Steam Gets its First Level 300 User

Back in January, I wrote about Steam user PalmDesert who crafted some mind-blowing badges during the winter sale: A level 1,000 Snow Globe, and a level 100 foil variant. As impressive as that was, though, it was quite alarming to see just how much money some users were spending to achieve these insane heights, and some of them simply do not stop.

At the time of PalmDesert’s accomplishment, I believe he was the highest-level person on Steam, at 260. Today, he sits at 289, but he’s been replaced as the leader by Flush, a user who just broke through the level 300 barrier. It’s clear that like most of the other extremely high-level Steam users, Flush doesn’t plan on stopping – he’s gained another level since he hit 300 just the other day.

When I wrote the article, “Steam Cards: How Do They Work?” last summer, I included an XP table that showed how much XP was required to get to any level between 0 and 200. At the time, I simply couldn’t imagine that people would exceed that – PalmDesert was 150 at the time.

At this point, Flush needs 3,000 XP to gain a new level, which is equivalent to 30 badges, or 6 complete sets (5 badges can be crafted per game). All I can wonder at this point is: How far are these users truly going to go? They’ve already far exceeded the heights I thought they’d go. At this rate, I’m not going to be too surprised when someone reaches level 500.