Should winners that don't play won games be able to enter GA's?

I've seen this idea before and I have seen good arguments on both sides, but ultimately, it is nice to have the option to play different games, depending on what mood you are in. Some people have back logs big enough that they will realistically never play every game, but it does give them the option to play what they will enjoy most at a given time.

lel

How will you tell if someone played the game, not idled it?
I get to some game only after a year or even longer because of a huge backlog.

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"Never" - 265 votes lel. I think you got the answer

If that happened then a lot of the level 0 leeches would probably disappear and that might be better for the Giving community.

As what Tree had said, how would you measure "playing" though? Time played? Achievements earned? Either one can be faked and that puts extra toll on the site's resources. How about DLCs won how would you measure time for that? The idea is interesting but you didn't contribute nor discuss anything regarding how it could be implemented.

i have a play priority and a mood thats decides what i play,games that i win are automatically on a low/really low priority,but depends on the game,you have to include the available time each person has or he put in in steam games at all (playing mmorpgs,console and so on ).
Voted for Never.

Nope. I certainly have steam gifts as the front of the backlog, with expensive games at the forefront of that battle, it can take moths to get around to it. That doesn't lessen the enjoyment of playing it however. It's even been noted that under the rules, winners are under no obligation to play the game. Do I think that's a pretty shitty thing to do - yes, but it's their prerogative to do so.

I strongly disagree with forcing people to play games they win. By all means BL them if they don't; that's your prerogative, although I'd suggest mentioning it in your description of the GA that you would like them to play it.

However, I'd like to point out a number of issues, some mentioned in various posts before mine, that would make policing this very difficult.

• How long must they play them for? I try and initially play a game for enough time (usually 5 - 10 minutes to get a feel for where it goes in my backlog schedule) and will then come back to it later.
• Maybe they play them offline .. I had one win that simply didn't work through steam and I had to run it directly from the executable via the windows file system.
• Maybe they are played using family sharing (most of the point and click games I have won are played by my wife using family sharing) and won't show up as play time on the account of the person who wins the game.
• People may play games in spurts and real life intervenes. For example my father had a stroke in the New Year and consequently I've played very little since then.
• Do you mean public GAs or all GAs? For example many of us belong to groups where we do group GAs which are almost private trading groups where we are simply offering excess bundle games and trying to collect the ones we are missing.
• Why is playing a game more valid than collecting one?
• People can just load a game and idle it to get card drops (or whatever it is they idle games for) so how can you tell. I have no interest in achievements so potentially very few of these would show up in my game play anyway

Personally I'll always try and play a non bundled game when I win it. For example I won Tales of Zestiria two days ago and have played half an hour of it both evenings since - this may not sound much to many members here but its effectively 25% of my free time each day :)

One thing I will say is if someone specifically says in their description to only enter if you are going to play the game I abide by that request. I can only think of one game I have entered with this specification on and I did play it (until I got stuck anyway)

If you want to find someone who will really play the game he gets, you better ask in a thread or something instead of opening a giveaway

I treat the games I win here the same as the games I buy. I don't discriminate. I spread them amongst my backlog evenly regardless of how I obtained them.

i cant see the point of forcing people to play x and y game they won

believe it or not: many of us have big backlogs, which means that we may be jumping from a game to another

that doesnt mean that we wont play the game we won nor that we are ungrateful toward the person who made the giveaaway

I don't care if people don't play the bundle stuff that i give away sometimes.

But when I buy a game just to give it away and say in the text "please only enter if you would like to play" and then, after 3 months people didn't even start the game I'm pissed. And then I'm not sure if I want to give away more games.

It's not about finishing the game or something and I don't need a thank you but when I buy games to give them away, I do this, because I want that people can play that game and not just so people get 0,30€ out of the cards and a "+1"...

Frankly, there is no way to even control it. Some play games in offline due to connection problems, as I have done so with Dwarfs, which I've won here. And of course it could encourage winners to just idle the game and leave it unplayed. So I believe that it wouldn't improve anything.

it is said that "I've spent 3995.1 hrs" on gaming, enough for me, is it for you ?

They are too naive to think about morals/politics in everyday life

Do you really think that?
Oh man, let me say one thing, discovery if one person is moral or political in their lives is not a thing that you can discover with a post or discussion because no one lives in the other shoes... you say: "naive to think about" maybe the people have another more important or urgent things to think or do in their lives that are more moral or political than argue about a rule in a site where the idea is share our taste for the games.

If for you is important that the game that you're gifting be played immediately maybe you must gift the game directly to a person that want that game and can ensure to you that have the time for play it.

Apply this rule with a raffle is a nonsense, is like if a lottery winner is forced to spend the money that he win in the form that the lottery wants...

I am sorry, but this sentence "My social experiment tells me:" makes me kinda angry.
You act like you were above all this and above all opinions. In your point of view, everyone who does not act the way you like it is only a "hoarder, who cannot think about morals, only wants free stuff and do not like to change their opionions (argue)" (indirect quote from threadpost). I mean, seriously: What makes you be the one who is allowed to say such things about all of us? If you see people with different opinions and different ways to enunciate them, is it your standart reaction to say "Oh, he does not have my opinion. He has to be an idiot, who is too dumb to think right (while "right" equals "the way you (Threadstarter) think") and I do not even have to think about his point of view, because I am better" and then stating it is all "a social experiment"?
I'm sorry, but I hate it if people act so much over the top. If you think you were so much better than everyone else, and if you think most of the community are just idiots who are under your level, then just leave the community.
And hey, I know that you will blacklist me, but I don't really care, because I don't want to have to be grateful for winning something from someone who thinks about the community that way.

I find it amazing a lot of posts are about the technicalities ('you can't check everyone', 'some people might bypass it') while the proposition in the first place is so wrong on the very basic level of one's fundamental basis in life: how do I choose to use my time.

I am asking a refund for the last 5 minutes by the way.

Dude I have over 2,400 games on Steam and thus a long list of games I still have to beat and yet you expect me to get punished if I do not play a game I've won here? Well.. thanks I guess.

No. People have backlogs. Just because they don't play it right away doesn't mean they never will. Plus, it would be near impossible to enforce.

If it were possible to enforce this in a reasonable way, I would be in favor of it. It would certainly cut down on regifting, since you can't play a game you didn't activate. It would also result in slightly fewer entries on games, since if people did actually have to play the game, they wouldn't enter for ones that they didn't want to play.

Unfortunately, as people have pointed out, there's just no reasonable standard of "playing". It's entirely possible that the person doesn't like the game, and it seems absolutely ridiculous to force someone to play a game they don't even like, so beating the game is out. Achievements and playtime are easy to cheat and achievements don't exist on every game anyway. Requiring some kind of review would just encourage people to write more five word useless reviews. which nobody wants. And so on. It's just too easy to fake, which means that only the honest users will get in trouble.

I voted for "three months", because that's enough time to allow for real life to get in the way. And if someone honestly has no free time for over three months, why are they even here entering giveaways? That said, since it can't usefully be enforced, it's more of a wishful thinking vote than something that would ever happen. Still, if there was a foolproof way to tell, three months would be my cutoff.

Full disclosure: I currently have three wins that I have not tried out, all from about two weeks ago. Two of them have been idled for cards, the third does not have cards. I also have very low actual playtime in some of my wins, for reasons ranging from "I can tell that I will play a lot of hours of this and I'll get to it later" to "this game is not at all what I expected and I never want to play it again".

As many said before: it's the winners problem wheter he'll play it or not. I only enter for interesting games that I'll play some time, but with my backlog (which isn't too bad compared to others (I've about 30 or 40 games in it)) and the limited time I have, I might not get around playing them for the next two years.

You basicly assume that everyone has hours to play every day, while most people only have 1 hour or even less, since they need to go to school / work. The weekends and holidays are the only times I really have where I can play for a quite a while. And even then those days are gone in no time, getting almost nothing done in the games.

You can't punish people that play games as a hobby, remember that you aren't able to judge what people do if you don't know the reason behind it (being busy, broken/dead PC part, not having a huge download speed, beating games at a slow pace, etc).

How do you even tell if people are playing won games? I do a lot of gaming on my laptop on cross country trains. And it's in offline mode because the in-carriage wi-fi is expensive and I'm not paying for it just for my Steam playtime and achievements. I've completed entire games and have nothing to show for it, not even the card drops.

Over the last few months I've spent a lot of time looking after an empty property that my aunt owns in Shropshire that has been threatened by flooding. I've actually caught up on a lot of my backlog there because of a lot of waiting around in the middle of nowhere. And although I had internet on my phone all of my gaming was again done in offline mode as I had no landline there.

I can't be the only person who has reasons to use Steam in offline mode. And aside from that people strangely don't appear to be able to schedule their wins to suit their schedules, with them often appearing in 'lucky streaks' or while people are on holiday, etc. If rules on this matter were to be enforced I can only see it benefiting hardcore leeches. Honest users would be the only ones to be caught out while leeches would simply use idle master and achievement manager to carry on entering giveaways with less competition.

Edit - Cheers for discussing this by the way, while complaining about us other users not wanting a debate. That's appreciated.

Punish, punish, punish. That is a word that is used awfully a lot in a website based on the word "gift". So what is next? Lets punish the winners who win AAA titles but give back only DLC and crappy games? The rules we have now are clear enough and sufficient. Why adding more?