Thanks, Yak!

 

Any chance of being invited to the group here?

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Ravnius/

 

Invite Sent.

 

Okay, registered on Steamgifts, now, do we have a group there for the secret santa stuff?

 

Group giveaways are a special sort of creature... Needing specific links, and such. Easiest method is for announcements on DLP's Steam Announcements page.

 

Steamgifts.com is a great way to giveaway extra copies when we buy bundles. (Mostly Indies, but sometimes big ones too).

 

I'll probably do another special giveaway for DLP in the next few days as more incentive to come on to SG.

P.S. Yak won the giveaway, inbe4 rigged!

 

Woot Woot!

Bioshock 1 & 2 winner here. I'd like to thank the Academy DLP, Middy and Big Z for this award. And let's not forget the most important person to be thanked, the Steve Jobs of the internet, the Michael Jordan of gaming: me.

When you join SteamGifts.com, you'll be a winner too.

Not as awesome as me, but I'm the impossible target that you should strive for. I am so credible and so influential and so relevant that I will change things.

 

Mind adding me as well?

http://steamcommunity.com/id/DLPBullmoose/

 

Do you need to keep your profile public all the time or just when you verify your SG account?

 

I'm not 100% sure, but my best guess is that it must be public at registration and after you receive a won game.

SG needs to know that you've installed the game you've won and not sold, transferred, or re-gifted it. For that, it'll need to be able to see your profile at least once after winning. There's a sync account button on SG; presumably it'll be your friend if your account is only public for a few minutes.

You might have to keep it public whenever you want to use SG. Not sure.

edit: According to year old info [and there's nothing to suggest it's changed], you need to go 'public' and sync once every seven days whilst you're using SG.

The below quotes are regarding SG's policy that gift transactions should be completed and activated on the winner's account within one week [and not traded/sold/transferred to other accounts]. There's plenty of flexibility in that rule if you're unable to login every week though [eg. armed services personnel].

src.: http://www.steamgifts.com/forum/phZIE/

 

My profile, for all the doubters of SG: http://www.steamgifts.com/user/bigzgod/won

And another giveaway! http://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/eBOcu/bioshock

 

Thanks Z, just as I was about to feel sad for not being lucky enough.

 

No problem. Apparently I got good karma for it too, since like an hour later, I won Trine 2 Complete Story

 

Very long time lurker.. just created a steam account, not sure about what the communities are all about but if its DLP then I want in!! Please add

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198079053813/

 

Accidentally sent a friend invite before the group invite.

 

How to earn Steam cards without installing or running any games.

Download Steam Achievement Manager. This program lets you unlock achievements on your Steam games, but it has a neat side effect where as long as you have a game's achievement screen open, Steam thinks that the game is running.

Warning: VAC Bans. Getting banned is extremely unlikely, but don't play any VAC games [eg. TF2, CS, etc.] while using SAM just to be on the safe side. Read the SAM download page for more info about VAC.

Install SAM as per instructions. Run SAM.Picker.exe. See the list of games? Pick any card-dropping game that you own [eg. Bastion]. You'll get a new screen showing your achievements in Bastion. Don't click on anything, because that's all you have to do.

Steam now thinks that Bastion is running and will drop cards to your Steam account until you reach the maximum amount.

You can do this trick with multiple games 'open' at the same time by running SAM.Picker.exe again. I had six games dropping cards at once quite successfully for a while, but then the drop rate slowed down. It seems to have picked up again now.

In the past two days my game playtime in Steam has risen to "345.5 hours past 2 weeks".

To see which games you own which have cards attached, and how many cards are still available to drop, go to Steam -> Your Username -> Badges. You should see a screen like this one: http://steamcommunity.com/id/mountainyak/badges


On to the big question. Why would you want to gather cards?

Money, of course. Every time you gain cards, you go to your inventory and take those cards to the market. Each card is only going to sell for 10-20c each [unless they're special], but with 2-5 card drops per game and a big game library that still adds up. The money goes to your Steam wallet which will help you buy games for yourself/Secret Santa in the future.

Selling on the market is easy. I look at my cards in my inventory, click 'sell', choose a price which is about 2c above yesterday's average and wait for it to sell.

I've only made a couple of bucks in the past two days, but I've only been selling dupes and haven't touched my foils yet until I have a better grasp of the market.

I don't know if I'll ever actually create game badges. Once you create a badge, the cards are used up. It seems better to use the cards for cash and to forget about levelling up your Steam score.

Just FYI, I discovered this SAM trick by accident while trying to work around a bugged achievement in a game. I don't know how widely it's known that SAM can be used like this.

 

Damn things just keep cluttering up my inventory, it pisses me off. Even though I keep giving them to Z I always end up with more cards, damn boosters just pops up for no good reason.

 

Lawl, I love the meta game of cards/market. Enough people are using cards to level up that they're not going away any time soon. Their popularity is here to stay.

I wouldn't be surprised if Steam pulls a 'series two' batch of cards in a few years, creating an artificial scarcity of 'series one' cards and badges by not allowing them to drop any more. The number of 'series one' cards would be constantly diminishing as they're consumed by badge creation.

That would drastically increase the value of early cards much as we see with other trading cards in the real world.

Steam could do the same thing, though much slower by stopping booster packs from dropping. That'd turn cards into a finite resource.

 

Can someone please invite me to the DLP Steam Group ?

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198025105147/