If the Steam Summer Adventure seems rigged to you, that’s because it is

***UPDATE***

Valve has updated the rewards of the Steam Summer Adventure to seemingly prevent collusion. You can read more about the changes made today here.

Original story follows below.

***Original***

Yesterday, GameZone writer Lance Liebl wrote about why he doesn’t trust the Steam Summer Adventure. For those of you unfamiliar, it’s this year’s Meta game tie-in with the Steam Summer Sale. Basically, the entire Steam community has been divided up into five separate teams that compete to earn points (by crafting badges) in an attempt to win free games on your wishlist. It’s a brilliant system created by Valve that undoubtedly has led to additional sales through Steam.

But as Lance pointed out, the system is broken. Not the way he had originally thought though. Whereas Lance couldn’t figure out the reasoning behind the varying discrepancy of points every day — each day one team, a different team, pretty much dominates in points and wins. Up until now it’s been a different team each day. Collectively, we thought it was Valve rigging the system. We were wrong.

Turns out, the system is being rigged, but not by Valve. Instead, it is the Reddit community — specifically the Steam subreddit — that’s primarily responsible for the outcome every day. As pointed out to us by our lovely readers, there’s apparently an “Operation” where everyone on Steam works together to give each team two days of winning.

And you know what? It’s actually working. So far, each team that is scheduled to win has done so on its specified day. Leave it to the Steam community to put differences and greed aside, and to work together for a common cause that gives everyone an equal chance at winning free games.

This probably frustrates some of you — especially those who are greedy and believe their team would win on every day, but I find Steam and Reddit’s ability to collaborate and work together for a common cause admirable. I’m not sure how Valve feels about this — I’ve reached out to them — but I think it’s great that an entire community of gamers have managed to organize something like this. Truly amazing. PC Master Race, indeed.

For those of you who want to get on board with this collaborative effort, below is the remaining schedule:

• 24th – PURPLE – Tuesday
• 25th – RED – Wednesday
• 26th – GREEN – Thursday
• 27th – PINK – Friday
• 28th – BLUE – Saturday