Steam Level

Whats your current Steam level and did you max out the summer badge to level 5? Well I am level 13 and am completed summer badge and Bastion badge both level 5.

I've been 13 since they started the beta and added levels, purely through passivity. Own ALL the games!

I am only level 11, and have level 5 badge for the regular summer sale one, only 1 foil card, but didn't expect to get that set anyhow

I'm at 17 and want to hit 20 since I'm close to get another profile thingy and 40% chance for boosters. Then I'll stop and quit thinking about it!

I have only gotten a couple badges to level 2, and a ton of level 1 badges.

Level 26 at the moment. Completed the summer badge and its foil variant. Typically I don't care about the foil badges but I figured the steam one is slightly more "special" than the arbitrary game ones. I ony have a handful of level 1 badges so far, but level 5 tf2 and The binding of isaac badges.

What in the world are you people doing to get so many cards? It handed out the ones for the sale pretty freely, but you only get half a set for each game, which is 10% of what you need to get to level five. Do you sacrifice the ones for games you don't care about to trade them for the ones you do want? Do you know dozens of people who don't care about cards at all and just give them to you for nothing? Do you buy them in the market? Do you leave your computer idling in TF2 all day for items to trade for them? It just seems either really tedious or really expensive.

What in the world are you people doing to get so many cards? It handed out the ones for the sale pretty freely, but you only get half a set for each game, which is 10% of what you need to get to level five. Do you sacrifice the ones for games you don't care about to trade them for the ones you do want? Do you know dozens of people who don't care about cards at all and just give them to you for nothing? Do you buy them in the market? Do you leave your computer idling in TF2 all day for items to trade for them? It just seems either really tedious or really expensive.

Well once you get all the drops from a particular game you should be eligable for booster packs to drop which don't require you to play the game. For the badges I have crafted I just bought the extra cards off the market place because I had some money sitting in my steam wallet, but I got booster packs for both TF2 and Isaac which helped a little bit, only 3 cards per booster pack but still.

I traded a handful of spare games I had for cards as well, that got me closer to the level 5 badge in tf2 and a few others.

It would be pretty expensive to level 5 every badge from the market, but for only a few the prices have dropped drastically per card since it left the beta. Otherwise, the choice is either, as you said, trade cards you don't want for ones you do or play the long game and just wait for booster packs to drop, which could take a while lol.

I got my first booster pack about ten minutes after they first added them in the beta, and I figured maybe it wasn't so bad after all. It took until this past weekend to get my second, and I decided I was probably right the first time around, and it's exactly that bad. Heh.

I'm currently level 13. I wish I knew if it would eventually be good for something. I have been selling my cards on the market place and using the credits to buy missing ones. That way I'm not actually spending my own money on possibly pointless stuff.

I hit level 20 and sold everything else on the market. Mission accomplished. Now to wait for the booster packs. I've gotten one so far, don't remember for which game, and I traded someone for a Hotline Miami pack and got a foil in it!

My strategy was to get the freebies for every game and then just try and trade people my less expensive cards for their more expensive cards. There are a ton of users who just want to finish that one set, or who don't realize that cards have different values (or who don't care), and I was able to make a lot of really beneficial trades like swapping Garry's Mod cards (which I was sniping for $.05) for Super Meat Boy and The Witcher and whatnot ($.20-.30). I had a post that I would bump every so often that just advertised that I had full sets of all the cheap stuff like Garry's Mod, Terraria, Magicka, etc. and that I needed various of the more expensive cards. Surprisingly, a lot of people responded to that. Then sell the expensive cards and keep buying the cheap ones, then keep trading the cheap ones for more expensive ones, etc.

Also, maybe I got lucky with the amount of uncommon and rare emoticons and backgrounds I got from crafting badges. It seemed like I was able to sell a lot of them for $.25-.50.

But yeah, I'm happy at level 20. The cost in time to go from 20-30 (3 badges per level) isn't worth it to me. I could handle the 2 badges per level from 10-20. Maybe I'll casually wind up at 26 or 27 by this time next year and then push for 30. I am curious to see what happens to supply, demand and prices the farther from the summer sale we get, and what they will do with the cards in future sales. I had a lot of fun trading just because I like trading.

@blindly
I also find the meta game of steam to be fun by itself. It's so bizarre how well it really works and it's definitely going to be interesting to see where it goes in the future. This weird economy could become difficult to balance but I have faith in Valve to figure it out.

haha oh god what

I was complaining earlier about how annoying it was that I couldn't idle in multiple games at once to get card drops faster, thinking that Steam didn't let you play more than one game at a time. Just for the hell of it, I tried running a second to see what would happen...and it worked. So I added a third. And a fourth. And a fifth. And a sixth. And a seventh. And an eighth. I could've kept going, because I still had 8GB of RAM free, and they were using ~10% CPU while tabbed out, but that seemed like enough to screw around with. Unfortunately, at some point something always seems to lock up with the way Steam tracks things, and at least some of the games have to be quit and relaunched from time to time. All eight ran perfectly stably, but I never got more than three simultaneously to be particularly reliable in terms of Steam granting card drops on schedule. Even with just two at a time it sometimes gets a bit confused and needs to have the games restarted sometimes, but it's still significantly faster than only running one at a time.

Never when I first started playing games would I have imagined that I would someday have the ability to run 8+ of them simultaneously while actually playing none of them. The future is a strange and wonderful place.

I thought they fixed it so you couldn't run more than 1 game and still get cards. I'll have to investigate further, I have so many games that it'll take forever to get all the drops for them and they keep adding more every week. Just want to be eligable for those booster packs, got another isaac pack the other day and sold them for a few pennies. Already making back the money on the badge :P

I thought they fixed it so you couldn't run more than 1 game and still get cards. I'll have to investigate further, I have so many games that it'll take forever to get all the drops for them and they keep adding more every week. Just want to be eligable for those booster packs, got another isaac pack the other day and sold them for a few pennies. Already making back the money on the badge :P

It's definitely kind of glitchy, but I was getting notifications for new cards simultaneously for two games I started at about the same time, and then a third a little bit out of sync from them. It got a bit weirder and less reliable toward the end of the day, but I still came out ahead.

It's definitely kind of glitchy, but I was getting notifications for new cards simultaneously for two games I started at about the same time, and then a third a little bit out of sync from them. It got a bit weirder and less reliable toward the end of the day, but I still came out ahead.

It was confirmed that you can idle in multiple games at the same time. However, if you open more than 1 game to farm cards, it'll take you longer to get drops than if you would idle in one game at a time.

Oh well. I didn't time it, but I felt like I was still coming out ahead with only two or three at a time. That may even have been true, because I was able to ignore it while doing other things instead of having to either check in more often to swap games or lose a bunch of time after running out of drops while not looking. I guess it doesn't matter too much, because I've gotten all the ones out of the way that I already played forever ago, and all the ones I have left are ones that I was already planning to play at some point.

Seems like some games it takes way longer to get cards than others. For example in FTL I had my 4 cards in like 45 minutes, for serious sam 3 I have 2 cards in like 4 hours.

Most of the time it seems to be 20-30 minutes per card, but one game was definitely a full hour for each. That was while only doing one at a time, too.

I realized there were a bunch of new cards that had been added since the Steam sale, so I got all my freebies. Then I was thinking that instead of just trying to complete one of all the badges, like during the Steam sale (that frenzy wore off) I would rationally try to get the most for the least. After some googling and a trip to reddit I found this site:

https://ehsankia.com/steam/cards/#btnsmalltext

This site tracks trading card prices and generates new data every hour. You can sort by the games you own, the games you have cards for, the average card price, the set price, and how much money you make for selling your freebies from any particular game. So I filtered to the games I owned, sorted them by set price, and figured I'd from now on just sell all my more expensive cards and buy cards from the cheapest sets because I get more badges for less (virtual) money. For example, I got 3 freebie EVE cards, which go for $.70-.80. At the moment, the set price for Frozen Synapse is $.81. So basically my 3 EVE cards I can sell and buy 3 full sets of Frozen Synapse.

I'm sure many of you are more on the ball than I am and have figured this out already, but I just wanted to share!

In my quest for badges, I've accumulated a few coupons. They are useless on the Steam market. If anyone wants any of these, you can have them for free, just let me know.

Sniper Elite (50% off, exp. August 8)
Strike Suit Infinity 50% off, exp. August 8)
Defender's Quest (66% off, exp. August 8)
Starvoid (66% off, exp. August 8)
Hamilton's Great Adventure (75% off, exp. August 9)