100 gems from an item costing 3 cents on the community market. Booster packs however, would cost anywhere between 300 to 800 gems to craft, with many rarer games holding stable prices at $5+. The result? Massive profits for those who caught on early.
Even worse, an exploit in the system allowed some users to duplicate their Gems, and craft an absurd amount of badges to sell on the market.
While Valve did ban and clear the inventories of users who duplicated their Gems, they were available for sale earlier on, along with any items crafted buy the exploiters. As a result, the market still suffered from the effects of exploiters selling their gems and crafted items.
When none of their restrictions worked due to inherent flaws in the concept’s numbers, Valve ultimately decided to suspend the promotion, looking for a solution to the market crash caused by the massive influx of cards created by users both legitimate and illegitimate.
Let us know in the comments about your thoughts on the situation and how you would solve this problem.