A few days ago, members of the Steam community to rig the competition, a metagame running in parallel with Valve's 12-day Summer Sale. Surprisingly, it wasn't the sort of malicious plan you might expect, but a kind of cease-fire alliance meant to bring equal victory to everyone on Steam. Purple will win next, if things go smoothly. On Wednesday, a Red victory is scheduled, then Green. Is a small collective actually having this big of an influence on a Steam-wide, public competition. Valve has already amended the contest to encourage more competition. I took a look at the evidence and spoke to steam summer sale 2019 reddit few of the people caught up in the dark business of virtual trading card market-manipulation. Most of Steam's seasonal sales have included a unique trading card set. Craft a full set ofand you get something like a unique wallpaper or Steam chat emoticon or in-game reward for a few participating games. The 2014 Steam Summer Sale has its own special set of cards you can badge-ify, but with a twist: participating Steam users are randomly assigned to one of five teams during the sale: Red, Pink, Purple, Blue, or Green. Crafting a badge earns points for your team, and 30 members of the winning team get three free Steam games off their wishlists. Oh, and a few extra cards that they can use to keep crafting. In review: buying games earns virtual cards which can be crafted into virtual badges which increase the rate at which you earn booster packs which contain cards which you can use to upgrade your badges. It's a circular system designed to keep you inside the Steam client, either nickel and diming you to complete your incomplete set of cards or by selling the cards you've been given to encourage you to spend that money on a game. A competition to see who can craft the most badges, of course, makes money directly for Valve and developers by creating more activity on the Steam Market. The community's plan Bottom line: we celebrate Steam's price cuts, but in the middle of the Summer Sale Valve has integrated a system that stimulates the Steam economy and nets them thousands of dollars a day from virtual, non-existent goods. The more trading volume and competition, the more the house wins. But a segment of the Steam community is wise to this. They know that a 12-day period when a five-dollar bill can get you isn't the best time to be engaged in what's essentially a spending war. So to discourage, or at least mitigate, frivolous trading card spending, some Redditors and Steam forum members have organized a coalition to take competition out of the equation. I spoke to one of the initial organizers behind the plan, Reddit user. I made the list showing who should craft on what day and then posted it on all of the team's subreddits under the name. Valve's response Up until today, the plan had gone smoothly. Each team won on its designated day. But today the plan is showing signs of falling apart. Valve, apparently unhappy with the lack of competition between teams, to award second- and third-place prizes to the runners-up each day. Purple may still come away with first place, but at the outset of today it's already a tight race between the colors. Lendon, the Red team member I spoke to, wrote back to me this morning after he noticed Valve's change to the competition. However, I believe, as many other Redditors do too, that the new rules steam summer sale 2019 reddit the competition were to prevent the rigging of the competition, as we saw yesterday when Pink one with over a million points above everyone else, Valve had to take action. However, I personally don't believe the changes to the rules are even worth it, as people's chances are even more reduces to win, as-if it wasn't hard enough already to get a winning three games, it'll be even harder for the 2nd place and 3rd place and not even worth the effort. On the surface, it seemed wild to me that a small percentage of people could be driving the massive point swings we saw in the initial four days. After all, there's only a few hundred people each in theseand just 140,000 on the Steam subreddit, most of whom steam summer sale 2019 reddit aren't aggressively participating. But the Steam Market tells us that just a small number of from another team—the most valuable item for influencing the Adventure competition—are trading hands. Even if a single team were buying those tokens, it isn't that much of a swing relative to the 1. With the adjustment made by Valve, today will be an interesting test of the internet's ability to dictate the outcome. Purple, who's meant to win today, has a modest lead as I'm publishing this, but we'll have to see if the Steam Trading Card Illuminati's grand plan survives through the week.
