What do you think of the SG contributor system?

the moment CV get removed. there won't be any public giveaway anymore, the only thing that left are group giveaway and private giveaway

Too many people abuse the contribution value. It needs to go.

An amusing observation:

Look at how many people are giving away the Tripwire Interactive Bundle (which doesn't count as a bundle itself, of course.)

Every game in the bundle has been given away in an indie bundle, now. That is, every game and piece of DLC in it is marked as a bundle game. Furthermore, most of them are currently available in a proper pay-what-you-want bundle -- at a much much lower minimum price.

Yet people are buying it at the 85% sale in order to regift it, purely because doing so adds to their CV while buying it more cheaply doesn't.

Obviously something has gone wrong here. Clearly CV was not intended to encourage people to behave stupidly, or to reward people for pointlessly spending more money than they had to to buy a game. But that seems to be what it's doing here -- I can't think of why else so many people are buying something for $9 when they can get nearly the same thing for less than $3. (Sure, the weekly sale doesn't include Dwarfs?! or The Ball, but those were bundled elsewhere much more cheaply.)

I still think having CV is better than not having CV, but I thought I should point out that bit of silliness. (I'm not sure how it could be avoided short of fundamentally changing the concept of CV, too.)

...what if instead of basing it on value, CV was solely based on the number of people who enter your giveaways, or perhaps the total number of points people have spent to enter your giveaways? (Which would mean partially value, but also how much you give away things people want.) This has a few major drawbacks (it means shorter giveaways earn you less CV), but it's self-correcting for bundle games or anything that gets spammed too heavily, since beyond a certain point fewer people will enter. And I think "giving lots of people a chance to earn a game they wanted" is what we really ought to be rewarding with the CV system.

Make the system less arbitrary!

You can only get CV from bundled game once and something like 20-40% of it steam price

3/10 voted no, do you have any stats on how many users never give away games? or only give away bundle games rather.

What we really need is a way to filter bundle games from the rest, then people can ignore the huge number of giveaways if they want to. Yes CV will still be abused but its worth it in the end. 5 contributor giveaways ruined is a small price to pay for having 50 more giveaways.

I like the contributor system, but could we remove games from the bundle list after a specified period of time, for example 6 months? Because it's not fair that games which were once in a bundle suddenly count for nothing for all eternity.

I voted remove it mainly because the contributor system is just abused and if you don't abuse it you lose out on a lot of giveaways. Because people abuse it the giveaway requirements get higher and higher each time a new pay what you want bundle comes out and people are giving away 10's of things like dungeon defenders complete pack and darksiders 2 which in reality cost them like 50 dollars for 10 but are getting a 500 dollar contributor value increase.

Unless you wipe it and then have someone constantly monitoring and changing the contributor value for things as soon as they show up on the indie bundle to like 5 dollars worth of contributor points it's a silly system and more effort then it is worth to do properly.

If you're curious, I voted against the contributor system because of my beliefs.

*Picking a random winner should not have to be based on credentials (amount you have given away).

*It benefits those who have the ability to give away and hurts those who may not have the same luxury

*It promotes a sense of elitism that I've observed on the site. I've seen cases where people with contributor value undermine the opinions of those who haven't given away, even if said opinions were valid.

*I figured the site is based around generosity. I think generosity should be extended towards all. If the majority of games being given are won by those who are already well off in terms of games, then there's a clear discrimination against those who don't give as much. I don't see this much as generosity, more so as the circulation of games between a set group.

*I don't see anything about giving away games as a requirement on the site, but it's starting to feel that way with the increasing number of contributor giveaways (at least that I've noticed). Sure, it promotes more giveaways, but some of the ingenuity behind the giving turns me off, but I suppose people won't care as long as they get free stuff.

I guess keeping the contributor giveaways as an option is fine. It's just the negatives of it that outweigh the positives for me.

remove it.

I think the contributor only giveaways are a nice incentive. But when you put a $1000 contribution requirement on a $10 game, it's just silly. The system could be made more sensible.

Definitely, definitely, keep it. Remember that it is OPTIONAL . The people who don't believe in it can make giveaways without it for other people who don't like it.

The overwhelming majority of giveaways don't even have a contributor requirement on them anyway. This topic isn't an issue until the majority of giveaways have the requirement.

Contibutor's giveaways are not the problem, the problem is with the way the bundles are handled. A lot of people sincerely don't understand why they're not moving beyond $30 because they never found the info deep in the bowels of the FAQ. Then there are thos who buy overly cheap games on sales to farm contributor value.

I'm not sure how feasible it would be but I think maybe CV could include all of one's contributions, but a second weighted value could be calculated in reference to how much the game is being given away at the time. If there are thousands of Crazy Machines giveaways going on, then it gives less weighted value than another game worth the same but for which only a couple of giveaways are running. People would automatically not get as much from bundles and sales because there would be tons of them being given away at the same time, at there wouldn't be a need to place titles on the bundle list. Currently, a lot of people avoid giving games that are on the bundle list and it's a shame.

I was going to send this to support, but I'd rather post it here and see if anyone likes it :)

I was thinking about adding a new contributor value. Lets call the old contributor value (the one we are using right now) "Fair CV", and the new one will be "Unfair CV".

We all know how the Fair CV works, but the Unfair CV will be calculated using the full value of all the games (bundles or not), so most of the users will have a really high Unfair CV, boosted by bundles.

Then, add the possibility to make another kind of giveaway, so we will have: Public, Private and Group, with Fair CV, Unfair CV, and no CV at all.

This way every user can gift games to whoever they want, if they don't care about bundlers, they can set their giveaways to Unfair CV and let every contributor (bundlers or not) enter. In the other hand, if the giveaway creator cares too much about it, they can set a reasonable amount for Fair CV, so only "real" contributors can enter.

Soooo... What do you think?

I think you should be able to specify contributor value of PUBLIC giveaways required. ..which excludes Private or Group contributions.

I am disappointed that 70% voted keep it. The contributor system tells the poor to fuck off. There is so many ways you could limit the amount of people...

a little wall of text...but feel free to read. Sorry about my English, I'm not it's obviously not my native language, but I hope that I can at least make some sense.

This site is called "steamgifts" it's about gifting games. Gifting itself should be the main thing. I like to gift things that I might like (and hope that other people might like) and things that I might not like myself but I now that others might. I'm happy that I can bring happiness/joy to a winner - if even for a minute or to (until they realize that the game they got sucks)

I have gifted away bundled game, but without knowing what the * meant (I did try to find info in the FAQ but missed it) Did I care about the CV being capped? No, not really. I think that it's fair. Have I continued to gift bundled games? Yes, because some people might not still be able to buy the bundles, but would like to play the games!

The last bundle I bought and gifted away was the Humble Weekly THQ bundle, I bought it for $50 (that would pretty much be what I would have payed for the games in a local store) Did I care about losing my CV? No, not really, I even wrote in the GA:s that "I would not complain if SG decided to put those games in the "bundle game list" so that I would get no contribution value at all, giving 40 (the rest to HB and THQ) to charity is way more worth it than getting contribution value here.

So, having written the above, did I vote remove it? Actually no.

I think a CV-system is something you "must have" because we don't live in a ideal world. Sometimes it's nice to give something back to other contributors (even if they are not in the same steamgroup as you are)

Is the current system good? It has some flaws, but so would every system have.
What tips to I have on trying to make it better?

1. The GA:s created should keep the CV based on the price in the steam-store when the GA was created. It should not decrease/increased due to price changes in the store.

Except for so game-bundled and exploited keys.

2. Here, the site would need to decide what should be on the bundle list and how the bundle list should work.

My suggestion is that fixed prices bundles should give the normal CV, just like all sales from GMG, GF, Amazon and so on does. Sometimes you can get a lot of of games to like 80% off, and there's no way to keep track on every high-percent of sale on every site.

What should be put on the Bundle list is PWYW-bundles, where you could pay $1 (or even less) for up to 3-5 games (usually something like this, then BTA) and thereby trying to cheat the CV system.

How should these be treated? My suggestion is that each game from PWYW bundles could give like $1 in CV. That way the creator of GA:s will still get some CV ($5 for paying maybe as little as $1!) and that's still a pretty good deal and would hopefully still make people want to share bundled games.

3. The games on the bundle list should not be on it forever. I think that 6-12months after the end of the bundle-sale is enough time. Sure, some people might want to sit on their keys. But as we seen with a lot of the bundle-sites (HB, IG, Groupees, IR and so on) they tend to do re-runs of some games, and that would put the game back on the bundle list for another 6-12 months.

Also, the steam-store price of that game might have decreased since the bundle ended, so you cannot be sure of how much CV that you could eventually get when the "waiting time" is over..

That's enough of my ranting.

I think that we have a clear proof of how important CV is before our eyes: look at how significantly the number of giveaways has dropped the last couple days, since some games were put on the bundle list and CV system is being discussed (changes may be on the way).

Keep the system as it is right now. No matter how you change it, there'll always be people complaining about it. At least now the majority seems to favor the existing system.

I don't really have a problem with this as it is. If people want to put on a CV for a give away, well shrug ok. I'm out of that one. It how they want to manage it.

The only issue that comes to mind is one of what if people want to limit via another method but not go off site to do it, i.e invite only steam groups; well then I foresee that if you put too many 'on site' tools it becomes a chore to navigate/use. I don't think anyone wants the mere setting up of a giveaway to be a puzzle in and of itself.