Valve has closed its Steam Holiday Auction over issues that some customers were exploiting the system.
Last night, Valve launched the first ever Steam Holiday Auction, allowing users to recycle community items contained within their Steam Inventory.
Users could receive Steam Gems for their recycled items, which could then be used to bid on new games.
However, Reddit users quickly noticed that some customers had obtained a huge number of gems thanks to the exploit of a currency loophole they had discovered.
“Sorry, but there have been some issues with Gems and the Steam Holiday Auction has been temporarily closed,” reads the Steam Community bulletin.
“The elves are working frantically to get the issues sorted out, and the auction will start again as soon as they’re done.”
The way the auction is supposed to work is that users place bids and at the end of the auction, one of each title will be award to the top bigger at the end of each round.
The first auction round was supposed to end on December 15, with a new round ending every 45 minutes from then until the last auction on December 18.
Because of the way it works, over 100 copies of nearly 2,000 individual titles were up for auction, amounting to around 200,000 games in total.
You could earn gems by tradition inventory items like Trading Cards, emoticons and backgrounds, with the gem value of each item clearly displayed next to a recycle button.
We’ll keep you posted as and when the Steam Holiday Auction resumes.
Read more: Best games 2014
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
