Steam's "Grand Prix" is an exploitable mess

[TopazFusion]

Jim Sterling did a short video on this, explaining how this "Grand Prix" Steam sale event caused people to manipulate their Steam wishlists to try and prioritize which games they had a chance of winning for free (which ended up screwing over a lot of indie devs).

But it gets worse. It turns out the whole 'points' system the event uses can be exploited and completely cheesed. The following video goes into depth about this:


Basically, you can earn points in a variety of different games, by doing a variety of different (repeatable) challenges. However, what Valve apparently didn't account for was people cheesing this by earning points in games that allow cheats and mods.

This means you can gather and hoard points fairly easily in certain games, much faster than Valve (presumably) intended.
You can then use these points to level-up your steam account (for what that's worth), spam points into Team Corgi (because why would you back any other team...), or use them to unlock discounts on your next steam purchase.

Anyways, it's pretty obvious that this "Grand Prix" thing is just a hot mess. Valve, you done fucked up.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

True, the whole thing is a mess. Tho a lot people don't seem to know that you can't get infinite tokens, or you shouldn't be able to without also continuously spending more money on the sale. Not that I blame them, since that aspect of the Grand Prix is obtuse, just like everything else about it.

There's no real limit on the amount of points you can gather, but there is a limit on how many you can use to boost your team, and thus convert into tokens to spend on $5 discounts and Steam levels. The max total points you can boost is determined partially by previous purchases, but mostly by how much you've spent during the sale. For every $1 spent, you raise your cap by 100 points, tho the amount differs depending on currency.

Once you've reached your max points, you can't boost anymore, unless you spend more money to raise the cap. There are also 4 'quests' you can complete to raise the cap, but those only get you 2000 extra points total. You cap also increases by 100 each day, but only if you've boosted the previous day. Switching team also gets you 1000, but that's not always an option, and why would you switch away if you're in Corgi like most people. Supposing you did all that tho , by the end of the sale, you'd still need to have spent over $100 to get enough tokens for a single $5 discount.

At least, this is how it's been working for me, and from what I've gathered, this is how it should work. But it seems like there might be people for whom the cap doesn't work and they CAN boost essentially infinitely. Either that, or they're big spenders with a really high cap they haven't reached yet, and they don't know it's there. Though it wouldn't surprise me if the cap is bugged and plain doesn't work for some

 

[Dalisclock]

I've had the idea explained to me a couple times and it's still confusing as hell. There's also the fact I don't really care. I joined team corgi on a lark but after I bought most of the games for the sale(and I don't think they apply retroactively) but I haven't bothered to mess with anything in the Grand Prix beyond that.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Exploitable and incredibly confusing. I have no idea what Valve was doing when they made this. It's got so many layers of nonsense on the description page that I can't wrap my head around it. I get they like doing events, but they need to be made simple for most people to understand. And not have the internet's favourite dog in it either

 

[meiam]

Just PSA for anyone who bough stuff, you might have plenty of point to redeem, could get yourself a lot of money off (I had enough for 20$)