Point System Updates

It can't say I like the current system - people are unloading all of their Humble Bundle games at once, but you can only join a small fraction of them. Imo it would have been enough to increase the points cap (or even better: increase them based on the level), so you still are able to participate in more giveaways when people are donating a lot of games at once, but don't need to check the site as frequently.

Thank you.

The logic behind this change seems to be along the lines of: every morning, you'll wake up to 500 points, of which you'll have to carefully choose the games you'll put them into, but hey, because there's less people entering, you have better odds at winning.

The thing is, like lots of other people, I check SteamGifts throughout the day, sometime hourly, to see what GAs are up. So I'll never have 500 points. I woke up today with about 100 more points than the night before. I entered a few GAs and now I'm broke again. And unless I restrict myself to only popping on once or twice a day, I'll never have a large amount of points. I can't really be more selective now, because I just see whatever GAs are there when I log on and I'll have to wait half a day to accumulate enough points, which I'll use to enter another handful that happen to be there at that time and then I'll be broke again.

I understand the reasons behind this change, and I won't argue those reasons. But, for better or worse, part of the fun of being here is taking chances on GAs and seeing if you won. The more of that there is, the more fun it is, and the more I want to be here. Now, I'm always starved for points and watching a bunch of wanted giveaways roll past me. The excitement about the potential of winning a GA is kind of being overshadowed by being bummed out at all the ones I can't enter now.

I can see all the pros and cons of this change but I don't think my opinion matters since I don't have a clear solution either. Subjectively I don't like it, perhaps it's better in the long run but I'll just end up being more stressed about points than I should. This update brings back memories though, from 6 years ago when SG was still young and points were so scarce that I had to wait an entire night to be able to enter a 20p giveaway. :)

This was a reply on another post, but I think it warrants it's own post:

The REAL situation however is that it isn't about the chances per win, it's that the flexibility is gone.

You get the same points on Humble Playstation Day as you get on Humble Monthly day.
In the old situation you would have less interesting titles on PS Day, but thus also less points to spend, balancing it out.
In the old situation you would have more interesting titles on Monthyl Day, and also more points to spend on them.

The only logical conclusion thus would be to take the Playstation Bundle points and bank them for the Monthly Day since it'll generate too little points for the amount of (wishlisted) giveaways being created. Worse, most will be 1-hour giveaways take take more points than a single hour can even GENERATE.
If you trust on the 500 max you really cut your chances short compared to banking those calm Playstation days that had no real reason to generate so many points.

There's no reason why such a good, flexible system nicely playing into the whole bundles that are often given away, with only a few minor (mostly gamemakers) ones screwing it over (or people mass giving away the free Outlast) needs to go for a rigid system which doesn't play into especially Humble Bundle's release schedule.
Even if you literally bank all your points knowing in advance the HB days, you wont know the titles, so you don't even know if you're limiting yourself for something you want.

Meanwhile bot-users can just set their bots to join every 1-hour giveaway not caring and raking in the massive wins they'll get now from people having to hoard for bundle days. Effectively making bots more effective in what they do, farm cheap games to futher bot them card drops.

Nobody wins whereas simply making the point generation smaller (and not have free games count as people said countless times) with a few safeguards for excesses like Outlast or RPGMaker would have kept a perfcectly good flexible system which works well with the bundles this site 90% relies upon.

The update at least means I won't max out my points while I'm away for a few hours at a time.
From my observations thus far, however, it's slow going to enter new GAs once the points have been used.

I really liked the "all in" system on Nick Klein site "Steam Companion". It feed my ludopathy (Kappa). Guess we're not gonna see that type of thing here.

It kind of punishes those that frequent SG a lot - by a huge margin.... It may affect the amount of games bot users will be able to enter but it will do nothing to deter them in the long run - it may even be beneficial to them (in terms of win ratio). If the change was put in effect to combat bots, it seems a bit counter productive to punish those that don't use bots - quite severely imo. If the change was a general change in direction then ok, no point arguing there. The change and cap increase seems to heavily favor casual users of the site while at the same time being detrimental to the more frequent users. Also this system doesn't take at all into account the nature of bundle releases, which is a shame - it was nice to get more points when there are more new giveaways - seemed more forward thinking.

It would be nice to complement those 15 points with a modifier that is related to the amount of new giveaways you make - or relative to their (real) value to be more fair. That way there would be an additional incentive and benefit to making new giveaways. Not something dramatic but something to kick it up a bit.

I feel we can enter much much lower amount of GAs.
I understand globally we all have same odds.
But as we have much less points to spend there are downsides.
Much less activitiy on SG, people are now not enough incited to connect whole day long in their (whole day) spare time : they can't enter more than 2-3 giveaways if they come back 2 hours later (40 points in 2 hours ! so they can enter 2x 20 points giveaways every 2 hours... that's quite low amount).
We have to carefully spend our points, and not waste them on games that are not "worth" them.
This is going to kill (whole day) active forum users.

My suggestion : increase point income x2, x3 or more and point cap too.
Actually, point income could have not change in first place, but just the point cap.

I don't know, why raise the cap when you also lower the maximum number of points to enter a single giveaway? 300 points was fine and it's even finer when the maximum one can spend on a single entry is 50P anyway. Wasn't the whole point of the point system change to make people think twice which games they really want to enter?

500 points, jeez, now I really will never run out of points.

I don't really see the point of this change at all, but alright.

Well, thinking about It, an "all in" points option would be useful for the giveaway creators since they might be looking for people that really want to play the game, specially on the AAA stuff.

Steam Companion had a multiple & single entry option for each giveaway.

Maybe this could help with the auto join scripts? If somebody want to really play a specific title and the giveaway creator set It as multiple entries, then the user would be encouraged to place most of his points on that specific GA.

I really do not like it. Banning auto join should be sufficient. If there are more average points available because the community is active just raise the amount of points people can accumulate. The new system punishes active users and regulates the supply / demand balance.

Sounds like a good change. Thanks, cg. May I suggest that now that points are scarcer you could reconsider giving people refunds when GAs are deleted.

My wishlist page has 5 giveaways ending in the next 5 hours, totaling 204P, but I will only earn 100P in that time. I am sad. 😢

I understand the reason for the change and I am fine with the decision, I just think there will need to be a few more changes to make it better. Increasing the minimum GA time to 12 hours would be a huge help.

So, one goal of this change was to keep people from feeling like they had to log in all the time to avoid capping their points. I never really saw the problem with this but fine. Now, I'm being forced to log in every hour to see if I can find the best flash giveaways for my precious 20 points while watching dozens of other giveaways I would have liked to enter vanish in the rear view mirror. Bad change. Your ability to enter giveaways needs to be proportional to the number of giveaways being created at that moment in time. Humble days are now going to be a source of frustration not a frenzy of excitement.

Perhaps once I have 500 points and a bank going I might feel differently.

I have mixed feelings about the change....I definitely don't like the minimum time limit. I think it's ok for groups to set limits for their group-only GAs, but not as a blanket rule across the entirety of SG. It takes away some interesting fun-factor GAs.

As for the new limit and speed of points...still unsure. I'm leaning toward not being a fan, as this is how indiegala works. When they made their GA system into a steady-as-she-goes, slow release of a max cap of daily points, I stopped visiting as much (and so did everyone else). It actually killed a lot of the activity on that site and reduced the overall quality of GAs. Now, SG is a lot bigger and I don't expect quite as dramatic of an effect, but I think that overall it may be detrimental to the site. Time will tell.

Can't say that I'm a fan. I feel like I can barely enter anything now. I entered for a game on my wishlist, Orwell, and I'm out of points already. And One Piece Burning Blood costs me 50P a pop, yet the entries are always exorbitantly high, which means entering for the lower level giveaways for the game are not worth it now. Because before at least you could enter for it and it wouldn't be a problem because the points would just regenerate with it. Now I enter it, I lose not only the game, but also 2.5 hours worth of points as well. And that's only for one giveaway. Enter 3 times and you lose a third of your points for the day already. And the chances are still pretty brutal.

Sounds like a good change! I like the openness on why it changed, too.

I'm not convince by this change. It's more fair for users because it's easiest to connect once per day instead of checking regularly and for not losing points now. I agree with that.
That does not solve bot problem.
That means that this system will mostly benefit to users that have no activity on the forum and shares nothing with others.
I also think that the puzzles section of the forum will be hirt a bit with this new system because a part of the people on this part of the forum are here for the better chances of winning a GA (those who complains when a puzzle seems to hard to solve :D )
And the winning chance won't be better I think. Yes on the paper they are better for 1 GA. But chances still are low and entering large number of GA instead of a few will still give you better chance to win in my opinion.

A tweak on the old system with a limitation of max point per 15 minutes would have probably a better way to regulate amount of point. And of course finding a real way to fight botters.

Don''t like the fixed point distribution.. Really preferred the point distribution relative to the actual amount of GAs/their cost. Now this new variant just creates a bunch of issues.
Sucks if new bundles or deals/sales are released and there are actually multiple games you'd be interested in (so far i don't see the entries changing by a significant amount on GAs, maybe that does need some more time however). And while i do feel like we got too many points when that happened lately (especially on Humble Bundle Bundles, which i get myself most of the time) this solution probably went a bit too far in the other direction.
Fake/Deleted GAs actually hurt now. Where i previously didn't care much for a 60p loss for a GTA V GA for example, nowadays a 50p GTA V GA would basically mean losing 2.5h of point distribution.
If you feel like people are having too many points to spend that's fine, lower them.. just would've really preferred to keep it relative to the actually created GAs instead of this fixed point distribution approach while still having variable amounts of giveaways...

It won't last.
So many people don't realize that the proportionbetween value of GA's created and amount of points to spend of them is essential for the system to work.
Now they will.

Don't like the fixed release. It might make it easier for people to plan around spending but honestly has issues.

With this setup, whether the place is flooded with giveaways or dead the points are the same. So when the place is flooded with giveaways from some good sales, won't be able to have enough points to enter enough while if the sales are dead and not much going on, you will have more points than you can reasonably even want to spend with nothing to spend it on worth getting.

Before, you knew the points exploded with humble bundle releases as well as when you saw it explode, it gave a good indication that there was a decent sale that just started.

I will admit that it makes it easier to plan around, but I don't really consider that a good thing either.

Yeah, with the graph you gave, they might get 6 times as many points to enter 6 times as many giveaways but also there are just as many new giveaways with just as many new entries to them.

Would rather the points match the activity of the giveaways rather than a fixed number. And of course you will see massive point explosions with a Humble RPG Maker giveaway. That is a good thing when the costs to enter the giveaways are pretty huge as the costs of the software isn't cheap. That isn't a bad thing.