I've seen this happen a few times as well, but haven't checked for any cases on my own giveaways (I'll do this soon) and I agree, having a specific report for theses cases would be nicer, classifying as "others" feels like its going to be somewhat neglected or take longer.
I reported those I saw with screenies and all, one of them about a month ago already, still pending, another with 8 gifts not activated and 3 obvious re-gifting GAs that ended just 1 day ago right on their first page.
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Thanks for your reply. :) From what you mention, it sounds like this is a pretty prevalent issue around here, which is quite disheartening. :(
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Ah! I saw that and wondered what it was for! What does "request received feedback" mean?
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After you supply evidence that you sent the game and when the giveaway got one week old, you can request support to mark it as received for you. The winner will not be able to change it after that. If he is regifting it, support can also promptly and quickly suspend him.
Just keep in mind that the feedback request tickets can take a few days to get processed.
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It's possible that they only owned the game after winning it, then won another copy of it, and are attempting to give away the won key.
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Certainly there are many different scenarios under which regifting could occur. I do think that most of the time, depending on why you suspect there is a regifting issue, there would be a relevant category which you could file your user report under. In your example here, it would be "Multiple Wins for the Same Game" (or, as talgaby said above, file a "Request received feedback" instead if it's your giveaway and the winner has marked it as "not received").
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Regfting is caught under
"Not activating Won gift"
If he has the game on his account, then it's not a regift. He might bought the bundle himself a day later or whatever.
So if he does not have the game, when you send the key (if you checked that) but does when he creates his own GA, thats not considered regifting.
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This!
Waiting for the day I preorder an Indiegala Happyhour, forget what games are exactly in the bundle, just to win a key for a game in the meantime - dont wanna get banned using the won key and giving the new one away :(
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If he already has the game, he should request a reroll, like what one of my winners did. It is against the rules to regift a won key from SG. That's the reply I got from one of the mods when on a different support message previously.
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Well, yes. If he already owns it at the time the GA ends, yes. Then a reroll is appropriciate.
And you would notice that, if you check the winner before sending the key.
If he does NOT own it when you send the key, but he owns it a day later and has an active GA for the game, he most likly activated your key on his account and then got another one.
And thats completly fine.
Or do you have any proof he is sending YOUR key in the other GAs?
PS: I was in the exact same position a few months/years ago. Won a game only to notice it's in a bundle I want to buy. But I solved it by buying the bundle twice and giving away 2 copies. ;->
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Well right now he is refusing to mark as received the key he won from me. I suspect that he's waiting for the winner of his giveaway (using the key won from me) to mark it as "received", then I guess he'll probably mark the key he got from me as "received" too.
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[EDIT: removed link to user profile]
[EDIT 2: removed name of game in question below, by order of moderator]
The game is "___". He may be regifting some other games as well.
Also, are you suggesting that the onus should be on every gifter to check that their winner does not already own the gifted game before sending them the key?
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While we may not have a "trying to give away their won keys" category as rule-breaking by word, we have another rule of no calling out (naming and shaming), and based on that you really want to remove the link to the person's profile, unless you want a 2-day long vacation from the site. That issue belongs to you, to the person and support, through tickets, not to the forums.
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I had no idea, thanks for telling me! Edited to remove the link.
I only included it as there seem to be multiple messages on this thread from users implying that they don't believe the user is giving away the key he got from me in a giveaway that he made.
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I don't even know how clear the picture is currently for you, so to sum it up:
It's not against the rules to make a giveaway with the key you won - keys doesn't matter. Two things matter in this case:
What you win, has to be activated on your account in 7 days
and
What giveaway you make, you have to deliver a working key.
If I win key A for the game but I have a key B as well, it's entirely irrelevant if I create a giveaway with A or B, or which one I activate.
This is why some people said - correctly - that if they don't have the game activated after 7 days then they are reportable
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Forgive me if I'm understanding things incorrectly, but the information on this page (https://www.steamgifts.com/about/guidelines) clearly states:
"Won gifts should be activated to the Steam account used during registration, and they should not be regifted, traded, or sold."
But you are telling me (and I quote from your message):
"It's not against the rules to make a giveaway with the key you won - keys doesn't matter."
So, are you trying to say that the rule stipulated on the guidelines page is wrong, and that regifting is NOT against the rules?
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Should not be regifted = has to be activated, and not used for something else. It makes literally no difference if I make a giveaway with my key or my won one, as long as I activate mine. The no regifting-trading-selling is just to emphasize that the game should be activated, not gifted to friends, not used to giveaway (instead of activation) or sold for money.
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FFS, all this drama over a $0.03 dollar bundle game?
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That's not really the point though is it? This is the 2nd time this has happened for a giveaway I made so the frequency of occurrence bugs me. Part of the reason for making the post is also to find out if other users have similar experiences.
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When your $49.75 of CV for $1 spent turns into a mere $48.25, I don't think too many people are actually going to get upset about it. File a ticket and move on.
There are so many ways people work and/or cheat the system on SG (including the very thing of making dollar bundles that are pure fodder for giveaway churning), it's just not worth getting bothered about any particular one. The problems are all well known, have been hashed out on the forum dozens of times, and there is really nothing useful that can be done to prevent them upfront. But luckily, there is a support staff that's still willing to handle your ticket even though it's for a $0.03 key that nobody is actually going to use and exists only to churn CV.
(Full disclosure: I'm giving away 4 copies of the bundle myself.)
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Quote: "File a ticket and move on."
That's exactly what I did. And I made this thread because it was a pain to file said ticket. I had no idea what category to file it under, so I ended up filing it under "others". I thought it would be nice if there were a dedicated category since other users have said this happens quite often?
I really don't see how or where the price of games comes into question here, so I don't care if you've given away only free stuff or $1 million worth of stash - that's really not the point. The point is - and I reiterate - that I just felt that it should be easier to file a support ticket to report rule flouters, period, hence the suggestion to create a specific category, instead of having type out "so-and-so is regifting Game A, which I made in Giveaway B and blah blah".
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Well... Does he have the game in his library or not?
If yes, hard to proof regift. Only way would be to contact winner of second GA and compare the keys.
If no, report for not activated win.
For bundle games I check all my winners with SGtools for multiwins and or not activated games (in the past).
For DLCs/Games everyone can enter (at least for these that show up on profile) and for high value games I also check if the game is owned before sending the key.
The thing is (which I now repeatedly say): If he activated your key and gives away another is absolutly no Problem. And if he activates his key and gives away yours, thats really hard to proof.
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I just checked and yes he has the game in his library. That would indeed make it hard to prove regifting.
Thank you for sharing how you check your winners, but I have no idea how to use SG Tools to do what you did, nor would I bother, mainly. I just happened to "catch" this particular case because I noticed that the winner was "online" but refusing to mark as received, which seemed suspicious to me. One other winner regifted one of my keys in the past, and I don't even know how he was caught; I only found out after I visited his page and saw that he had been suspended, and he had only made 1 giveaway which was for the game he had won from me.
I also do not think that the onus should be on the gifter to have to check his winners. Why should you be the one to spend your valuable time checking to see if your winners have violated the rules? If anything, the onus should be on the winner to check that he has adhered to them, else face the consequences.
I guess it all boils down to who checks and enforces the rules. This responsibility shouldn't have to fall on the gifter.
But if at the end of the day it has to (because I'm aware that the site is run by unpaid volunteers), then reporting rule-breakers should be made as easy and convenient as possible.
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Jhea, the problem is... If you don't check it and you have people that break the rules on purpose, how to catch them?
Because in your case:
If he had it before you send the key: easy reroll
Now you can not proof anything without comparing the keys.
And Sgtools is very easy.
http://www.sgtools.info/activation
http://www.sgtools.info/multiple-wins
Just enter the SG-name and click go.
For people with many wins/big library it takes a little time, but then you see a list of violations and possible violations.
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As you are quite new to the site, I am giving you a warning. You are still including too much information regarding the person about whom you are complaining. That is still considered "calling out" and will get you suspended. You are allowed to complain about your problem, but you are not allowed to direct attention to a specific person (e.g. "the winner of this giveaway") or provide private information of others in the SG forum or comments sections. In other words, "don't air other people's dirty laundry in public."
For now, you should remove the reference to which giveaway is the problem as it will eventually display the user in question.
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Hello, thank you for letting me know. I've edited the information to exclude the title of the game in question.
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Hi Khalaq, I just found out that the winner of the game has marked it as "not received", even though a working key was sent, and the game was activated on his account. I have sent a ticket about this issue and it has yet to be resolved.
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SG Support involves a handful of volunteers who deal with thousands of tickets. We try to handle them in the order received, but some matters are more urgent than others. Please be patient.
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Hello again Khalaq,
I understand you marked the game as "received" on my behalf (thank you), however, if you check the same giveaway, the winner has just marked it as "not received" again. How is this possible? I am beyond stupefied that such a thing could happen and it seems to me that the SG system is deeply flawed if such incidences are allowed to prevail. Deeply disappointed.
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Make a new request received feedback ticket. And report them for misuse of giveaway feedback. Link your old ticket in the report.
Giveaways need to be marked as received for 30 days before they lock. So mods will likely take further actions this time.
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I'm closing the thread before it turns into a support center. This isn't the place for this.
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About your frequency inquiry - I think your numbers are a nice estimate.
Remember that SG punishments are extremely strict, so even if it takes a while to catch them, it's reasonable to assume that nobody gets away with it for very long, and there is no real incentive to try abusing the system on purpose. So it's very unlikely that you'll encounter many repeat offenders.
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I'm not so much concerned with "repeat offenders"; I'm sure new users join the site daily and out of this new crop of people I'm pretty certain a percentage at least would attempt to regift won keys.
I figured that one of the reasons I may be encountering these regifters is because most of my giveaways were open to all levels of SG users.
Ideally I would like to make my giveaways available to everybody regardless of level or region, but the small portion of level 0 regifters are seriously making me incredibly disheartened, which is why I ended up limiting my recent giveaways to exclude level 0s, which is not what I want. :(
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the small portion of level 0 regifters
Actually, issues with level 0 giveaways seem to be near-guaranteed (and are rather infamous on SG for that fact), with even level 1 giveaways being firmly reliable in having problems, and level 2 giveaways still generally having more problems than not. The fact that problem users may be more inclined to permanently remain at lower levels is the obvious consideration for that weighting of problem users, but there's also the consideration that level 0 entrants seem to have rampant issues with multi-accounting and auto-joining (leading to accounts that are created with the expectation that they'd eventually get closed down for rule-breaking, and have no concern with the details of the giveaways the enter).
Issues don't seem to measurably decline into a firm minority until you reach level 6 (or level 4, if you're doing invite only giveaways) giveaways, and even then, you'll regularly encounter users with a black mark or two further back on their record (even though they've already served their suspensions for such and haven't since repeated the behavior).
The only reliable way to avoid issues entirely ends up being using SGTools filters and invite-only giveaways, or manually doing whitelist/group giveaways. As long as you're doing public giveaways, your choice of level assignment ends up being a matter of how comfortable you are with that level's degree of likelihood of getting such issues. That of course makes it a matter of personal preference, but generally speaking, the only users that post at level 0 are the ones that don't care at all about what happens to their giveaways, or taking the time to follow up on their potential winners.
Personally, I avoid public giveaways whenever possible, and when I do use them, I almost always stick to 4+ , with 6+ for games I care about. For future public giveaways, you may want to consider slowly upping your posted giveaway level until you find the points where you're comfortable with the ratio of problem winners received.
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Thank you for sharing your experience. :) However I've already mentioned in my previous post that:
"Ideally I would like to make my giveaways available to everybody regardless of level or region, but the small portion of level 0 regifters are seriously making me incredibly disheartened, which is why I ended up limiting my recent giveaways to exclude level 0s, which is not what I want."
I would like everyone on this site to enjoy equal opportunity in winning games that I give away. I think enforcement therefore needs to be more stringent to exclude the black sheep who are spoiling it for the rest of the crowd - not only robbing people who actually want that game of the chance to win it, but also spoiling the gifting experience for the gifter.
Ideally, it shouldn't have to be a case where I need to accept that "issues with level 0 giveaways seem to be near-guaranteed".
All that being said though, I do know that this is near-impossible (hence the inclusion of the word "ideally" in a lot of my sentences, the above included ;)), as SG is run completely by unpaid volunteers, no? (This site desperately needs an "About" section btw. ;))
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Which I read, which is why I responded with "It may not be what you want, but if you want to avoid issues, it's an inevitability. You can only have one or the other of security and accessibility on SG." I apologize if my phrasing obscured that sentiment some.
As far as actually implementing better standards on SG itself, we've all been pestering cg on that for years. As you said, ideally, we shouldn't have to accept certain things. I think we've all really just given up hope of anything changing, however, which is why we've so solidly shifted over to using the alternatives that work best for each of us.
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I recommend this script to check for not activated wins: https://greasyfork.org/es/scripts/10120-steamgifts-add-links-to-sgtools
This way you don't need to check each profile in Steam, it's faster specially when you create a lot of giveaways.
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Previously I had a ticket go unanswered for a week or more, about receiving a duplicate key for a giveaway I won. I only got a reply long after the 7 days was up. Previously though, when Pete Ozzy was still around, he answered my tickets almost immediately, and his replies always addressed my questions very well. I wonder what happened to him.
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Hi there,
I've only been on this site a few months and given away 52 games to date, but out of the games that I've given, I've already been alerted to the fact that 2 winners of my giveaways have tried to give away the keys that they won from me in a giveaway of their own.
One of the winners who tried to do that was caught and suspended (I only found out about it later, thanks to another vigilant user who reported him), and is now back to using Steamgifts, and the other is someone who just won one of my giveaways, and immediately set out to create a group-restricted giveaway of his own, using the key that he won from me. This time I found out because I noticed that he was still refusing to mark as received the key he'd won from me, despite him being "online" all the time.
I just tried opening a support ticket about this, and realised that there's no specific category for the above violation. So I had to file it under "others" and proceed to include a description of what happened.
I was just wondering if this sort of incident happens frequently (since it's happened in 2 out of the 52 giveaways that I made, which is a 3.8% frequency in my case - and this is just counting the cases in which these people were caught; there may be others for all I know) to other givers on this site, and if so, I would like to suggest that a specific category catering to this offence be made, so that reporting may be rendered easier and more efficient.
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