The mechanics of the event are difficult to explain, but I'll try my best.
- You selects one of five teams to participate in a race.
- You have a "Boost Meter" whose capacity increases by 100 for each day of participation and each dollar spent during the sale.
- You complete "quests" in order to earn a number of points which is limited by your Boost Meter capacity.
- Some quests are special actions in select games, worth 10 to 100 points each.
- You can also just play, for at least 30 minutes, any game in which you have ever unlocked achievements, in order to earn an amount of points which scales to the quantity and rarity of the unlocked achievements.
- You spend your points, as well as the corresponding amount of Boost Meter capacity, to gain distance for your team in the ongoing race and to earn a number of Grand Prix tokens equal to the number of points spent.
- You spend your Grand Prix tokens at the "Pit Stop" store, where you can level up your summer sale badge for 100 tokens per level, buy a $5 coupon for 15,000 tokens, or buy other digital junk (like profile backgrounds for 1,000 tokens each and emoticons for 100 tokens each).
- A very small number of random users from high-ranking teams are selected each day to win games from their Steam wishlists.
Perhaps Valve is just trying really hard to obfuscate the very direct relationship between money spent on Steam and Grand Prix tokens earned. Beyond what's given for free just for participating in the sale, it essentially takes a $1 store purchase to get 100 more tokens. The $1 actually translates directly to 100 Boost Meter capacity, but the Boost Meter capacity is exactly the number of points you can earn, and that number is then traded for Grand Prix tokens at a one-to-one exchange rate. Several layers of nonsense exist seemingly just to dress up the fact that each Grand Prix token is a virtual penny. Now, of course, the money in question is spent on games, which you were presumably going to buy anyway, so the tokens are free — but if, for some reason, you just really wanted to accumulate 15,000 extra tokens, you'd have to spend $150 to get them.
The absurdly complicated method of disassociating money and tokens was the first thing about the event that struck me as odd. The second was how points are earned. In all of my recently played games on the first day of the event, the unlocked achievements were worth thousands of points. One game, in which I had unlocked all but a few achievements, was worth tens of thousands of points. But earning tens of thousands of points is meaningless, if your Boost Meter capacity is only 100. Boost Meter capacity, clearly, is the real bottleneck, whereas points — the currency rewarded for playing games, i.e., actually having fun during the event — are so easy to earn but so quickly capped by the Boost Meter capacity that they might as well not exist.
If you try to claim tens of thousands of points from a quest and your Boost Meter capacity is 100, you keep 100 points and the rest are thrown away. I guess this is supposed to be a psychological trick to make you feel like you're wasting something if you don't upgrade your Boost Meter by buying some games from the store. However, I don't think any sane person would actually buy games just to get more points. The end result is just that participating in the event feels unsatisfying. I think the average Steam user (with normal shopping habits and normal achievement completion) would, like me, find that completing a single quest is enough to exceed the Boost Meter capacity. Earning points this way is so much easier than doing the other quests, assuming you've actually played more than a few games, that the other quests are practically meaningless. Completing quests is the only part of the event which actually resembles fun, and the majority of the quests being pointless makes the event less fun, as does the perceived wastefulness of throwing away those imaginary points that exceed one's imaginary capacity.
But so far, honestly, none of this is really a big deal. Steam is a store; of course its interaction with its users revolves around spending money. So the event isn't fun. Who cares? It's a game store; if you want to have fun, then buy fun games from it. However, we can't really blame the Steam community for attempting to participate in something that's plastered all over the top of the main store page. When there's an event happening on Steam, even if it's silly, people are going to try it out, just to see what's going on. But it seems everyone who tried to participate just ended up confused and annoyed. The event itself is confusing, the official explanation of the event is badly written, and one bit of terminology, in particular, has caused a lot of unnecessary confusion.
Those who had more than 100 Boost Meter capacity on the first day of the event, as a result of having spent money on Steam, were surprised to see their Boost Meter capacity drop back to 100 on the second day of the event. Increasing the "capacity" of something sounds permanent; in this case, it's not. When you "boost" your team in exchange for Grand Prix tokens, you spend the points you earned as well as the corresponding amount of Boost Meter capacity. Any unspent Boost Meter capacity presumably rolls over to the next day, but if you fill your Boost Meter with points and then spend those points, you lose all of your Boost Meter capacity and will star the next day with 100 again.
The other major problem with the event is that, even when we understand the rules, it appears to be completely broken. Boost Meter capacity, or so the rules claim, is increased not only by money spent during the event but also by money spent before the event:
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| Source: https://store.steampowered.com/grandprix |
Sounds great, right? You're a loyal customer, and you've spent lots of money on Steam before, so you should get something even if you're not buying things right now. The problem is that many people started with a low Boost Meter capacity despite having a large number of games on Steam. Others report users with very few Steam purchases starting with huge amounts of Boost Meter capacity. The sum of anecdotal evidence posted online, for what that's worth, seems to throw into question any coherent method of computing what a user's starting Boost Meter capacity ought to be.
(It's worth noting that the 2019 Lunar New Year event had similar issues. The tokens given to users at the start of that event were also supposedly scaled to prior purchases on Steam, but based on users' self-reported numbers of tokens received and games owned, it almost seemed as if tokens were given out at random.)
My own personal experience with the Grand Prix event is just confusing. I started with a Boost Meter capacity of 100, despite having over 730 games on Steam. I wasn't surprised, at first; I just figured my Steam store purchases weren't recent enough. Many of my recently added games came from third-party bundle sites, so many those don't count. All of my recent Steam store purchases were made with store credit loaded from Steam gift cards, so maybe those don't count either, for some reason. Maybe adding keys from third-party bundle sites, and gaining store credit by selling Steam trading cards on the Steam market, actually subtracts form a user's starting Boost Meter capacity. How should I know how these things are computed? I just assumed that my 100 was correct.
But then I scrolled to the bottom of the Pit Stop store page (under "Frequently Asked Questions"), and found this:
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| Source: https://store.steampowered.com/pitstop (while logged in) |
Atrocious grammar aside, it says I received 2,000 Boost Meter capacity, but I never did. I'm not sure where they even got the number 2,000 when I consider my recent purchases, no subset of which add up to exactly $20 — but, regardless, it's wrong. I started the even with only 100, so now Steam is lying to me. Others online have also reported starting with 100 despite their Pit Stop store FAQs promising much more.
As a result of everything described above, people are mad about this event. People on the Steam Community forums are mad. People on Reddit are mad. People on 4chan are mad. Nobody is mad about which team is winning the race, or about the individual odds of winning free games; everyone is mad about the completely broken Boost Meter mechanics. The amount of frustration this has caused is actually somewhat amusing, considering that this Grand Prix event is just a stupid gimmick to promote the Steam sale. Keep in mind that Valve could have just done a regular sale — you know, discounts on games, and stuff. They don't owe us Boost Meter capacity and Grand Prix tokens. However,
- When you present something as a game, people expect it to be fair, and tend to get mad when it's not.
- When you say you're going to give something to somebody, they tend to get mad when you don't.
Post-Sale Update
After I originally posted about this event, Valve made a number of changes as described in three news posts. These changes included some attempts at clarifying the rules, a new feature allowing participants of one team to "steal" another team's boosts, a "Switch Teams" option, and other unspecified adjustments to address team imbalance. Starting on the fourth day of the event, they also stopped forcing users to throw away over-capacity points gained from achievements. I don't think it really mattered to anyone who had achievements unlocked in a sufficient number of games -- but, as explained above, it was an annoying psychological trick that didn't really make the event more enjoyable, so I can understand why this was changed.
On the third day of the event, they also gave 1,000 extra Boost Meter capacity to anyone who participated in day one and to anyone who participated in day two (i.e., 2,000 to anyone who participated in both of the first two days), presumably to apologize for the sloppy and confusing event kick-off. However, in my opinion, it still remained confusing to the end.
They also considered "fixing" the Grand Prix Badge which was apparently awarding more experience points than intended. I didn't realize it when I wrote the original post above, but this event made it easier than usual for Steam users to level up their Steam profiles. Indeed, even before I had spent any money on games, I was able to level up far more than during a typical sale event, and the levels I gained were nothing compared to those who spent a lot of money during this sale (either incidentally or, perhaps, for the purpose of leveling up). Personally, I don't really care about my Steam profile level, but some people apparently do, and some felt that the ease with which users could level up during this event was causing Steam levels to be devalued. Ultimately, however, Valve backtracked on their decision to fix the amount of experience points awarded by the badge, which shouldn't be a surprise because Valve would seek to please those who spend the most money.
They did remove the ability to upgrade the badge infinitely, capping the badge level at 2,000, but those who had already gotten the badge past level 2,000 were able to keep it.
I suppose the take-away here is that Valve did try to fix the event, and in doing so, made some effort to please everyone. However, I think most users still came away from this event with the opinion that it was a poorly planned and poorly explained mess. First impressions are everything, I guess.
