As many of you know, another way to show off to your friends on Steam except achievements is Steam level which is increased via Trading cards. Lately, though, there have been some people that were abusing Steam Greenlight's system and started earning them in bulk or in other words for gamers, they started farming them.
What are Steam Trading cards?
Steam Trading cards are iconical cards which can be earned by playing games and can be sold for Steam Wallet funds on community market. These cards are used for crafting badges, which help you to increase your Steam profile level. Besides selling them you can also trade these cards with other Steam users.
The reason why this affects Steam directly is that, throughout this feature, Valve hyped up Steam users for better community engagement while a new valuable commodity was being created. These farmers have created hundreds of fake, low-quality games in order to acquire as many cards as possible. They used to get these trading cards via idling bots that were especially designed for this purpose. Even though this doesn't hurt Steam users directly according to what Steam said, there was another problem, which leads to false advertising. Steam's algorithm mistaken in many cases these fake games for popular ones hence a special spot on the spotlight wall was undeserved. With this sneaky trick, indie developers could use the bots to farm cards of their own games on hundreds of fake accounts and profit in another way than just selling their game.
The simplest way to fix this problem would be removing the cards from indie games completely, but Steam has announced a rather more user-friendly fix, which is a system that will check if the game is being played by a real player or a bot. Once a game reaches some trustworthy metrics, cards will drop to all users, including all the users who've played the game prior to that point. Through this system, Steam hopes that there will be a significant reduction in a fake popularity and cunning developers will not be abusing this system anymore.
source: steamcommunity.com
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