Tag: Trading Cards

Steam Cleaned: One Wish Gets Farmed For Cards


Today’s Steam Cleaned topic is One Wish, the latest game to be targeted by card farming bots because Steam allows this sort of thing.

One Wish is by all means a completely forgettable title owing to the simple fact that it came and went without a whole lot of fanfare. The game launched back in June 2018 and probably performed just fine for a low budget game. One Wish also has trading cards, and appears to have been the subject of a mass botting campaign that took place this week.

Despite the fact that One Wish has had two forum threads and less reviews than would fill up a Battlefield server, the game experienced a 24 hour peak of over eight thousand players. Keep in mind this is a game that previously had long periods where nobody was playing at all. Eight thousand concurrent players yet nobody is discussing it in the forums and nobody is leaving reviews. It’s almost as if those accounts don’t have a real person at the helm. Almost.

And 24 hours later, the swarm is gone. Like an antelope devoured by a swarm of piranha, One Wish is back to having 0 concurrent logins.

I wanted to see if One Wish was by its lonesome, so I did a quick look at the other titles listed by developer GD Nomad, and wouldn’t you know it? I found more. GD Nomad also developed My Bones which experienced a similar but nowhere near as large spike in users over the past couple of days. My Bones has a “mostly negative” 25% positive rating on Steam, not exactly the kind of game to jump up 2,500 players for no reason. It averages one or two reviews per month, if even that. It does have trading cards.

Wooden House has trading cards, and wouldn’t you know it. My Bones hasn’t had a single post on its forums in nearly two years and one review since October.

GD Nomad’s library is chock full of games that have sudden inexplicable leaps in popularity only for that popularity to immediately die the following day.

Now none of this is meant to imply misconduct on the developer/publisher’s part, nor is it conclusive evidence that the games are being farmed for cards (although it’s pretty clear). The games could have been swept up by bot farms given that they are 1.) cheap and 2.) have trading cards. That’s all you need. These games are literally a dime in some currencies, and it’s also possible that some keys got dumped off on one of those grey market Russian websites that like to buy these games in bulk from the dev to use in bot farms. Not a bad return for games that most people seemed to hate.

More Steam reports as they appear.

Valve’s Trading Card Update Shoots Shovelware Games In The Heart


Those of you who use or follow Steam in any capacity are no doubt aware of the high volume of low effort shovelware being heaped onto the service, increasingly from developers out of Russia, that have popped up on Steam for one purpose: Farming trading cards. These games use unscrupulous methods, through bot voting or through key bribery, to get their games greenlit, after which the game is immediately besieged by thousands of bots who idle the game and then sell the trading cards for money or break the cards down into gems which are then sold for money. The bots make money, the developer gets a cut of the sales, and others have more incentive to throw their shovelware onto Steam for an easy, if ill-gotten, profit.

The practice has become so popular that there are entire Steam groups dedicated to buying up these low quality games for the purpose of farming cards in large quantities.

Today’s Steam update takes those bad actors out back and buries them next to the rose bushes. In order to be eligible for trading cards, a game must obtain a certain confidence level showing that people are actually playing. In the update notice, Valve attributes changing the trading card system as being to cut down on faux data.

As we mentioned in our last post, the algorithm’s primary job is to chew on a lot of data about games and players, and ultimately decide which games it should show you. These Trading Card farming games produce a lot of faux data, because there’s a lot of apparent player activity around them. As a result, the algorithm runs the risk of thinking that one of these games is actually a popular game that real players should see.

Thankfully this system is retroactive, meaning you’ll receive any cards you should have once they are made available.

Instead of starting to drop Trading Cards the moment they arrive on Steam, we’re going to move to a system where games don’t start to drop cards until the game has reached a confidence metric that makes it clear it’s actually being bought and played by genuine users. Once a game reaches that metric, cards will drop to all users, including all the users who’ve played the game prior to that point. So going forward, even if you play a game before it has Trading Cards, you’ll receive cards for your playtime when the developer adds cards and reaches the confidence metric.

Valve has confidence that this system will function better than Steam Greenlight, whose failure to curate allowed the games onto the marketplace to begin with, due to the extra variables and larger base compared to the relative few who use Greenlight. Most recently, Valve made major changes to gifting Steam games in order to combat bad hombres.

(Source: Steam)