I took part in Steam's daily account game queue thing and received a crapload of holiday trading cards in 2 different Steam accounts over the holidays. The 2nd account is a spare I use only seldom and had not been used for a while. I decided to transfer all of the cards to my main account to then distribute to others through Steam. My main Steam account is logged in 24/7 for a long time and does not have any idle account status.

So Steam informed me that I can't trade with myself without a mandatory 7 day hold on the trade. That was over 7 days ago and should have cleared by now but no matter what I do I am told "you have to wait 7 days" every single day. I got tired of that bullshit and just cancelled the trades. Tried to do it again and I get the same problem but now I am also told that my main account can not trade for 48 hours "to protect me" or whatever.

Went on the trading forums to try to trade there, and same thing happens. Steam's user interface tells you that to avoid this problem you can use "mobile authenticator" and to make sure you have confirmations enabled. That's just fantastic.... If you own a cell phone or mobile tablet. I do not own either of them. I am gaming on a PC and a PC only. I just want to use my PC and do everything regarding Steam, gaming, trading etc. on Steam in Steam.

I'm not going to go and buy a tablet or a cell phone just to install some stupid app to "authenticate" myself to trade useless 8 cent "trading cards". This is ridiculous.

Don't get me wrong, I completely understand that Valve is trying to solve a real world problem of people running trading scams and hacking people's accounts and whatnot. I get that, and having protection against that is good. But making it a mandatory requirement to own a cell phone or tablet in order to use the service is completely ridiculous. What's next, I have to log into my games themselves with a cell phone in order to play them on my PC?

Has anyone figured out another way around all of this crap? I just want to trade some cards the way it has always worked in previous years and without stupid delays. My accounts are not hacked. Is there a way to PROVE this to Steam somehow? Like shit, I'll even do a password reset to my email to confirm it or something if that works, but I don't think it does.

So they make you wait 48hrs to 7 days to trade cards that are only valid until an hour from now. I'm not sure how waiting 7 days after the cards vanish and expire useless is going to help me or anyone I might give them to.

Valve: FAIL

(Interestingly enough, I purchased a game yesterday during their sale, and was able to gift it to a friend no problem immediately with no delays or validation/verification/etc.)

If you cannot verify your account then that is tough shit. Stop being a whiny baby and either get with the times or go concern yourself with something actually important in life.

Would suggest getting ahold of support, seeing if there's a way the block can be removed. They should be able to look at your records and see that you're a customer in good standing, with no reason to be restricted.

aaahhhh, just the kind of situation I was pointing out in the other thread about this new steam "forced" protection.....

The miracles of Internet.... Had to do some bank transactions but the internet app of my bank "is encountering problems" today....

That's kind of rude darthspudius. This is a legitimate problem. I can log into my Steam account fine, and the account itself and my email are verified. My complaint is completely legitimate, Steam does not offer me any way to engage in legitimate trading without great personal expense of hardware that I don't need for any other purpose. That makes their entire trading platform practically useless to me and others in a similar boat in such times like this. I'm not whining about it I'm simply stating a fact and to be honest I'm surprised you're being rude as you don't seem to normally be that way.

I will agree with you however that at the end of the day, the subject matter is pretty low on the list of life's concerns with regard to the holiday trading cards. It does however seem very odd that Valve puts greater security measures in place to protect against fraud and other scammy practices between people trading rather useless virtual goods that are valued in the order of pennies, than banks and other financial institutions put on transfering large amounts of money or other securities. There's something inherently humorous about that to me.

At any rate, I wish you a happy new year regardless of your grumpiness. :)

Yeah, it's a bad situation to be in considering that your cards will disappear... er... today.

But it's like you said, unfortunately there's a LOT of shitty people out there so Valve needs these kind of "defense" to aliviate the customer support, there was one of the sales that i missed because i had to wait 1 week for adding money to my Steam Wallet using the credit card.

Cancel your current trade. Go to your 2nd account and turn all your cards into gems. Once they are made into gems they won't expire. If you have a 1000 gems, you can turn them into a sack of gems and sell them on the community market. You can also use your gems to acquire booster card sets from games you already owned. Not a perfect solution but it's better than nothing.

edit: looks like I was ninja'd by someone else.

Well, I can't use the market for the next 23 days because I haven't bought anything them directly for a year. Because their prices are crap. I rather buy bundles.

Well, my mind isn't at the right place right now so sorry if missed anything from your posts but could you sell the cards? I know that is, like you said, 8 cents but if you sold them all that would be $2.96 (37 x 0.08), not a lot, i know, but there's some few indie gems that you could buy with that.

Dunno, i don't feel like steam gems are usefull, each card gives low amounts of it and if i remember correctly, you need something like 500~1000 gems to make a booster pack, i don't know how much gems each card gives but i'll assume it was 30 gems, so we're looking at 1110 gems (37 x 30), that will give you what? 1 booster pack? And considering that one booster pack give 3 cards and each one sells for... 20 cents, that would be 60 cents (the same for a bag of gems).

I know, i'm overthinking...

Yeah, you make a good point. I didn't try to sell them as I figured Steam would prevent sale just like it prevented trading although I could be wrong about that too. Another factor is that the promotion ends in about 10 minutes I think and I'm not sure everything would have sold in time either so I probably did the easiest of the options even if it wasn't the most beneficial. :)

The way Valve has all of these things set up is to encourage "collector" mentality in people and hopefully get them engaged in buying and selling so they can skim their cut off the top. The additional stuff like booster packs, gems, gem sacks etc. are just further refinements to encourage collecting mentality through rarity IMHO. Same with those "foil" cards. It's very clever really from a business perspective and I'd have to say it appears to be successful in generating Valve revenue.

Think I might just dump everything into the market in the future to top off the Steam wallet with the least effort/hassle. :)

Is that what you tell your kids every day? :P

well no ; that's not a good idea actually to cancel a trade : because if you cancel a trade the account will get a 7 days trade ban -_- .... but at this point who cares ....

even those using the apps got a 7 days trade hold before they could trade like before and need the other user is in the same situation (that's what i read). Otherwise it doesn't work like previously...that's pretty restrictive...

the main issue i see ; they designed the app only for android smartphones, so those wanting to use it with a windows phone are screwed.

as for me , who doesn't have a smartphone , i stopped to trade ....

less than 0.08 (valve taking a cut ..).

earch card turns into 18 gems. (winter sales ones)

i have some others cards in my inventory : they worth 2 gems -> 32 gems....

And that is one of the things that i like about Steam, buy some bundles, get some cards and make money out of it to buy a new games on steam.

Ironically i made around 4€ with cards to spend in this sale and i never used it because i was always thinking "Why buy this game(s) when it will appear in a bundle cheaper and with more games in it?". :|
Oh, i was using his number so i wasn't even thinking about that, i was selling mine for 0.06€ so it was 0.04€ for each card (in the last days, earlier it was around 0.10€)

Since this is a steam problem, have you asked about this on the steam forums?