Even as they work to find a way to better telegraph Dota 2’s rules to newcomers, it seems Valve have created another set of systems nearly as arcane in Steam trading cards. Why, only yesterday Beat Hazard developer Steve Hunt fell foul of its obscurities, promising ship unlocks for wearers of particular Steam badges – little realising that high-level badges are incredibly difficult to acquire without recourse to real cash trading on the Steam market.
He’s since rectified the situation and apologised for the “stupid” oversight.
The new ships – a gold ship unlocked with a level 5 badge and a Dragon Ship limited to rare foil badge owners – have now been swapped around and stripped of their stat bonuses. Elsewhere, Hunt has added a new mini-gold ship unlock at Badge Level 1 – “so there’s something easy to unlock for everyone”.
“I sincerely apologise for messing up here,” he wrote on the Beat Hazard Steam community page. “Hand on heart I didn’t actually realise when I did the update that cards/badges cost money and were so hard to get. The documents I read never mentioned anything about payments and I thought I understood how it worked and therefore didn’t look into any further.
“That was stupid on my part,” he added, “so sorry about that. I hope these changes help address most of the concerns you have.”
I doubt Steve will be the last developer to trip up trying to tie their title into Steam’s retail metagame. But I also don’t imagine any will resolve the problems so quickly and conclusively as he has. Do you?