Home Gaming Steam Auctions are back up, still seem extremely broken

Steam Auctions are back up, still seem extremely broken

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Late last week Valve took down their new Auction House, which allowed everyone to convert useless trading cards into gems in order to bid on a massive catalogue of games. It wasn’t long before a huge exploit was discovered, allowing anyone to basically create gems out of thin air and post ludicrous bids. Valve say they’ve fixed the problem, but it still seems wildly silly.

Over the weekend, Valve reactivated the Holiday Auctions. wiping the slate clean and getting everyone to start converting and bidding from scratch. All community trades for gems were also reversed, in case anyone managed to grab a few million for basically nothing. That was probably meant to drive the price of bids down, but a quick look at the catalogue shows that they’re still almost unattainably high.

It’s nowhere near as bad as the massive bids during the bug outbreak, but some of the highest bids still exceed the million gem mark. It makes me wonder if the entire system is working properly. Gems are obtained by destroying Steam Trading Cards, Backgrounds and Avatars, as well as trading through the community market. I did some destroying this weekend, only managing to get around 200 gems out of 10 useless cards. I’ve sold most of my valuable ones ages ago, so I’m left wondering what type of hoarder manages to rack up even a hundred thousand of the suckers.

The auctions kick off today and end on the 18th, so if you’ve got a massive pile of cards just taking up space you could try your luck. Unfortunately, I’ve found it to be a waste of time, and cards.

Last Updated: December 15, 2014

14 Comments

  1. I don’t like these auctions. They’re silly.

    Reply

    • Admiral Chief BellatorMachina

      December 15, 2014 at 09:33

      I love em, I made SO much money selling to the masses!!!

      Reply

      • Alien Emperor Trevor

        December 15, 2014 at 09:36

        I made a cool few dollars selling TF2 stuff.

        Reply

        • Admiral Chief BellatorMachina

          December 15, 2014 at 09:40

          Yeah, my steam wallet is now ready for the inevitable trading card purchases!

          Reply

  2. Alien Emperor Trevor

    December 15, 2014 at 09:25

    What a WOFT. I had a quick look in my inventory, the most I can get for a background or emoticon is 100 gems. I have suddenly received a lot of emails about a number of 1c items I listed in the market being bought though, so some people are going for gold, or diamond, or whatever.

    Reply

    • Captain JJ glitterati fantasti

      December 15, 2014 at 09:30

      I’ve sold all my holiday cards. Rather take the money than redeem it for 180 gems when the average bid sits around 10,000 gems.

      Reply

      • Alien Emperor Trevor

        December 15, 2014 at 09:36

        I like my shiny badges too much to sell my cards, except for duplicates obviously. Got rid of most of the emoticons & backgrounds.

        Reply

        • Captain JJ glitterati fantasti

          December 15, 2014 at 09:36

          Holiday badges don’t bother me much. I want my game badges though!

          Reply

  3. Ross Woofels Mason

    December 15, 2014 at 09:36

    I just like being able to craft boosters from gems, the auctions are ridiculous. But being able to get a few new booster packs to craft my badges is great.

    Reply

    • Admiral Chief BellatorMachina

      December 15, 2014 at 09:40

      Yeah,I wanted to do that, but saw how much the gem sacks are selling for, and sold them instead!

      Reply

  4. Kensei Seraph

    December 15, 2014 at 09:38

    It’s almost time I left to go to the customer to deploy and test.
    I’m not looking forward to this.

    Reply

  5. Admiral Chief BellatorMachina

    December 15, 2014 at 09:44

    The trick is selling or trading backgrounds and items, NOT cards Sandy

    Reply

  6. Joe Black

    December 15, 2014 at 11:45

    I have a fair number of games and thus I had a fair number of trading cards (even though I have sold some in the past. I managed to scrape together 1012 gems.

    I think the lowest bid on anything in the auction is like 60k or something.

    Woo Christmas! :/

    Reply

  7. torchie4269

    December 16, 2014 at 19:04

    There are some games that are reasonably priced. I was able to get a $10 game for 900 gems this morning. I think I would have made 50-70 cents in the marketplace selling all the items I converted to gems, so I’m happy with that deal. The big name titles are going for ludicrously inflated prices though. Some people just suck at math. But important point: I was converting backgrounds and emoticons, which are worth a lot more than cards, into gems, so I only had to convert like a dozen items I never used or cared about.

    Reply

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