Has anyone receive a free booster from their badges? I have 90+ games I'm eligible for a booster pack. Account level 35. Still never got one. I know droprates are stupid low, someone else literally has to craft the badge, then 1 person who's eligible gets 1 booster pack.
[Edit - I added this as a comment, but feels like I should put it in the main body. Changed subject from the question it was. Comment deleted since it's here now. Hope it helps someone]
For those who do want to know a bit of it, even over simplifying is a lot, but here's a brief.
Games that have steam trading cards will have min 5 up to 15 cards for the set. You can earn from playtime an amount roughly half of whats needed. 5 cards you'll earn 2 or 3, the odds go either direction. 15 from my experience are 6-8 cards. A big sucky part is that you can get duplicates. One game I got 7 cards but RNG gave me 3x of 1, and 2x of two more, so only actually 3 for the set. That's all you can earn, basically, forever for that game. Playing more won't drop more. The idea was use trade feature or marketplace feature (steam wallet money used to buy cards, or sold goes into wallet)
So, you have to acquire however many cards your missing, then turn them all in to craft 1 badge for that game. Badges can go to level 10. Oh, did I mention there's rare foils that can only be used once you get a set of foils for a foil badge?
Once you have all the drops you can earn, you are eligible for a free booster. What that actually means is, when someone crafts 1 level of a badge for a game, out of everyone else on steam who's logged on in the past week that has that specific game booster eligible, one singular user gets one booster. A booster is a pack of 3 random cards, for that game only.
Every 10 levels of your steam account level (up to 100) increases odds that you'll be the one by a bit. If people aren't making badges and/or too many people are eligible.. nothing ever. Even during summer sale, I bought cards cheap like lots of other people and crafted badges. I gained about 25 level. Oh, each badge gives 100xp, but like anything levels take more as you go up. The summer badge I to level 9 (which was 100xp/level also) by crafting tons of badges. Theres not many ways besides badges to gain xp. achievements and playtime don't matter. Each game that counts to library is 1xp. Look at your profile - games, not your actual library. Events are the only other place to sometimes get xp.
You can scrap cards for gems, most scrap for 4 to maybe 60. You can use these gems to craft a booster from any game you qualify for, each games booster cost is different. I've seen 600s, up to 1300+. Remember a booster is 3 cards only. The main reason really is chance of foil. If no t many people are making badges for a game, then that much less chance of a booster. You can put 1000 gems into a sack thats marketable. As of writing this, there selling for $0.25 for 1000. You can often buy cards on the market for 3-7 cents each, so it's often not even worth gems just buy the missing cards, unless you REALLY want foil and have some wallet money to burn. Oh, if you do sell, you get 2 cents less. Sell a card for 5 cents, you got a whole 3. Some foils go for 10-20$. Oh, some free-2-play games have cards technically, but you can only get from ingame purchases, I think it's 1 card per $7-9 spent. Oh, paid dlc to free games counts, if it's expensive enough to get one. I've bought cards for a few f2p games and made badges because I wanted that badge. I got a pay dlc for a game for free that earned me 1 card.
That's.. probably most of it, as simple as I can make it, so many more intricacies it's hard.
Just know that you can have thousands of hours in a game, and never get anything. There has to be more people playing to sell the cards they do get, than people earn. Especially with 10 possible levels of each badge. Imagine someone having a lvl 10 foil badge and lvl10 normal. Almost all has to be bought or traded for. There's idle programs that will run the crap games that have cards for you, there's cards in games you would never imagine/expect, there's not cards in games you'd think there would be. Surprising amount of rpgmaker games, adult games, things that you can't really even call a game, that have cards.
I didn't know any of this long ago (12 year member) and sadly traded/sold most of what little I had actually earned or scrapped for gems.I remember trading one foil for like 6 cards and some gems and thinking I won that trade. Years later, those cards helped get closer, but still didn't have the set to make the badge. I hope all this helps at least one person.
I'm at:
Level 35, XP 8,129 (total, that much to be 35)
271 XP to reach Level 36
61 badges, 147 games (that count, on profile) personal library says 361 games.
12 years of service badge, which got me 600 xp, so, 50 xp a year.
Game collector Badge for 100+ games, (1, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500 etc all the way up to 28k somehow)
steamcommunity.com/.../