Should the current policy of how free games are treated in relation to developer gibs be examined/fixed?
Giveaways available on SG only aren't considered free because you cannot use them to farm CV for free. Each win on SG gotta be activated on your own account, so even if hundreds of copies are given away none should get regifted and thus should not be exploited to gain free levels.
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So it's purely CV-related? As in it's a safety measure to guard from the abuse, rather than just being a scarlet letter on the game.
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More or less. You can't abuse games given out for free here to raise your CV, but you can if they're free elsewhere.
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Yes however I think this answer (zelghadis') misses the fact that when games are mass given away for free here, they're often mass given away at other places as well soon after. Even then all in the meanwhile, and before any mass giveaways are made the keys are floating around from the dev/pub to notable community members (that sometimes inflate their CV levels and others before they do bigger giveaways) . So even if it is to combat some form of CV farming, it's not entirely effective in that manner -- it allows users with higher influence/affluence to farm CV, personally or otherwise from subsequently gifting keys to friends, while the users with smaller libraries probably don't have that ability. This is why you'll see sometimes a game given away in lower amounts by multiple users and then a larger one later. For instance recently, Wrath of Anna -- you see dozens and dozens of users giving away 5, 10, 25 copies of the game and not marked as "promotional".
It's nothing new of course. I mean, I didn't even vote in my poll. Just wondering how everyone feels about it as I do know the nuances in and out and even operated within the damn things myself.
:D
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well, not long ago, there have been many many people coming with hundred of copies of same game...
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I just updated my reply to talk about that cuz I thought it was important but you replied 4 seconds after the edit so you might've missed it. xD
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You ninja'ed me :P
Well, that is exactly that game I am talking about ^^
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For instance recently, Wrath of Anna -- you see dozens and dozens of users giving away 5, 10, 25 copies of the game and not marked as "promotional".
That's because the developer was throwing keys at people left and right, even if you didn't ask for them. Trust me, it had nothing to do with influence. The developer was almost forcing people to take keys.
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It may not be "entirely effective", but it's effective against casual CV abuse, which is most of what would happen.
The point is, for an external giveaway, people who aren't interested in the games take the game keys and then gift them. For giveaways on SG that doesn't happen.
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I'm not disagreeing with you in regards to the dev-key abuse. That seems like a very hard problem to fix though. But it does at least prevent some abuse.
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yep that's the reason why, we have no control on external giveaways, but we can verify if a giveway is a regift from a mass giveaway made here
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why is regifting a factor in whether it should be considered bundled or not though? the reason for this topic is (from what i gather) regular non developer users are contacting developers and getting massive amount of keys that have not been bundled before, just in order to boost their cv for either free or below a bundled rate price... a true developer doing promotional work would not (imo) care about CV by anymeans what so ever, and would be looking at it as promoting their game (like it should be) so they should not care if it is considered bundled by our (steamgifts) standards.
edit: oh well, nvm.. op did say free.. i say they should be treated as bundled standard though when mass gas of that nature occur.
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Wrath of Anna should beconsidered bundled.
There were like 20 different 50-1000 key giveaways made for it here for the CV. I wonder if you should get any CV for dev giveaways, look at how many of those jumped from lvl 3 to lvl 7.
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that one being the absolute top contender i agree.. they were free all over the place.. i even managed to find a reddit page with 5x wrath of anna keys on it, took one, left the rest.. 3hours later told people here in forums the link, got 4x thank yous for the reddit link cause nobody even touched the other 4keys they were so easy to obtain. grand total of 8hours sitting on the internet before they got used.
second contender is rogue operatives, certainly was abused as well. i'm not saying everyone was contacting dev's either. in fact i'd imagine some of them were legit asked to do promotional work. but promotional keys, dev keys, etc. should just be treated as bundled here anyways to prevent that abuse regardless imo. people can hate me for that if they want, but a good developer shouldn't care about trying to receive CV here on SG for those specific keys. they should be forced to do the same amount of work here on SG as all us non-developers. making a game shouldn't get you a free pass to skip levels.
they can still get CV from those just fine, putting them on the bundle list would almost entirely stop the users from reaching out to developers, and developers that truly do use this site are welcome to gain CV imo just the same as us regular users. but they shouldn't get the xtra CV out of their own keys anyways imo.. the decreased CV should suffice for promotional keys. i'd love to see a single developer argue with me on that case, it would just make them look greedy, won't happen (or i'd laugh if it does).
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SG attempted to prevent this by adding the 5+ copy cut decreasing. but it's very apparent that is not enough. 15% and the 5+ copy decrease increment however should be.
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Wrath of Anna
Added to bundle list on Oct 20, 2016
Bundled effective since Sep 22, 2016
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Aside from those we had people going to devs getting 10s or 100s of keys and making mass giveaways while saying thanks to the dev in the description, there should probably be a tag or something for dev giveaways so they aren't exploited for mass CV gain.
I wonder how many people jumped to lvl 7 because they made Wrath of Anna giveaways.
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How do you determine what is a dev giveaway and what is not ? While the mass giveaways are obvious, they are already limited by the diminished return after the 5th copy (there is no difference between a 100 copies and a 100 000 copies giveaway). Besides those, there are also a lot of people giving away only a few copies (often in group giveaways too), then moving to the next game. They usually don't mention devs (even if they did, they would stop the second we implement something to limit the CV from these giveaways) and just say something vague like "consider leaving a review". Tagging these as dev giveaways would have to be done manually, and it would rely on assumptions so we would get tons of complaints and discussions dragging on forever. It's a lot of time and energy that could be better used elsewhere.
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does it really hurt anybody to have them all tagged bundled though? the diminishment is clearly not enough though because this issue is gradually just getting worse, not better. further reducing the CV gain would greatly diminish this issue all together after people realize they only will be getting bundled rate cv gain vs non-bundled rate.
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Again, how do you determine which games to bundle? Wrath of Anna may be obvious but Vermintide, Neptunia, Convoy and a multitude of others have been given away by devs. Should they be included to the list too?
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admin specifies a threshold number, same as the 95% threshold is handled.
example: mass GA of 500copies goes live, it in turn gets moved to the bundle-list. just as if the it had gone over the 95% threshold.
again, a true promotional purpose GA should not care about CV, its purely for promotional purposes.. all others are here to take advantage of the system. and yes this is including actual developers, they should be forced to do the same amount of work as non-devs. making a game shouldn't make you entitled to skip levels, nor knowing or contacting somebody that made a game.
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The bundle list is not handled by the admin but the bundler: Theshobo. It is at his discretion what games get manually added to the list at the moment.
The moment you add a threshold, peeps will just undercut it. They don't have to do 500 all at once but can do in batches of 10-20, in public, groups, and private. Adding more qualifiers will not solve anything since there will be a work around.
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so doing nothing at all is better? i never claimed it was a perfect solution, i said it "would greatly diminish this issue".
i mean nothing, even on the "obvious ones"??
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Not saying that but just pointing out the issues. Your solution would require more moderation and is seriously flawed. It would lead to support ultimately asking for receipts to verify that the keys were purchased or dev sponsored. I very much anyone here likes that idea.
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while i agree, doing nothing and allowing this to run rampant will only fuel it to get even more out of control. now we've even been getting topics opened asking how they can contact devs to do the same, that's how bad it is getting. there is no need to have proof or verification, as you said it is up to the discretion of Theshobo.
not even trying to move when a rocks are being thrown at you means you are obviously going to get hit. at least try and dodge a few of them.
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The mass giveaways at Gleam, Indiegala, Failmid are about way more than 1000 keys.
Oh, and voted for the nice RATM reference, though it should be "won't" instead of "don't".
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I'm guessing it's because the keys on SG are meant to be activated on the winner's account, you can't regift them. You can do it with keys from everywhere else, which lets you farm for CV.
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Is this free https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKjib23Hx6Q
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Nothing is truly free, I honestly want a Steamgifts-Steam account merger thing, in which one prebuys/inputs steam code to redeem it automatically on the the winners account if they don't already own the game.
Steamgifts should be a secondary place to find people to trade, other than Steam itself, other sites don't receive any support, and G2A type reselling just cheats everyone out of their money.
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You could do that in the past, from humble bundle pages.
But steam disabled that kind of features.
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Rip, Valve moved on to focus on the virtual hats and knives scheme instead of giving us a better Steam and HL3 :(
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fuck you I don't do what you tell me
don't = won't
that is all
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I knew it didn't sound right after I typed it out. Too bad you can't edit polls. :(
Even then, if you won't do something, you effectively don't do it. :D
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Agreed... wasn't even 100% certain it was a Rage quote... but glad as hell to see one! I've seen them five times over the years.
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when i registered on steamgifts i thought ppl can't make ga's with devs keys ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
From faq
Do not ask users or developers for keys or gifts, whether in comments, chat, or outside the site.
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Well, I can confirm with you for a fact that rule is broken a thousand times over by lots of respected reputable SG members.
As well, devs/pubs reach out to give keys without being asked just as often.
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It doesn't say you can't make a ga if you were given a key, just says not beg for one.
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If the user or developer reports it and provides proof, then yes, they can.
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I can also report my dad for opening my mail when I was young. What is the chance of that happening?
Edit: Didn't think this was a blacklist worthy comment but w/e. Thanks :3
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You raise a very good point, one that I've never thought about.
I suppose that SG can say that the games given in bulk away on websites like Gleam are counted as free because a lot of users will be able to guaranteed get those games, without even a "small" chance of not grabbing the game (in most cases). However, they must think that the users who win these game copies will use them for giveaway purposes, trading purposes, etc.--something other than having to redeem to account--, allowing users to use these to boost their GA value, make profit off of, etc. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that all users "must redeem won games to their account" if they won the game on SG.
I can't really think of any REAL situation that would lead to them not counting the games like this free on SG.
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The sad point, is that we can't giveaway "free" game... even for 0 CV / 0 sent gifts, to make other people profit from left keys you may have, whereas game is no longer available for free.
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Oh, I forgot about that part...
I hardly giveaway games on this website, mainly because I'd rather give to those who I know will use the game...., so I'm used to thinking that any game can be given to anyone.
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Ideally one would only enter giveaways for games they really want and intend to play. It sucks that a lot of people enter any ga just to get a +1 game on their account or because the game has cards. To me that is selfish and a little bit of character flaw...
Anyway, because I only enter for games that are on my wishlist I choose to believe that most people do that as well.
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I believe giveaways made here are not considered free because it's not like anyone can get a copy at any time. It's still a raffle not first come first served.
And also you can't farm CV like everybody else said. :)
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As others said, a game with 1000 giveaways here (but no free keys elsewhere) can't be abused, regifting is forbidden. A game with 1000 keys on gleam (or whatever) can and will be abused though.
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Did you just put a Rage Against The Machine reference? haha
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Does anyone else think it's funny that a developer/publisher can giveaway (either themselves or via Steam users that swindle the keys from them in exchange for "advertisement") a few hundred copies of a game for free on SteamGifts and the game isn't recognized as "free" but if you giveaway a few hundred copies or more elsewhere SG considers it a "free" game?
For example, the Rogue Operatives game that's given 1000 copies away over the last 5 days. If that giveaway was on gleam it would now be marked for free here. Anyone able to consolidate that logic?
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