If you're like me, you keep getting in more and more Steam Games in that have cards, so you have to download the game, let it idle until the cards drop, then switch to the next one.

Someone came up with a program that fools Steam into thinking you're playing a certain game (even if you don't have it installed, but you do have to own it, since that's the only way cards can drop) then checks your drops every 15 minutes or so to see if there's more cards needed from that game, and if not, switches to the next one.

This is going to be an absolute godsend for me, and it's not like I'm cheating or anything. I'm just avoiding unnecessary downloading and idling. They do warn that while they don't know of a case where a ban (particularly a VAC ban) has happened, it's probably best not to run Idle Master and a game at the same time, since that looks to Steam like you're playing a game from two separate sources simultaneously.

You can get the program here. They even have a community on Steam and log in through Steam like you can for other sites, so it's not like Steam doesn't know they exist. http://www.steamidlemaster.com/

This seems interesting. The only reason I'd want this is for those games I play that have cards but I don't play the necessary time to get all of the free cards from the game.

I use steamidlemaster since the first version and it saves me a lot of time as it automatically 'fools' Steam that you are running a game. Never had any problems, nor heard someone getting a ban or such. I also often play a game when it is running. You can when you are on the same computer.

I think Valve doesn't care if you are 'harvesting' those cards or not; if you have them and sell them, they get 30% and that's why they have created them. It's not like achievements which upset people when you get them using programs like SAM. But cards, no. Just farm them and sell them. You have google plug-ins that allow you to sell in bulk if you have lots of cards.

What the program actually does is first of all start (idle) up to 30 (!) games for 2 hours, which is the time you need before card dropping starts. It then switches over to a mode that 'runs' the game for as long as not all the cards are dropped. When the last card is dropped, it switches over to the next game.

I think I have 'harvested' about €900,-- this way, which is pretty nice. The only thing that is annoying it that your playtime increases for every game with cards, even if you didn't play it. That's the only trade-off. But hey, don't we all like free money? ;-)

Yeah, I've suspected for a while that they changed it so you can't get cards for the first two hours, since that's how long you can play a game for and still request a refund. So one would have to be careful using this program like this if you bought a game on Steam where there was ANY possibility it wouldn't work and you could get a refund on it (ie it wasn't in a bundle or such)

But even before refunds or even Steam Cards came along, I wish Steam allowed us a way to reset time played on games. Back in the day, it was somewhat common to "exit" a game and not find out until a day or so later that the game didn't really fully exit, but one file has been running all this time. My "time played" on various games is completely useless right now.