Gems... something stinks here

lol , the least price for emotes is 0.06 now , so....

most emotes that give 100 are 7+ now

I have bid a whole gem to get the badge.. and now I'm done with this shit.. thanks for all the effort, steam.. or not.. :)

What do you mean with "these events are just money grabbing techniques"????

The gems are sellable again. At this point in time, 1000 gems is going for .75 or so. Too bad I turned my 16k gems into booster packs and sold those and only had 2k after I rifled the rest of my backgrounds and emotes. I only made $8 selling boosters and would have made $12 selling gems directly if I'd been patient. And maybe the price will climb higher as the people that can't do math continue to buy / inflate the value of the gems so they can bid on games with said gems.

It's hardly stinky. Your once useless trash is now actually selling on the market OR you can turn it into gems for a chance at a free game (over 3,000 being given away). Without the Steam Auction that junk would stay in your inventory for who knows how long. No one is forcing you to participate, so I don't see any problem here.

2016 games * 100 auctions so its 201.600 games, still gonna be hard though, 11.000.000 gems in the market right now :( !!

Being the total failure at math that I am, I'm still going to attemtp some here :> Okay... Sack of 1000 Gems = 70c Most expensive booster = 1200 gems = You buy a sack of 1000 gems for 70c and still need 200 gems to get the booster, which translates to another 14c in cash, making 84c total. For 84c you get a booster that ranges in market price from 19c to 35c in most cases. If you open your 84c booster because you need the cards for a badge, you better hope you don't get 3 of the same card (because you can!). And the chances of getting a foil aren't very good at all, not enough to justify an 84c booster pack, anyway..

Basically, unless I'm missing something somewhere, you'd be insane to buy gems at that price (concerning the 1200-price boosters, at least..) I know the gems are new and going insane, but if 1000 gems is supposed to equate to a booster pack, and booster packs cost between 19-35c, why wouldn't you just buy the cards off the market for the same price and get exactly what you needed with no duplicates.. And the Steam Engine is taking a 5% cut of all these 68-70c gem transactions, millions of them per minute :) Which brings me to my next (sad) point..

The way I see it, 1000 gems should be equal to a common booster pack, which, again, is 19c-35c on average.. Maybe a bit more expensive if you figure in the potential for a foil, I suppose, but that's fairly rare.. Eventually the booster packs that can be created for 400-600 gems will all sit around 20c in the market, while all the 1200gem packs will cost around 35c (boosters will probably drop in overall value as well, since this provides an on-demand way to make them), and I imagine 1000-gem bags will settle in at 40-50c.. I still wouldn't pay 40-50c for booster-gems when I could just buy the 3 cards I need for 6-11c each, though.. We'll see, anyway!

And on a more inflammatory note, Happy Holidays from Steam! We're celebrating the holidays by auctioning off games to the absolute richest of our customers, with money disguised as emotes and wallpapers and /then/ disguised as gems! No potential for the non-paying or poor to win anything here, no sir! We want our most wealthy patrons to get even fatter, because obesity is healthy!
...
It basically translates to "We're going to sell you inflated gems so you can grossly overbid real-money-parading-as-gems on games! They could have at least went with a raffle system and charged 5 gems per entry, /something/ even somewhat friendly to the non-elite.. I liquidated my entire collection of unwanted emotes and wallpapers and collected a little over 7000 gems, and the only game I'd have a (SLIM!) chance of winning (with a /single/ 7000gem bid on a /single/ game!) would be a 1-3 dollar 'mixed' reviews piece of garbage, no offense to all the devs that generously provided 100 free copies of their games to the 'Anti-99% Holiday Extravaganza' ;) So, for Christmas this year Steam let me bid 1 gem for an easy 100xp.. YES! YESSSSS! ;)

(And I'm not saying the gems are awful or anything, just saying that simple math says to stay away from direct purchases of gems, probably until some point after the auction ends.. And if my math is fuzzy then I'd gladly read a 'correct' version of my rant, because something isn't adding up at 68c per sack :> I will admit that I crafted a 454gem booster last night and instantly made 1.86 on the foil card that came out.. 'MURRICA!)

this is the best promo in the steam. i will fill my wallet whith money :D

This is retarded system. People overypay with gems for those games 3 times over the actual games value. Also Valve made that people have to buy their community items for more gems so that they get more money... Like what the fuck, card from one indie game that has 10 cent value on market gave me 3 gems, but CS:GO card that has 5 cent value gives me 80 gems. WTF!?

I made 500 gems (about 30 cents), created a booster pack, got a foil worth 4€. Ain't gonna try again, never had such luck =)

The holiday profile is going for 1,045,000 gems, at the current price on the marketplace of $0.71, that's $741.95. For a profile background. That expires. Valve must be laughing.

Badges needed to make colorful profile like this

I thought of a way to beat the system. :) I will give details after it's over, nothing illegal or against the rules though. lmmfao I'm so smart. :) I hustle, baby, that's all I do.

valve came up with an ingenious way of raising the value of wallpapers/emotes, and because of that they now make more $ off each sale of each of them in the marketplace.

I avoided all the crap. Why? Cause it's BS.

I was skeptical but I won 6 games for about 2 dollars each and I doubt any of them will get that steep of a discount during the winter sale. lol I also won 2 more games for other people. :) I'm thinking of going after one more game but it's a gamble. Forced 2, it's not even for sale yet. Buy it for six sell it for 20, hmmm. Yep might just do that.