Valve Apologizes For Incredibly Complex Steam Summer Sale Grand Prix, Makes Changes

The Steam Summer Sale is underway, and a couple days ago we ran down twelve of the best games with the most significant discounts. Steam has a mechanic on the Summer Sale called the Steam Grand Prix that has been the source of lots of player and developer ire for its confusing and very complicated gameplay and instructions.

Valve says that it has heard the feedback about the complexity of the Steam Grand Prix event and admits it designed something "pretty complicated" and with a bunch of numbers and rules that should have been more clear. Valve apologized for the confusion and for broken mechanics that have led to the event being unbalanced.

Based on player feedback Steam made changes to the event including the following:

• We've made improvements to the Driver's Dash and Manual, to help clarify how to play.
• We've made some back-end changes to help mitigate some of the snowball effects we've seen that have led to Team Corgi running away with the first two days of the races despite their tiny legs.
• We've changed some code to help deal with the imbalanced team sizes across the board.
• We've added a new random drop drivers can receive upon boosting called STEAL BOOSTS. If another team is way ahead, use this attack against them to help close the gap by stealing their boosts for your own team.

Some devs had complained that the mechanics of the Steam Grand Prix had players deleting their games off wishlists to ensure they would get one specific game if their team won an event and they were randomly chosen to receive a free game off their list. Valve says that there is no need to remove any games from a wishlist, the players simply need to be sure the game they want most is at the top of their list. Valve is trying to make up for the confusion by giving everyone active on day one an increase to the max points they can earn by 1,000 and those who were active on day two get another 1,000 added to their max points.