What am I missing about steam level?

You have a lot of L1 badges, do they? Or do they have L5 badges everywhere?

Eliminate the middleman, and just flush your money down the toilet... :)

The money you get from selling booster packs is less than the money you spent to get a higher steam level... :)

But if you're serious about making more badges, I suggest waiting until the winter sale - assuming things don't change, instead of coupons you'll get a winter card with each badge. Sell those.

It just means they crafted a lot of the event (sale) badges, e.g. Steam Summer Adventure, which have uncapped levels. They can get thousands of XPs from those.

Why would you spend a ton of money to get a tiny fraction of a percentage increase in drops that are only worth $0.25 on average?

No

I recommend this one, Steam Card Exchange, and not the one with a weird name, something like eshankia... It has better UI in my opinion.

was it this site?

it proved to be an invaluable tool for me during the summer sale, it allowed me to calculate how much it would take for me to finish a badge, and my strategy was to buy cards, finish the badge, and sell the resultant summer sale card such that I made a net profit

as you can see, this resulted in me having badges for crap games like Dysan the Shapeshifter and Dead Bits...but whatever

(yes I know I could have made more money from actually selling the rest of the set, but I don't quite care as much for that :P and it's so tedious anyway)

here's an interesting question to think about: who spent more on games + badges, the guy with the most games or palmdesert?

or poor, because he spend so much on 'worthless' cards.

i would be more intereted in the reason why he does this, and perhaps in his IQ ;)

You´re right, but what can I do with that badges? I can Play the games. But I don´t know anything more useless than a virtual Card or badge. Sorry I know my opinion is not very popular and it´s my subjectiv sight and I don´t want to hurt anybody, but I absolutely can´t understand that Hype for getting an Icon or Badge and paying Money for that.

Sorry mate, I don´t get angry with you, I just don´t get it. Yes I´m a collector of games (not just Steam). You (and everybody else) can do with your Money what you want, but I (personally) didn´t see anything useful in it, maybe I´m too old for understanding this (Don´t get this wrong it´s no offence!!! that anyone here´s too young). For me it´s like somone says he´s collecting stones or teethbrush or old socks or anything like this, maybe nice Hobby for that Person, but like I said I don´t get it.

...you get an arrow through the knee/thanked for Skyrim/both