So what just happened?

as a casual observer over the course of the night, I'll do my best to summarize.

Some people(many apparently from brazil) duped the gems and then flooded the market with them not very long after the event started. Currently the page for the event says "Sorry, but there have been some issues with Gems and the Steam Holiday Auction has been temporarily closed. The elves are working frantically to get the issues sorted out, and the auction will start again as soon as they're done.". As such is unclear how many, if any, gems will go to people that did not appear to be exploiting the system. We're at the wait and see phase of this.

Diamond heist: the gems

Valve gives a neat event that allows users to craft cards/emoticons/backgrounds into gems that we could then use to bid on games or craft booster cards with. People (mostly BRs) found an exploit which allowed them to duplicate as many gems as they wanted. They sold them by the millions on the market at 0.03 for 1000 gems. People were buying them and using them to craft the booster packs which cost 400-1200 gems each which basically has crippled the card economy for now. Valve then made the gems untradable/unmarketable and took down the auction page. People who were exploiting are slowly being community banned. No word yet if any rollbacks will happen.

I think that about sums it up.

" People were buying them and using them to craft the booster packs which cost 400-1200 gems each which basically has crippled the card economy for now."

As far as I know there was nothing wrong with doing that and that's what Valve allowed. They just didn't think it through very well. They crashed their own market regardless of any exploits.

i did not know about the exploit until everything went dark

i was just trying to get some gems to get a couple boosters to finish off what sets i had

and i had issues buying them,even when i put in buy orders for 20 cents,i tried lower prices,higher prices,and managed only to get 2 bags of gems before it went datk

i assumed since it was new the market was flooded with buying/selling and just the usual issues like over Halloween when i could not purchase TOD tickets and what not

i did not really bother with the auction and did not know that some items had reached 1million gems,i knew i would not have enough to have a chance at bidding and winning,i think they should have set it up as a raffle rather then auction and only allow one entry per user,per game