I'm gonna write something up about what teams, badges, and trading cards are.
Trading CardsThese have been in steam for a while. A large amount of steam games have Trading Cards. These cards are virtual items which you can get from simply playing the game. Having the game open, even on the title screen, makes you able to get cards for that game. You get the cards randomly, around one every 30-120 minutes*. However, you can only get half of the trading cards for a game this way (rounded up). The rest, you have to either trade for with friends, buy them on the market, or get a booster pack (more on these later). Some trading cards are 'foils'. Foil trading cards simply have a different border to them, however they are much more valuable than normal cards, selling/buying at around 10x as much as the regular card.
You can run multiple games at once and get trading cards from each of them. However, each game running reduces the chance of getting a card, so that it isn't faster than running each game one at a time. However, if you run multiple games, and leave it on in the background, or while your afk, or while your sleeping, you can get a lot of cards. While I'm typing this out, I've gotten multiple cards from
1... 2... 3... KICK IT!, while its in the background on the title screen. There are also other tricks you can do, like replacing the .exe with notepad, to reduce the load on your PC, while tricking steam into believing that you are running the game (infact, this may be a requirement to being able to run multiple games at once. Ill have to check).
Booster packsOnce you have ran out of random card drops, you are eligible to get a Booster Pack. You get booster packs randomly, as long as you log in to steam at least once every week. You don't even have to be online at the time. They are pretty rare, but also quite valuable. When you use a booster pack, it is removed from your inventory, and you get 3 random trading cards for the specific game.
BadgesBadges are a virtual item similar to Trading Cards, however they are not visible in the inventory. You can only get them by crafting all of the cards of a specific game together. You can do this for both regular and foil cards, creating a regular or foil badge (I don't think that you can mix-and-match). You can display badges on your steam profile. When you craft a badge, you will also get 3 random items. These include (but are not limited to); emoticons, profile backgrounds, ingame items (TF2, etc) (?).
TeamsThere are 5 teams. Red, Blue, Green, Pink and Purple. Each steam member is assigned to a team at random when they either craft a badge, or press the Join Team button (on the teams page). When you're in a team, it will display it on your steam profile. Any badge you create when in a team (including when you craft one to join a team) will earn your team points. Normal badges will earn your team 1 point, foil badges will earn 10. A badge created from the Summer Sale Trading Cards will earn your team 10 points, and a foil 100.
At the end of each day, the team with the highest points wins, and 30 members of the team
that have contributed points to that team will get the top 3 games off their wishlist for free, and everybody
who contributed points to the winning team will get 2 Summer Sale Trading Cards. Members on losing teams
that contributed points will get a single Summer Sale Trading Card.
ConsumablesConsumables are items which you can use once. AFAIK, the only consumables that exist are for the summer sale. They can be traded, marketed, or won when creating a badge. There are 3 different types of consumables; Point Boosts, Steal Points, and Team Tokens. Point boosts simply give your team either 100, 500, or 1000 points (depending on the item). Steal Points will do the same, but also remove the points from another team. Team Tokens allow you to change what team you are on, there is one for each team.
* sources may not be reliable, but you get the idea.
So, are the teams rigged?
I seriously doubt it.
For a start, why would Valve put one team way ahead of another? Then everybody in the losing teams would stop crafting badges, which would make them stop buying cards, which would lose them money.
Second, somebody created a
Everybody Work As A Team plan on Reddit. So far, the winning team has been true to their plan:
19th - PURPLE - Thursday
20th - RED - Friday
21st - GREEN - Saturday
22nd - PINK - Sunday
23rd - BLUE - Monday
24th - PURPLE - Tuesday
25th - RED - Wednesday
26th - GREEN - Thursday
27th - PINK - Friday
28th - BLUE - Saturday
There are some interesting tricks you could pull of with this plan in mind. For example, if you have enough money, you can buy enough Team Tokens to change to the winning team, earn a point or two for the team, and then get 2 cards from it, and have a chance at getting the 3 games off your wishlist.
If there's anything I'm missing, or anything wrong, point it out to me and ill fix it.
