@cmdr: yep, still in good old vista. It's a Kwality product. Might replace that if I can be assed to back everything up. @aks: sorry about that cut off. To answer your question from Steam, I'm still on my old pc with a radeon 4850, 4 gig memory I think. Might get a new one in a year or so.
Steam just opened a Community Market. It will allow people to buy and sell game items. At the moment it's only in Beta and only includes TF2 stuff.
Do you guys actually play together? It feels like it's only me, monsly and grim that do it regularly.
Nope. Time zones are a pain. I pretty much only game between 9 and 11 PM which is 11 to 1 AM east coast.
I saw this hawk4x4 dude on Steam. How is he level 33 when the rest of us are like ~10. What does that number mean anyway? My steam level is below afk'er monsly...
No idea. I can only assume he actually played some of the games he owns. I own about 20 more games than he does and I'm sitting at level 12. I honestly don't even know who's who on my steam list anymore. Everyone changes up their names.
I think he completes game card sets for bonus points. The games that have them will only give you half the cards. The rest have to be traded from other members.
The Steam level is dependent on completing card sets and crafting badges. If you can complete a game's card set, you can craft a game badge and earn points for your steam level. When I got back on Steam last year, I completed a few sets by trading winter sale cards on the Steam trade forum, and by asking for cards from people on my friends list who don't use them. Like bfun says, you only get half of a set by playing the game, which means you have to actively obtain the rest by buying, selling or trading. Plus every ten levels, you get a 10% chance of earning a card booster pack (3 cards) for a game you earned all the free cards for. So far, I've only ever gained 1 booster pack and it was for a stupid pug game I bought for a dollar. I was really into the whole trading card thing for a few months because I thought it was fun and I liked collecting the badges. The steam level was just a side effect.
Fun little side story: my user name on just about everything is some variation of Hawk, except for Steam. I made a really obscure name because when I first got on Steam, I was absolute shit at shooting games. Actually... I still am shit at shooting games.