For what it's worth, I've given away one game, and it was a Steam inventory item gift, even though said game was previously in an Indie Royale bundle. However, I bought it when it was discounted during the Because We May sale because I had a little money in my budget left over, and I bought it directly on Steam.
I am pretty sure that, of the over 50,000 or so people on this site, there are quite a lot of others like me, who have gifted games that happen to have been featured in bundles, even though their giveaways were not bundle keys.
I know I once entered a giveaway for Gundemonium Recollection, in which the giver specified that it was a Steam inventory instance, even though it was on Indie Royale at the same time.
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"Not much of a motivator for giving any indies game here, for fear it'll show up in a bundle."
Well, I think that if I really, really like a game, I might just give it away anyway, even if it's been in a bundle. It won't help my contributor status, and I won't be able to enter much contributor giveaways. On the other hand, I never really liked the contributor giveaway system that much--it seems like a nice idea but its practical effect is "rich get richer"--so I'll just not participate in it when I make giveaways.
And yes, I really hate what this will do to the plethora of indie games that have shown up in bundles. And nowadays, even some non-indie games.
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Mine were not from Indie Bundles, and I am no longer a contributor, I physically bought 2 of them, one was a spare freebie key...sigh. lesson here is don't give away anything remotely indie as it will bite you later.
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Same with mine...even though I never gave away Bundle Keys.... I support Indie games...
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I would like to see bundle games be worth at least a small fixed amount each - perhaps between 1 and 25 cents - so that everyone that has actually bothered to give something away can enter the 1 cent contributor giveaways, and those that have contributed substantial amounts of indie games can at least get in at the $1 level for their efforts.
Just to be clear, these minimum values would only come into play for those who have only (or mostly) given away indie games that end up on the bundle list, the 20% rule would be used when it gives a higher value.
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Wow, that's really great idea, I didn't think that you will figure it out in a such good way ;)
EDIT damn, no, I also gave away 20P game not from bundle, that appeared in one... That's not good. I would have to give 100$ more to get it's value back... It needs more figuring it out :)
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I lost something like 15% of my value this way! Booooooo!
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A this point is better to just ban the game from the site when will be in any bundle.. because that is what this solution will accomplish ( + endless spam of keys ) and it punish who bought the game in the past in a honest way.
Yeah preventing the game to be added forever when become part in a bundle or become "free" ( like summerseal ) is better than this solution..
Than you could request the staff to giveaway a game that has been prevented and it will be approved if you have it on your steam inventory ( require public inventory ofc ).
My solution seem far better and fair for honest people ;)
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But what about those of us that want to give away bundle keys for honest reasons?
Some of us aren't trying to unfairly inflate our epeen value, we're just looking to offload keys for things like Indie Gala that give individual Steam keys. I have many keys from there that I already own the games to.
You seem to have forgotten that the original point of this site isn't a score competition, but to give away Steam games. What makes bundle games not legitimate Steam games other than that they were cheap?
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Banning games that have ever been featured in bundles seems like it would really discourage people largely interested in indie games (such as myself) from being part of the site.
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That would create far too much work for the mods. They already have their hands full simply removing bundle giveaways right now.
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What if, God forbid, Max Payne 3 gets into a bundle? Will future bundles affect users' contributor values?
For example, I gave away Puzzle Agent two months ago (two months before the Indie Royale bundle). What happens? I also gave away a giftable copy of Braid. Do I lose that too?
This system does have benefits, but I can see drawbacks as well. If my legit contributions turn to nil, I'll certainly second-guess contributing in the future. I know Steamgifts is about gifting, but I believe the contribution system wasn't put in place just for shits and giggles. It was to award contributors.
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Only indie games go in Bundles.
You won't ever be seeing COD or MP3 or Dark Souls in a bundle.
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King's Bounty: Armored Princess is not an indie game. In fact, many of the games in IndieGala bundles are not indie.
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What about Killing Floor (during Steam Sale there were few bundle copies and DLC around, and it gets quite a big number of sales, so people might want to gift it then, and KF was in bundle)? And Red Orchestra 1 was also in some bundle, what will we do with RO2 when it goes into bundle (probably when RO3 gets released)?
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It went into the Humble, so it is classed as one now. Killing Floor too. While they are both big name games, they are still indie.
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No, it's because we're hacking. God, get it right.
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short version: i dont think its fair, not for me in general
so those that have gifted an amnesia TRADEABLE copy for example will get owned?
not such an idea i think.. also if this happens people will be reluctant to gift as much as now, therefore more users/fewer giveaways
was nuclear dawn free? the answer is NO! the 1+1 offer came later.. so the user should be burdened by that..
NONETHELESS if you do that don't forget THE TRAINS
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He mentioned that Amnesia will be counted by the 20% thingy if you gave the bundle game and not tradable copy and only if you dont have many giveaways of normal games.About the trains....Everyone who gave it away,BOUGHT IT on a discount.Since when is that not allowed?If that is the case then every game that has been on sale should be the same :P
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Yeah.
I actually wouldn't mind if it went by "how much you spent on the game when you bought it". That would be really hard to enforce, but I'm saying that I think that passes a fairness test.
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That's why I figured it'd be really hard to enforce. By that I mean pretty much impossible.
I think you can see when an item entered your Steam inventory, but apart from that...yeah.
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Even if people were willing to post photos of that,it would need a lot of work to find the value at each date(there are sites that track this) and change it to each profile.But the mods are already pretty busy so no need for more work for them.
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I have to agree there, why is Railworks 3 at 90% off *$7.20 vs $72 still counted as a-ok, but other sales are bad....(Like Killing Floor had to pay $10 to get in Groupee bundle, meaning you paid $6 for it... yet paying $5 for it in the summer sale is better...) I didn't even exploit bundle keys yet I am punished the same
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Looks mostly good, which is about as good as I can reasonably expect! :)
It's somewhat unfortunate for legit givers, but understandable, at least for now.
It would be nice to have Bundle Games indicated clearly in a user's giveaway list, and perhaps an additional figure on their profile to indicate the max value available and used from their bundle giveaways (ideally, indicated similarly to how the Bundle Games in the list are indicated).
I assume this will apply retroactively.
Also, it might be nice to list somewhere which bundle(s) the Bundle Games are actually from.
How will P generation work?
(Trying to think of exploits, this question is in case there are people who still have hundreds of $0.01 bundle keys stashed away, with alt accounts, and would try to gain P just in time to snag an otherwise low-entry high-P giveaway. Though really, that sounds like more trouble than it's worth, and technically, the community would still reap the benefits of those giveaways and P.)
For "free games" (e.g. Shadowgrounds), what happens when people stack hundreds of free copies onto giveaways of non-bundle 90% off games? Imho, that starts getting nearly as janky as mass-$0.01 key giveaways.
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I don't like this new idea. It doesn't devalue bundle keys, it devalues every game that have been in a bundle at some time. This will make it highly unnattractive to give away indie games and will also lead to a lot confusion for users that buy a game in the Steam store and don't know why they only get up to 20% contributor value while they would get 100% for other Steam games
For bundle keys, i'd suggest the following addition: Giveaways of bundle games with less than 50 entries get only up to 20% of that value and for giveaways with more than 50 entries the winner can select an option whether this game comes from a bundle or not, since bundle keys can't ship with the official gifting or trading function. However, this wouldn't solve the problem with free games
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But then you'll say, make their gift inventory visible!
The opposition will cry: "What if they plan to buy it at the last day?!" or "PRIVACY REASONS LOL"
I 100% agree. I tend to do that a lot with you I think lol.
But yea, people will always say some kind of bullshit.
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And considering how so many indie games eventually get bundled...
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Not just that. After seeing Bastion get in an indie bundle, I wouldn't be surprised if Torchlight gets featured in the next main-numbered-series Humble Bundle.
And then you look at the current bundle and, while it's a music bundle, Hitoshi Sakimoto is NOT a name to be sneezed at. He's a guy who's written multiple Final Fantasy soundtracks.
Now imagine if something like Portal 2 got dropped in a bundle. Or maybe an oldie-but-goodie like Morrowind.
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Point. Hey, look at the latest Indie Gala. Did we ever think that King's Bounty: Armoured Princess would ever be bundled? Also Theatre of War 2 in that same bundle.
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...wait, holy shit, you're right. I didn't even know there was a new IG bundle going.
And I thought IG only ever did all sorts of obscure indie games that I hadn't ever heard of...
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Theater of War 2 isn't in IG7, unless it's one of the games they arbitrarily withhold for no good reason.
and if it is, how do you know it?
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Someone leaked the list of games to be bundled a few days ago. Likely to be an unlock.
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Sorry that i spammed this post in the beginning, it didn't show up even in different browsers so i thought this was due to my bad internet connection
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It only devalues the bundle games if you've been giving away a higher than usual amount of them. For example, we have roughly 15 users that have contributed over $2,000.00 in giveaways. They've given away plenty of games that were once in bundles, and yet this update will have zero affect on every single one of their contributor values. Actually, this will have no affect on over 75% of our total contributors that have given away countless bundle games. Their contributor values will remain exactly the same.
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I must admit i slightly misunderstood your system (that's not good since those systems should be easy to understand, but it's my fault in this case). However, as you can see in this thread, there are a lot of people that would feel punished by your idea (I'm one of them) because their contributor value will be decreased without a reason. This is ok, since for every change there are people that don't like it, but it seems that mostly new contributors (with less than 5 games) will be punished which could prevent them from contributing further
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Agreed. Sorry if some of us dont have $2000 to spend. Im fairly new here, I gave away Dungeon Defenders so that I would be allowed to enter contributor giveaways. It was a tradeable inventory copy. I did not even know it was ever in a bundle, until today. I looked it up because I was shocked that my contributor status would be stripped to $0, as if I didn't contribute anything, wasted my money. If this goes through, I am stripped of my contributor status because of a sweeping generalization... I don't exactly feel encouraged to give away any more.
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SuperFluffyKitty for example loses $1.3k+ with this.
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Why would mine go to $0 when I gave away Dungeon Defenders? I didn't get it from a bundle
This punishes people who gave away legit inventory games that they did not obtain in a bundle. Why should I ever want to give away a game again when you take away my contributor status and waste my Dungeon Defenders purchase? I could have given it to a friend instead!
A better option is to disable or make games worth little to no contributor points *only when they are currently in a bundle. Don't make them worthless forever just because they were in one at some point. People do buy these games when they are not in a bundle.
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And same here with Serious Sam the Random Encounter.
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So your giveaway of DD was a "waste" because your epeen isn't lengthened over it?
The fact that a user won DD and now owns it doesn't make it not a "waste"?
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Thanks but I'm a female and I don't need your epeen comments. I gave it away because I wanted to have contributor status, even if it wasn't a high dollar amount. Had I known that it would now give me $0 I would have given it to a friend instead. The guy that won it did not even have the decency to thank me.
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I'm a female too, I'm still allowed to make epeen comments. That's really what this is. A contest to see who has a bigger contributor score, i.e. a bigger epeen. It sucks that the winner didn't thank you, but saying the only reason you would give away a game is to be arbitrarily recognised for giving away a game with an arbitrary score just tells me you missed the point of the site.
I give away games to give back to the community (especially since I've won more than a fair share of titles myself) and I don't begrudge the $7 or so I'm losing at all.
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I don't care how high my score is, if I did I would have bought a whole lot of those train games like a lot of people did. I just wanted the ability to enter some of the contributor only giveaways. I gave away a game, that I bought. And now I will have $0 contributor, so I will not be allowed to enter contributor giveaways anymore. Should I not at least be able to enter for contributor values equal to the game that I actually gave away?
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I never claimed the system was perfect, only that it was better. And like I said in some other posts, there should be a method of proving that you legitimately bought the game as a gift on Steam (Steam's gift history, for example). But, I'll flip your question around: Why would I want to make a contributor giveaway when all the entrants will just be people that cheaply increased their scores via bundles?
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Don't see how the question applies to me as I don't consider myself one of those people, I didn't buy a bundle. I don't have a high score, and I've only joined a few months ago...all I wanted was the ability to enter some of the contributor giveaways. Sure people have given away keys to increase their scores, but people have also bought deeply discounted, high value games to do the same thing. Should the site make every game that has ever been on sale worth no points too? We need to assume that everyone is guilty until proven innocent?
As far as I'm concerned they could scrap the contributor idea all together, or at least remove the numbers value (from everyone). Then, there would be no exploiting to increase contributor value, nobody worrying about their score at all. It has obviously resulted in an us vs them mentality.
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As far as I'm concerned they could scrap the contributor idea all together, or at least remove the numbers value (from everyone). Then, there would be no exploiting to increase contributor value, nobody worrying about their score at all. It has obviously resulted in an us vs them mentality.
I made that exact same point earlier - however, I think it's too late, I don't realistically expect the site to just throw out their value tracking entirely.
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I have always though that too. Give something away, get the flag, if they want to give back to others who gave, the amount they gave shouldn't matter. Not everyone has good jobs, some, like me, are crippled by student loans. I gave what I could, I bought during a sale an entire year before it went into an indie bundle, gave it away after I joined here because it was sitting in my inventory since no one wanted it/already had it. Basically all they are saying right now is if you have a lot of money, you can get more free stuff than those that don't....which doesn't seem that fair because odds are if you have given away thousands of dollars worth of stuff legitimately, then you probably don't even need to win the game to be able to play it if you wanted to. I think the flag system would be nice, because, you still are buying bundle keys, not like they are free, so you are still contributing, just you are getting a different kind of sale. The 1 cent Humble Bundle days are gone, min $1 now.
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Like I said earlier, the value in general is laughably inaccurate when I can increase it, totally above-board, for less than 20 cents on the dollar.
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Actually, yes, you do. Technically, the penis is nothing more than an extented clitoris. Therefore, you do, in fact, have a e-peen to be lengthened. Just saying.
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wow i realy do love you lol, thank you very much!
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"Individual bundle keys are allowed, since their value can no longer be exploited."
"The above changes would mean anything can be submitted at any time,"
Thank you! All I wanted was to give away the excess keys I get from things like Indie Gala without putting the epeen society on the defensive. The only reason I ever disliked contributor giveaways is that so many new rules had to be put in place to protect contributor scores, and it really turned this community noticably more hostile and suspicious.
Edit: I do have one question, though, what about "Beat the Average" games and full bundles? Full bundles, I imagine, would be excluded, since the entire purpose was to stop the artificial inflation of buying a bundle for, say, $6 and getting $100 in contrib. score. But if the full bundle costs ~$6 minimum and gives 6P, there'd be no reason to deflate its value. As for BtA games, you still have to pay $7-$8 for them so it's not like you can spam them for $0.01 each. I'd say if you were willing to put in the work to program two different classifications (bundled and BtA) I'd have the BtA games contribute...I don't know, 50% or something. If not, well, it's still better off than we are now.
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Full bundles are not marked afaik. All individual games from bundles are though (BTA as well).
As for BTA value, you still give away one game of the BTA ones while you have separately used all the other ones. So you can't really say it cost you 7$-8$, can you?
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Your solution is very good... for computers. But people won't be able to understand what is happening with their contributor value. Get ready for "My contributor value??? O_o" - thread SPAM on forum :D
While entering giveaways i always look for steamgifts, but most of contributors does not give this important information. Please, make it obligatory to select option steamgift, cd key, * bundle key while creating giveaways!
And now: steamgift should be 100% valued, cd key should be 50% valued, bundle key 5% valued
But if someone is cheating... you can ban him. Winner will report him if he gets cd key instead of steamgift for sure!
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No, a lot of winners might not care, and there're always going to be people trying to game the system.
Let's be honest, anyone who gave away nothing but games that JUST HAPPENED to be in bundles, got them from bundles.
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Ok so make it obligatory for winner to tell what he got while clicking "received": Please select what did you get: cd key, stemgift, bundle key
If most of winnes tell that contributor is giving something else that he is offering - can be banned automatically :P Or better - the number of availble giveaways he can create should be automatically decreased! (i am genius in good ideas :D)
edit: additionally contributor value should be calculated using winner answer not the contributor information!
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You're assuming it'll work like it should in theory.
I'm trying to keep in mind how much workload a solution will present to the staff. Having to investigate every individual claim and play "he said she said" over whehter it's a CD key or a bundle key or whatever is just going to increase their workload.
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No it can ce automatic.
Contributor select: You are giving away: steamgift, cd key, * bundle key
Winnes select: not received, received steamgift, received cd key, received bundle key
Contributor value is calculated using winner select but if winner selects key instead of steamgift the number of giveaways this contributor is allowed to create is decreased by 1.
:D
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You're still going to get a flood of "confused" (either honestly or not honestly) people registering complaints and whatnot over it.
You're still going to get contributors and winners disagreeing, you're still going to have dumbasses claim to have hit the wrong button or something, you're still going to get idiots claiming they didn't know what it meant or didn't know how it worked...et cetera.
It's just like the new accounts that go make 3 giveaways of Skyrim or MW3 or something, then claimed they thought that's how they won games.
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This idea isn't airtight, but it would definitely cut down on abuse. And be an improvement on the current system.
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Exactly.
We need something that's a significant improvement over the current system, not necessarily something that is airtight.
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I would argue it's no more confusing to follow than three tiers of value at 100%, 50%, and 5%. Also, large amounts of people would select the wrong option every day. We'd also have countless support tickets saying 'I sent a Steam gift, but the winner said they received a CD key' (impossible for us to verify, it's one person's word against the other), and 'Oops, I wasn't cheating, I thought Steam gift meant Steam redeemable'. Anything that relies on user input will cause plenty of headaches. For example, what happens if a group decides they'll mark their friends bundle keys as Steam gifts. We're back to square one, chasing down users, while being unable to prove where a gift originated. A user posts three copies of Shadowgrounds and their friends verify they're Steam gifts. Where do we go from there? We can't ban them based on assumptions, and they receive full value for potential bundle keys.
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Ok, but please read my answers above. Or i'll just write once again. I improved this idea :D
Ceating giveaway:
Contributor select: You are giving away: steamgift, cd key, * bundle key
Finallizing giveaway:
Winnes select: not received, received steamgift, received cd key, received bundle key
Contributor value is calculated using winner select but if winner selects key instead of steamgift the number of giveaways this contributor is allowed to create is decreased by 1.
edit: or for safety reasons it can be decreased by 0.5 (this should eliminate possible mistakes)
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player A created giveaway
player B won
player A "hey, it is a key, but please marked it as received steamgifts"
profit
and this idea will bait bunch of trolls who marked the wrong gift, for example winners get steamgifts but marked it as key, then bunch of ticket/thread will appears on forum, and it will be hard for SG staffs to track them down one by one.
/thread
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You're going to have a lot of winners either maliciously or accidentally select the wrong type of gift, and then that makes work for the staff trying to play he-said-she-said between two disputing users.
You're going to get people selecting steam gift for bundle keys and saying "well it's a gift on steam not a CD doesn't that make it a steam gift???" or you're going to get people who give away keys from non-bundle sources (like Amazon, GMG etc) who say "Well it's not a CD key it doesn't come with a CD" or other stupid things.
Hell, a lot of people have had winners not even bother to note that they received a gift at all. And that literally takes two seconds and a single mouse click and comes with a freaking reminder on the front page.
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Awesome work cg
But what about to those who submitted ONLY bundle games, but as legitimate gifts, not keys?
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Do you really think that's really happened to folks?
And if so, perhaps they could prove it by showing their gift history in a screenshot to the admins on a case-by-case basis? Let's just be honest, there aren't that many people who just by coincidence gave away bundled games only, but nnot from bundles.
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If there are so few, then it surely wouldn't be difficult to rectify it on a case-by-case basis.
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It's happened to me, and I'm far from the only one. There are at least two other people who mentioned this somewhere else on this page.
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Hey everyone, it's no surprise we've been struggling with bundle keys lately, and we're bouncing a lot of ideas back and forth. One suggestion is below, and we're curious to hear what people have to think.
Proposed changes to contributor values
Bundle games, and those freely available at one time or another (Ex. Shadowgrounds), will only add a maximum of 20% to a user's non-bundle contributor value. For example, if a user has submitted $50.00 in non-bundle games, they would have a cap of $10.00 (20% of $50.00) for any bundle games submitted. Therefore, if they submit $10.00 or $10,000.00 in bundles, their contributor value would reach a maximum of $60.00. To further demonstrate, a few scenarios are below.
User #1
Previous value: $119.95. New value: $119.95. They receive full value for Amnesia due to the amount of non-bundle games they have contributed.
User #2
Previous value: $39.98. New value: $23.99. The value of Amnesia drops from $19.99 to the max of $4.00 (20% of the Counter-Strike value) since their non-bundle contributions are quite low.
User #3
Old value: $69.95. New value: $23.99. Same as the above, the max of 20% is reached, so it cannot increase any further through bundle games.
User #4
Old value: $29.98. New value: $0.00. With zero contributions not from bundles, their contributor value remains at zero.
How will this affect your contributor value
Add /update to the end of your profile URL, and you'll see a new contributor value in brackets, next to your existing one. This reflects the updated value, limiting bundle giveaways to 20%. This will have no affect on the vast majority of our users, and only begins to adjust values on those that have submitted a higher than usual amount of bundle games.
Proposed changes to what can be submitted
Lately, the rules are difficult to understand. Certain bundles can only be submitted at given times, and there are over 100 individual bundle games. Users submitting individual bundle keys, whether on accident or on purpose get a bad reputation, and it's the cause of countless arguments. It creates a lot of confusion and brings a negative feel to the entire community, which completely goes against what we're trying to accomplish. The above changes would mean anything can be submitted at any time, and the site will automatically keep contributor values in line. If someone enters a $120 contributor giveaway, you know a minimum of $100 is coming from non-bundle games.
Feedback
No changes have taken place yet. At the moment we're looking for feedback from the community to decide on a fair approach. Please post your thoughts below. Thanks!
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