I guess it depends on the pack? EG/ Path of Exile trends almost perfectly (excepting volatility) with the increase in gem prices (it’s a 462 gem cost pack). I think that’s a reasonable marker since its a F2P game with very little integration with the rest of the market (unlike TF2 or DOTA2) so that natural booster packs are really rare.
I’m not ruling out that hypothesis yet.
Bags of gems are now over a dollar, same price as they were when you could buy games with them in the auctions…
Weird.
OK, that’s probably getting out of hand now. Maybe another stolen credit card laundering operation?
http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/5/22/5590070/steam-valve-item-trading (see “The 'bud mob”)
Stolen funds -> buy gems -> trade for items -> quickly resell offsite for clean funds. Steam takes the hit, credit card guy gets clean cash at zero cost (though likely at a large markdown from the “paper” value). Or maybe not even trade for items and straight resell gems?
I hope that’s not it. I can’t think of any other reason for them to be moving this quickly :/
Volume: 17,723 sold in the last 24 hours
Just saw this guy buy over a hundred or so (sell offers @ $0.92 decreased by over that amount).
Level 1, 1 friend (to pass gems to?), new account.
Yep. That’s not suspicious at all.
It has to be something scammy going on. That account that bought the 100 sacks has one game, Defy Gravity, that he probably bought for $0.14 recently when it was on sale just so he could set up trading. The account in his friends list is totally private. That setup just screams scam, probably a dummy account using stolen credit card or Paypal info to purchase all the gems, then passing them to another account that will convert them to wallet funds or trade them away for TF2 or DOTA items that can be sold for real cash.
I’m still curious as to why gems though. Gems themselves have zero cash value. You can’t buy them direct from Valve, their market value fluctuates and is not great enough to rely on as a unit of digital currency, and you can’t turn them into anything that you can then sell for real cash. The best you can hope for is to turn them into booster packs for wallet cash, which you would then need to spend on either game items or actual games. That is a hell of a lot of work to turn some dirty cash into a smaller amount of clean cash, especially when earbuds, crate keys and other items already exist and serve the same purpose with less steps.
I did my run through (3 sacks of gems turned into 4 boosters then sold for wallet cash) once more last week at the inflated prices (both for gems and boosters) and only netted $0.39 in total profit. Gems have risen markedly since then, so once again the market is too volatile for trading. I could have just bought the 3 Sacks of Gems at the price I paid ($0.71 each), held onto them until they hit $0.95 over the weekend, and made the same $0.39 or more without ever having to turn them into boosters.
Maybe something about the gems->booster packs lets them wash away the flags that try and protect against trading recently purchased things?
This was added to the market page:
"Note: Steam Trading Cards, Profile Backgrounds, Emoticons, and Gems purchased on the Steam Community Market will not be tradable or marketable for one week after purchase. We are making this change to combat fraud (which artificially increases the prices of these items), and to help maintain a safe and healthy item economy within Steam.
Untradable Steam items can still be used like normal. They just cannot be immediately used in trades with other Steam users."
Well that will certainly curb speculation on individual trading cards and on sacks of gems. This points to gems maybe having gotten popular as the new “currency” for scammers, as other currency items like earbuds and crate keys already have 1-week holds put on them. It seems like a giant pain in the ass, but I could see how being able to buy 100 sacks of gems for $0.85 each using a stolen account or card and then moving those gems by trading for other items of value could have been a new exploit. It will be interesting to see what happens to gem prices now.
And this is why my purchase of a $13.00 game the other day put a fraud hold on my credit card until I called them up to tell them I did in fact make this purchase.
So Steam must certainly be seeing problems.
Prices on Sack of Gems have fallen to under $0.70, which is not far off where they originally started before the big run up (they averaged around the $0.60 mark for weeks before the run up). Looks like Sack of Gems was becoming the new Crate Key or Earbuds, and the week hold put the brakes on scammers.
So I just found out the hard way that when you buy gem sacks now, then unpack them, you are restricted on what you can do with them. I bought some gems, then tried to make a booster pack and was given two choices. I could make an untradeable booster pack (essentially just three random cards for my own use), or I could wait one week for the gems to be tradeable, at which point I could also turn them into tradeable booster packs. Given the restriction already in place of only one booster pack per 24 hours, this essentially means I have to wait 10 days to create 3 booster packs.
Why is this necessary? I understand not being able to buy and resell/trade sacks of gems right away, but why put the restriction on turning them into boosters? There cannot possibly be people trying to launder money through the process, it would be painfully slow and tedious for pennies of profit on each transaction.
Unfortunately people do stuff like that with scripts and ruin it for everyone. And if you have stolen credit cards then you are making more than pennies. Like people making thousands of accounts during the coal winter sale a few years back, some people love to ruin things for everyone else.
I’m not including any basic market stuff that normal people do in this, just the people clearly exploiting things.
So looks like mysterious badges are back for the summer sale. Wonder what’s this year’s gimmick.
I was going to post, but I don’t care.
But…
I always get drawn in during the start of the sale, and game the system enough to make like two bucks or so. I’m going to consciously refrain this time around.
What the hell is this gimmick. Game inside a sale.
Hurf. Are there leaderboards for the whales to compete over?
Probably a good choice. Exchange rates are even more obscured than usual, since we have no idea how the drop rates inside the game work and what rate progression helps out. I think I’m ending up taking a (opportunity cost) loss this time around since I decided to craft out all the dropped cards that I had gathered up in the past year yesterday (ended up with enough to craft 19 badges). Should have sold them instead.
Only thing more delicious than gamer tears are metagamer tears.