The Massive and Entertaining Steam Summer Sale Thread- 2014!

[SlickyTrickyDamon]

So the cards are basically what you get for doing the achievments? What if you already did the achievements before cards existed? Do they retro? Or do you have to play it again?

[Kane Knight]

Originally Posted by Poit The rate at which you get booster packs increases with your level. So, theoretically, you could buy cards to increase your level, planning to then get more cards in the future to sell. I seriously doubt how feasible that is, but it's something, I guess.

Makes sense.

Originally Posted by Poit Overall though, I think the cards are a great idea. They're getting me to try games that have been sitting unplayed in my Steam library for years. And, whenever a card is sold in the community market, 10% of the sale goes to the game developer, so it's another way to support indie developers.

Most of the ones in my library are ones I've already played. Some quite a bit, like super Meat Boy.

It will probably prod me into a few more games played, since a couple of the listed games are ones I got as part of a bundle and never tried.

Right now, I've been too busy playing Magic to get my cards back after the cloud fucked me and playing with my new Rocksmith tracks.

[Poit]

Originally Posted by SlickyTrickyDamon So the cards are basically what you get for doing the achievments? What if you already did the achievements before cards existed? Do they retro? Or do you have to play it again?

No, they're separate from achievements.

Basically, each game that supports cards has a set of cards, and the number depends on the game (I think it's up to the game developer). 8 is the most common size, but some games like Super Meat Boy and Dungeons of Dredmor have 5, while Brutal Legend has 15. Regardless, when you buy a game, you're granted a number of "card drops" equal to half the size of the card set, rounded up (so, you'd get 3 card drops for Super Meat Boy and 8 for Brutal Legend).

When you play a game, you periodically get a card (I think it's every 20-30 minutes, or something like that), until you're out of card drops. Once you're out of card drops, you become eligible to receive booster packs for that game. Steam will occasionally randomly give out booster packs of cards to people who are eligible, and who have "used Steam" within the past week.

When you have all the cards in a set, you can expend them to craft a badge, which you can display on your Steam profile. This also gets you 100 XP. Each badge can be upgraded by expending the same set of cards again, and doing so will change the name and image of the badge, as well as get you another 100 XP, to a maximum of 500 XP per badge.

What it means to "use Steam", and the drop rate of the booster packs are both unknown right now. However, we do know (because Steam told us) is that every 10 levels you gain, the rate at which you get booster packs increases by 20%.

tl;dr: No, it's based on playtime, but it's also not retroactive.