Now, last thursday, Steam launched its "Holiday Auction" in preparation for the holiday sale about to hit soon ("Gabe the halls with empty wallets" and so on and so forth) and its actually pretty interesting. Now if you are like me, you probably have a lot of junk items in your steam inventory. Unfortunately, until now you could either A. Let it sit and clutter, B. Put it on the steam market and wait ages for it to sell for a whole of $0.01 in Steam Funbucks, or C. Trade it to a trashbot getting nothing. Now, you are able to craft those items into Steam gems which can be used to either craft into Booster packs, which are actually worth a damn, or use them to use them to bid on auctions for Steam games.

Its a good system, and I think its great to give these otherwise useless items, y'know an ACTUAL use and deflate the numbers a bit to drive up the value. Take a look at last years holiday backgrounds. Before the Steam Auction, absolutely worthless at 0.03 on the market, but now many of them have risen to 0.10 or so. It also makes crafting badges a whole lot easier because while you used to have to simply wait to receive a booster pack or buy one off the market, you now have a reliable way to get one of whatever badge you are crafting. One of the biggest criticisms of it is for the time being, the current bid's gem worth outweigh the price of the actual game. One thing you have to keep in mind though: A. This isn't Valve's fault. People are idiots who will waste money without thinking about it. Valve didn't set the price that high, people did. B. The auctions haven't even begun yet, so they've had A LOT of time to climb up to the point they are at now. The bid amounts WILL drop when each auction is only 45 minutes long, don't you worry.

Unfortunately, with system, there comes a flood of cretins who exploit it. It was discovered that gem sacks could be duped and people started doing so. A lot. So much in fact, that the price of the gem sacks, which contain 1000 gems (Which is easily enough to craft nearly any booster pack) plummeted to 0.03. Let that sink in. The items that could be used to craft 100 gems costed more than 1000 gems. It got so bad, that many auctions broke 1 million gem bids. Valve finally had to step it, reset the auction house, make gem sacks unmarketable, refund gem sack purchases, and give everyone who traded items for gem sacks a copy of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Its mindboggling how people can do this and not think "I'm probably going to get banned for this" or "You know, Valve will probably just fix it and all this work will be for nothing" or most importantly "Maybe I shouldn't be taking advantage of this and ruining a good thing for everyone"

But you know, people are dumb.