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I once posted this in an IRC chat. People said it was a scam.
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I've had a few people tell me that they thought it was a pyramid scheme. I have to laugh because they obviously don't know what a real pyramid scheme is like.
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There is an prevailing cynicism in modern society which insists that nothing whatsoever can possibly be free, and people aren't nice just for the sake of it.
Argue all you will about people's motivations for giving on here, and feel free to bore me with a web of philosophical arguments about the innate selfishness of apparently unselfish actions, but Steamgifts is as close as it gets to a free meal. A veritable banquet, funded by a community of people who (for whatever reason) just enjoy giving stuff away :)
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"cynicism in modern society"
should read "skepticism in modern society"
scammers still nab people w/ the nigerian letter...i was unsure of this site before signing up and did a bit a research before i gave my email addy and steam id here...glad i did though
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But, steamgifts isn't free. We're giving up our dignity because we're essentially asking people to give us games. A lot.
On a serious note, it IS rare to find people who like to give away stuff for free. I've given away one game so far, and it honestly felt good. I mean, it was a video game so it's not like I'm saving lives, but it felt good to give something to the community.
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what are you talking about? steamgifts is obviously a huge ruse in order to steal our souls
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Shhh. This information is only for members of the inner circle.
Delete this at once. You already know the consequences of your actions...
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"and from that day twistedmetalero never got online on steam ever again"
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cg must eat our souls to open a gate to the underworld.
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^^^ Definitely this.
Eight months ago, I had never heard of SteamGifts. Once I stumbled upon it, I hesitated to join it because I didn't feel I needed to do so. (The games that were being given away were cheap games I could just buy, anyway.) Then I noticed some bigger titles, but I still hesitated because I suspected a scam. Finally, I tried it out, and the rest is history.
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There's very few games of any interest on this site that I don't already have. =\
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... You've been here 3 days. What did you expect, that the site would fill up with giveaways for all the AAA games your little heart desires in that time? 80% of giveaways (at least public ones), right about, are for bundle games. Giveaways for AA / AAA titles are few and far between. There are enough giveaway groups to join though, which often share better games to their members. Although it is good and nice of you if your attitude is one of "I only enter for things I truly want to play". I've got quite the amount of wins (and accordant backlog) but every one of those is for a game / DLC I intend to play :)
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.. How many of those Steam accounts belong to old TF2 farmers with 300 alts, people with multiple alts to use VAC banned hacks on, etc. Then there's people with trade accounts, also. Maybe only 30 - 40% of Steam accounts are legit and actually used to by people themselves. Probably less, even. And how many Steam users do you think have enough games on their account to be able to make a user, here, due to the minimum account value requirement? There's lots of people on Steam that only play one or two games on it..
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With the new TF2 update by valve wouldn't most of those TF2 alts become obsolete? (unless there's already a workaround to it :X)
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but they still count as part of steam since they cant really be deleted
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.. The TF2 update magically also deleted all those farming accounts? Really?
I have 4 alts I never use that I made for the 2011 winter sale when coal was a thing, to try and get some free games off it without ridiculous farming like some people did then using programs / bots / scripts / SAM with 100+ accounts. I haven't logged in to those alts since that sale, but those accounts still exist.
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there is a workaround to it and it is being exploited by idlers. :(
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What, some program to click the notifications for you? That actually works? -_-
I thought it didn't. Or is there some new way they've found?
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Relatively few people are aware of any benefit to having multiple Steam accounts. Fewer still are able to make use of this information. Even fewer are actually inclined to.
Having enough Steam accounts to even hit double digits, let alone more, is an extreme outlier. Meanwhile, millions and millions of people who are relatively ignorant of digital distribution entirely buy games at local retail outlets and register a Steam account when installing them.
I suspect 75-80% of Steam accounts being normal is an extreme low estimate. Your figure assumes a minimum of over 15 million alternate accounts out of something over 25 million Steam accounts in existence. Meanwhile, peak hours only show typically somewhere around 3 or 4 million active accounts at any given time. It's much safer to assume that something like 15 to 20 million accounts are abandoned, most of those being legitimate.
The proportion of alternate accounts in the active population would be higher, of course, but still shouldn't reach anywhere close to even half. I think even a third of active accounts beggars belief. There's just not enough people with the time and resources to consistently manage and maintain 3 to 4 million alt accounts who don't have better sense than to waste their time and effort on it when they could just as easily make several times more return on their investment with something more productive and useful.
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Even amongst the current 366,442 Steamgifts members, there are a vast number who aren't actually active in any meaningful way.
DeltaBladeX is right though. Add to that ill informed suspicions of it being a scam, or some form of unholy sorcery, and that pretty much covers it...
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What's the point? The ill-informed who think they get CV just for posting the giveaway, and not after the winner marks it received?
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SteamGifts used to be a closed site with registration by invitation only. We will not be returning to that, and we certainly aren't going to contribute to referral spam across the internet. That's like saying there's not enough dog shit on the sidewalk. The site is publicly accessible and no one can hide it for themselves. We don't need people promoting the site. It's doing just fine; I promise. If we wanted to promote it, we have better ways than trying to turn our userbase into a bunch of little used car salesmen. That's got to be about the worst possible way to try and promote anything.
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Well, things like the GMG ads and such translate to store credit for cg from the clickthroughs, which he uses to make giveaways. I assume there's some other ad revenue that supports the operating costs, but I don't exactly go prying into his business. I believe he has an entirely separate career that has nothing to do with the sites and that these are mostly labors of love. I don't think he's exactly raking in piles of cash from it. While I know you were joking, your registered e-mail (which can just be a throwaway specifically for the site if you like, plenty of people do that), the only piece of personal information we have on you, does not get passed around to anyone other than people whose giveaways you win so they can send you the gift.
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How about a big, fat, no. The site needs no advertising, it advertises itself. Aside from that, what would the referral reward be? Free CV or something else incredibly unfair and morally wrong? Also, the site's got enough users as is; if you ask me even too many, especially considering how many are shitty users (in multiple ways). Then there's the issue of it becoming extremely expensive to host if you don't want the site to experience more massive slow-down issues, as well as the fact that you'd need a bunch more people devoting a bunch more time in to support of the site.
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(I'm against this.)
But hypothetically. Let's say there was a ref system?
What the fuck could be the rewards for getting new members? Only thing I can think of is more points (Which isn't really needed.) or special ref giveaways from cg.(Like if you brought in 5 people or whatever.) Problem is day one people would abuse the special ref giveaways.
So what is your idea. What exactly would they get from refs?
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For every 10 referrals, CG will post in one of your topics.
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(realize I am new here)....I was dubious at first, to be honest. I think that sentiment holds fast to others for a longer period of time. I know a couple of friends I talked about the site with had never heard of it. So, take that how you will. (shrugs)
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As other say, most don't know about the site/
And when people learn about it, they don't trust it. And you can't blame them. Most giveaway sites are fake.
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Lol I literally threw my account at this site, because I had almost no games anyway
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I introduced my friend to this website, he thought it was a scam, even once he clicked, joined, and particapated in a few giveaways. He went away forgeting about this website.
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I actually learned about this site via the official steam forums.
I guess lot's of people don't trust that site, or don't know of it
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same here. i was looking for free games and betas and other shit. it was in one of the topics of th
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A lot of people think this website is a scam. Before I joined this site I looked in a forum. And one guy said he tried it and he got no gift, but the person didn't realize Steamgifts is a giveaway site.
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You most likely mean he made a giveaway and expected a free game from it, right?
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Steam warns us not to receive gifts from strangers. Sites like SG basically have the risks.
And now SG is doing everything to punish bundle game givers in order to protect their stupid and useless CV system. They have forgotten that the main source of duplicate games is bundles. Do they really expect givers to pay 19.99 to make a giveaway? Give me a break.
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Fun fact: bundle games weren't even allowed up until a little over a year ago, when the bundle list was implemented at the same time as the contributor system, which, by the way, most people, including everyone on staff, hates. Its days are numbered. Way to go, whining about something completely unrelated to the thread and which you have a poor grasp of in the first place, though.
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The bundle list was initiated at a time when bundles could be bought (with Steam keys) at $0.01. (Unless you count the old Exploited Games list with the bundle list.)
The results of cg's poll four months ago asking about CV were actually in favor of keeping it.
I can't recall if the bundle list or CV came first, but bundle games being allowed at all again definitely came later.
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I'm going to quote myself, because maybe, just maybe that will work here, and because everything else I start to write is borderline insulting.
The bundle list was initiated at a time when bundles could be bought (with Steam keys) at $0.01.
(Edit: If you want to nitpick my earlier post, nitpick the part about bundle games being "allowed at all" -- technically, you could still submit them back then, but only if you were providing a gift URL for the entire bundle.)
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Contributor giveaways and the end of the ban on giveaways for bundle games both happened at the end of May/beginning of June 2012. Before that, lokonopa would delete all such giveaways and was kept very busy just with that, never mind other duties around the site. If you mean the value figure on profiles, that's been around since practically the beginning of the site, and that's not going anywhere. And you don't have to link me anything. That poll is irrelevant.
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I like facts, and that's why I posted a reply, and why I linked to a source. Yes, the wording on the poll doesn't allow for all the nuance of opinions of users on the subject, so the validity of the results can certainly be called into question. In fact, I probably agree with your opinion. But, again: facts. And the poll is the closest I'm aware of to a general canvassing of the opinions of all SG users.
The way your earlier post is written, it reads like you were saying CV giveaways, allowing bundle games, and the creation of the bundle list all happened at the same time. I wrote my reply for clarification of that.
And here's cg's post announcing that bundle games are allowed again, which also implements a change in the existing CV calculation. The reason it was a point of contention was because of CV giveaways. Those had existed for a while before bundle games were re-allowed.
I think you've been around here longer than I have, and you have the staff perspective, so history's may be a little fuzzier from your point of view, but again, I like facts, and my replies here are for elucidation of those facts.
Here's the Contributor Giveaways announcement. The first reply is forum post number 3156678. The first reply in the earlier-linked thread is forum post number 5207097. I'm guessing there weren't two million posts made between "the end of May/beginning of June 2012", but I could be wrong.
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People weren't happy with the way bundle games were being handled out of the gate when they were allowed and contributor giveaways were introduced, so the system required further refinements, which is the reason for the temporarily reinstated ban on them and the threads proposing different ways of handling their values. That's why there appears to be a discrepancy.
Figuring out what to do about bundle games was one of the biggest hurdles trying to develop something like the contributor system in the first place. Before that, they were completely banned because they weren't as easy to distinguish from regular giveaways at the time and people were able to abuse them much more cheaply to inflate how attractive their profiles looked, especially as, for example, prospective applicants to a group or the like. Rest assured that they came at the same time, though. I remember it very well.
As far as the poll goes, I wasn't even considering it in relation to my statement about the community's opinion of the system, but I will state briefly that I think the results would look extremely different if the community was instead choosing whether to replace it with a different system altogether. What I meant before is that the poll itself is ultimately irrelevant and should probably be regarded more as a choice between letting the system stay a little longer before getting rid of it or scrapping it immediately.
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I am relatively new here. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
The fact is that most of the games given away here nowadays are bundle games. To the extent that when people see a sudden influx of a certain game, they may suspect there should be a new bundle somewhere in the universe.
I myself was pissed off when I got banned for regifting. That was because I won a game I already owned and did not know that I already owned it, considering I had over 300 games at that time. I gave the game away to someone else and a forum police arrested me red hand. What a joke?
I guess the creators of this site originally expected people to give away duplicate games instead of shelling out extra money to make some poor kids happy. If people can somehow get punished or ridiculed for giving away games, fewer people will do the same stupid things again.
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The joke is you didn't read the rules and yet act as if you were wronged.
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Then what should I do with that game? Just put it under my carpet?
Just make regifting receive zero CV will solve most of the problems and at the same time encourage people to give away gifts they accidentally win.
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Just contact the gifter, explain the situation, and they can arrange for a re-roll.
It's not rocket science.
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What if I say I already did it and the gifter just told me to give it away to someone else?
By the way, recipient of my regift regifted it to a fourth party. I did not call the forum police though.
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Then you should have grown a pair and insisted on a re-roll. If that wasn't agreed, you could have contacted Support, explained your error, and let them deal with it.
To most people, the solution is an obvious one.
You didn't do the right thing, and now you've got a huge chip on your shoulder because you got pulled up on it.
Instead of becoming embittered about the whole situation and using silly phrases like "forum police", why not simply accept you were wrong and stop bleating on about how unfair life is.
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What would I gain after going through all the troubles? Basically nothing.
Regifting is against the rules. But I would have just let it sit under the carpet instead of contacting and insisting this or that. Again, why should I spend time contacting support so that someone else can play the game I legally own? This is nonsense. Just give it away to someone else, as suggested and agreed by the original gifter, was the most efficient.
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So you still think it was the rules that were in error, and you did nothing wrong?
The rather obvious answer of what you would have gained by doing the right thing is that you wouldn't have ended up getting suspended, and someone else from the site who didn't already own the game, and had used points to enter the giveaway, would have won it.
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So if your pharmacist gives you the wrong prescription for a powerful narcotic and when you try to return it, he tells you to just sell it to someone else because he's too lazy to fix his mistake, you think when you get arrested for selling drugs that a valid defense is that the pharmacist told you to do it, is that correct?
Edit: Also, you're lying about your winner re-gifting. I checked.
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It was just a 1.99 game. And do your chemists sell heroin?
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Next time I would just flush it down the toilet so that fewer would get addicted.
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Nonsense. Why should I bother the gifter again and again?
I already gave the game to a poor soul, who by the way regifted it. I owed nobody anything.
Marking it as not received would make me a real asshole. Think twice before giving any advice.
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Wrong on both counts. Your winner never re-gifted the game. You're outright lying. I checked. And forcing the giveaway creator to choose a new winner is what the rules require. Marking it as not received does just that if they want to be credited for the giveaway. I'm suspending you for flagrant contempt for the rules of the site and promoting their violation. You're the one who needs to think twice before giving anyone advice. If you don't like the site rules, you can get the fuck out.
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"Steam warns us not to receive gifts from strangers. Sites like SG basically have the risks."
What part of that sentence makes sense? What does it even mean? We should call in Robert Stack.
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For all who dont know about the risk of receiving gifts from strangers, basically, if an asshole buys a retail dvd version, give away the Steam activation code and report to Steam with the physical box as proof of purchase, your account will be gone with the wind instantly.
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account ban is also possible.
but the main point is that accepting gifts from strangers is very dangerous.
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I basically have too many games that it is very difficult for me to enter any giveaway.
And basically I would not risk my library of 500 games just to win a cheap bundle game.
Trusting or not depends on how much you may lose.
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You'd think this site would be secure, though. Besides, you can be hacked in many different ways. Why not take the risk that is there all the time, and try not to be stupid on the way there?
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You have too few games to worry about account ban.
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I've probably spent just over 200 dollars, at least, on this account. That's enough to worry.
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I just know I haven't put up many more giveaways from lack of wins, last win 9 or 10 months ago and have put 2 or 3 giveaways up in that time, when I win I'll do more.So sorry for my selfishness everyone.
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I didn't know about this site until about 5 months ago, and I've been on Steam since it began. It just never occurred to me that people would just give away their games. Although, I think what I've gained the most from being on this site is awareness about bundles. My Steam library has exploded since I discovered bundles.
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It just occurred to me while browsing steam just how many people actually use steam. Then I wondered why I had never seen numbers even relatively near that on Steam Gifts. Why is this? Do people just not know about it?
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