Thanks for standing up cg. It's always good to know the position and opinions of the head of the site. Cheers!
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Thanks cg, you brought up some points I hadn't thought of.
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Thanks for the info. I'm sure a lot of users appreciate this clarification =)
Sadly, this thread will be on page X in a few days and we'll have those "Where's my CV?" threads all over the forum, again.
Maybe the FAQ should be updated and this thread should - at least temporarily - be stickied ;)
edit: wow, this got sticky fast
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Well, it won't be stickied permanently. Maybe for a day or two, then it will drift down to page X.
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I've noticed price jumps with titles in official Steam collections myself, and what you pointed out makes a lot of sense.
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Thanks for the clarification. I figured there was more to it than just the technical feasibility.
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+1 if i payed 40€ for a game...and after 4 monts is at 20... why my cv must go down?
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I agree too... If by that time I spent 40$, I should be rewarded by 40$ CV, if you buy it later when the price is lower, then the CV will be according how much you spent, but if in past I wanted to spend the full price, I don't believe correct to get a penality..
No one will give me back those 20$ they cut from the game that i spent in past, so no one should touch my CV because I actually contributed for that value.
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Sorry, but I think the explanations/rationale is BS. Capture the value at the time the giveaway ends. If someone puts up a game for $50 and it drops to $25 by the time the giveaway ends, they can't complain about only getting 25 CV because that's what would happen in the current system anyway. What it does save is the person giving away a $50 game and then five months later it gets discounted, and they're not punished for giving away a AAA title at launch like they are now.
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Reason 1 is a matter of opinion (personally, I don't see why it would be bad for people to remove entries from 50p giveaways and redistribute to 25p giveaways) and would be fixed by your method. Reason 2 doesn't occur that often imo, and should not really be a factor.
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Yes, reason one is a matter of opinion, but I think it's something that people overlook and they should keep it in mind.
Reason two happens quite often. I've been running SteamGameSales for 3.5 years, and I've wrote, and rewrote countless scripts to load in Steam pricing data from a wide range of sources. At one point in the past, the site had a price tracker which listed fluctuations in game prices. It wasn't unusual to see errors on a daily basis, whether it's a game that jumped up $10, and went back down within the hour, or a few dozen games that were listed with the wrong price. During sales, it was more common, and there were times where I'd wake up to a few hundred pricing errors, due to APIs providing inaccurate data. I'm always looking at new options for pulling pricing data, and they've improved since then, but I still don't feel they're reliable enough.
I'm not saying it isn't possible, it's just more maintenance than people expect, and it's not a magic solution that's going to fix issues regarding CV. I think it's worth exploring other options first.
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It's like saying, that you should confiscate money from people that earned it years ago and then stoped working. That's beyond communism.
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No, it's not like that at all. Most people don't even HAVE the money that they earned years ago, they spent it. If you want to relate this to earning money you've already lost the point. Money you make now doesn't stay with you forever. You lose it by spending it, on food, clothing, housing, etc. If you work for a period of time, you can't just stop working and expect that money to support you for the rest of your life because eventually it will run out. But anyway, money cannot be compared to contributor value because unlike money, contributor value is not a currency that is paid out to get things.
Anyway, the bottom line is if you want to continue reaping the benefits that come with being a contributor, you have to actually continue being a contributor.
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So if i donate money to charity, than some years later my name should be struck out of the registry ?
And that's not my point. Think of CV as a ledger. You cannot change values over time as they must represent the value of the transaction at the time it took place. Not before or after it, because other bought something for more or less and are now whining.
Furthermore SG is not your basic money outlet. You only use excess money here, not your basic food/drink/whatnot budget, so the your argument that money doesn't stay forever with is is meaningless as CV has more of a collectors value not strick buy food or die value.
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The charity example was an overexaggerating to highlight the ridiculousness of JoeyNeanz claim that "once is not enaugh":
"(...)you have to actually continue being a contributor."
I did not say you get wiped.
And loosing worth is demeaning. It's like saying:
"Yes, indeed, you have saved the pirncess, but now sod off, because you did not do any good deed recently. As of last friday you have no longer hero status."
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Well, to some degree even without price drops he's right, but it's going on on it's own - like I said inflation :> Let's say you donated 250$ worth of games 6 months ago - back then there were much less ppl on this lvl of contribution than now - on $250 GA you had 2 digit entry number, while today it's common for over 100 ppl joining $1500 Contri GA ;p Inflation works in every economical system, including SG, even if it's not implemented to the site itself ;p
And on the topic - while I also lost some contribution, I don't care too much, because I personally stand on the side that CV is flawed system, and only way to fix it is to remove it completely ;p Also as I understand while people may be angry about losing CV from games they given away months ago, I also understand cg's poinf of vie from his post. Plus it may be really hard to draw a line where price drop would occur, as there would always be people who got hurt because of this. I may create month long GA for a game, have it sitting for a month in my inventory and let's imagvine price drops at 29th day of my GA. I'd get lower price that ppl who bought game and given it away day b4 price drop. Next thing - differen't price levels could be easy to abuse. Let's say I have game XYZ worth 10$ sitting in my inventory, steam messes up the price and for 1-2 days this game is "worth" 50$ - I give it away during thois 2 days in flash GA and earn 50$CV. Someone buys this game while it's 50$, and next day when steam fix price he gets only 10$ contrib.
I give thois hypothetical examples just to show that whatever cg would do system would always be "unfair" to some people. We change it now to your favor - it's fair to you, i starts being unfair to some people it wasn't before.
And btw - that's why whole CV value system sucks - cause no matetr what we do it will always be somehow unfair to somebody ;p
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You're talking as if inflation is a good thing. And your resoning is flawed.
If we both donated $250 worth of games 6 months ago, but i donated Hitman Absolution and you donated Crazy Machines, then you are in a much better position, because i lost CV and you didn't. You can enter contrib GAs of $250 and i can't.
I will not venture into technicalities as i am not qualified.
And every system is prone to abuse, but a new set of rules could be laid.
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It won't be taken down, so a more constructive approach would be more useful ;)
Aside from that, i am right.
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I dont know how your guys do it and stay sane CG. Im just waiting for a thread where someone wins a contributor only GA that they entered in the brief time they had enough CV to do so but then dropped below the threshold when price mistake was found. Not sure how you guys would handle that, hopefully it doesnt happen :P
Keep up the good work.
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There were issues when the bundle list was first implemented I think, but otherwise, I don't recall rerolls based on that.
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That will lead to users complaining about their CV being lowered just because their giveaway ends after the price change while they paid full price for it.
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True. But as I've said before in various threads, the system is not fixable. As long as the CV system is in place it will have issues. But it's better to drop someone's CV because the price dropped within a few days than to drop it months or even years later.
It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than what we have now.
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I like the system we have. Your contributor value is based on the current value of everything you've given away. Want to maintain your value? Keep giving games away. This keeps people from giving games away to hit a certain value, and then just riding on that value forever to win giveaways made for contributors when they're not really contributing any more.
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More like: want to maintain your value? Only give away games like Death Rally or DLCs that never drop in price.
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Issues with consistency. Points are tied to the value of games. If prices differ per giveaway, you might see multiple Hitman Absolution giveaways, some for 50P, others for 25P. This means, every time you enter a giveaway, you'll need to check across the site to see if others are available at a lower number of points. Also, if you've entered into a Hitman Absolution giveaway for 50P, and the price drops, well, now you might want to revisit the site, remove your entry, and enter two giveaways for 25P instead.
Coincidentally I made a 4 copy giveaway just for lulz
The lack of entries is funny enough as is even though the copies are what they are.
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No, because they would have generated half as many points for you in the first place. ;)
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I am who you see here, I guess. I never changed my id or anything.
If you meant how do I know you - Well, we talked sometime ago, I knew you from the Scary Girl haiku puzzle/private giveaway a while back. But meh, be like that.
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I don't like:
"Once you've entered a giveaway, you're entered."
Think it should be either "you're in" or "you've entered". Not sure, though.
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That was just an observation. English isn't my first language, so i try.
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Depends on the reason for the CV dropping. If it lowered due to an error or exploit being corrected, I think it's fair to fix the issue, and reroll the giveaway if requested. If it's simply a price drop, they deserve the win since they met the requirements at the time of entry.
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Thanks. I think the issue is that the complainers (sorry, I'm sure there's a nicer term) aren't taking into consideration the administrative side of things, and the fact that there is no perfect system that addresses all member wants. Sometimes we have to accept a system that is "good enough" rather than "perfect".
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Or at least shouldn't be so tacky and obvious about it.
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With all the recent topics, I'll try to summarize why the current system is in place.
First off, as many have noticed, Hitman Absolution lowered in price earlier today on SG. Why? The game wasn't automatically updating correctly, Lina pointed it out this morning, and it was corrected.
Aside from bundles, games and contributor values on SG are meant to reflect current Steam prices. It's understandable people get upset if they spend $20 on a giveaway, and the price lowers to $10 shortly after. The obvious solution is to save the price of the game at the time of the giveaway. It's simple enough, but there are a few main reasons why this hasn't been done. Let's take a look.
Issues with consistency. Points are tied to the value of games. If prices differ per giveaway, you might see multiple Hitman Absolution giveaways, some for 50P, others for 25P. This means, every time you enter a giveaway, you'll need to check across the site to see if others are available at a lower number of points. Also, if you've entered into a Hitman Absolution giveaway for 50P, and the price drops, well, now you might want to revisit the site, remove your entry, and enter two giveaways for 25P instead.
Steam doesn't provide the most reliable pricing data. Prices bounce all over the place, and it's not unusual to see inaccurate data at times. For example, let's say a game is listed as $9.99. For one reason or another, Steam decides to start displaying the price of a bundle that contains the game, rather than the individual game. The price jumps to $19.99. A week later, Steam returns to the individual price, and it's lowered to $4.99. This means we have users receiving values of $9.99, $19.99, and $4.99 for the same game. The $19.99 is incorrect, so we'd have to catch that error, and readjust the values for all those giveaways. However, we don't know what hour or day the price changed from $9.99 to $4.99, so we wouldn't know which value to assign. Imagine this, multiplied by 2,000 games, and 400,000 giveaways. Also, prices need to be accurate to the minute, otherwise we'll be hearing about it in support. For example, we'll have users catching price drops, posting giveaways within minutes before our data updates, and receiving a higher value. At the moment, it's nice when we can fix a pricing error, and know it's corrected site wide. It's not perfect, but it's consistent for everyone. With individual values, I can't say with confidence our pricing data would be at the level of accuracy we need, and I think we'd have more headaches than what we have now.
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