Remove/Adjust CV from Group Giveaways

I understand the idea. The thing is that there are open and closed groups. I don't know if it's possible but the best for me would be to remove CV for closed groups. The open ones being open, I think they can be considered as a sufficient part of the community to have their CV taken into account.

And then do same for private? Or maybe increase the number of entries required to something like 20 or 50?

I'm happier gifting what I have to a group of people who are nice (my whitelist) or care about gifting stuff themselves/play their games (groups). Events in the forum (invite only) are a more fun way of hosting giveaways. But, to get rewarded for the stuff I give away, I would have to delve into the hell hole of auto joiners, rule breakers, bad ratios and people who haven't gifted in years. I get that I'm not the person you're against here but what you're suggesting would make SG a worse place for me.

just blacklist them

and it s not fair for thoses who had created real group GA

why blacklist though?

Well, then also remove CV from all giveaways for other than 0 level. Remove CV from all region-restricted giveaways. Remove CV from trash flip-assets that was never bundled but sold dirt-cheap. Remove CV from all developers giveaways - they got their games for free! So many ways to exploit the site... Maybe we should remove CV completely, just to be sure?

In my case 81% of my CV comes from Public Giveaways, but in the last few weeks/months I changed my giveaways to Whitelist and Public ones with Lv.6 or Lv.7 as requirement.
At the same time I check the entries and also add people to my Blacklist - mainly cause they reached their high Lv. just because of group/invite only giveaways and/or region restricted ones (for regions they don't even live in).

I know, Lv.6 isn't easy to get, but at my last giveaway with Lv.4 as a requirement, around 33% of the ones I checked landed on my Blacklist. Giveaways without a requirement Lv. is a no go for me - cause of all the leechers/autojoiners/bots and so on.

Removing CV from groups completely would the wrong way in my opinion. A better way would be a graduated value of CV based on the group size OR based on it if it's a public or closed group and if it's a public group, everyone should be able to see for which group the GA was created (if I don't know for which group it was created, I can't even know which one I have to enter).

Better just increase the requirement of entrants to get CV for a GA, from 5 to 20 or so for group/private GA's. Public should still be at 5.

I think it's wrong.
There are so many important groups, like the SGPillars, Unlucky-7 and others.
Also don't forget about community trains and puzzles. Many of them bring activity to SG and give users different experiences.
It would be wrong to remove the contribution for all this.

I agree with the premise, it's a good idea.
I created giveaways for mostly "open" groups like Playing Appreciated, or at a lesser degree, Unlucky 7 (have only a few wins, or you can be a gifter, but that means a few mandatory GA a year). If we take aside good intentions and look at maybe the biggest group - Steamgfits - the issue is pretty clear - it's an opt-in system, and people need to know about those groups to know that they can join them, even if it has no requrements.

It would be a less radical, but sensible thing to raise the entry number required for the giveaway, for it to give CV.
Why?
Because if I make a level 0 giveaway for S.Gifts, I can reach to 66,350 people in this moment. If I make a level 2+ giveaway on Steamgifts, 55,944 people can enter it.
Just to spell it out for everyone - level 2+ giveaways are more restrictive, than the biggest group. If we want to push a rule for "all groups" regardless of its size, we have to apply that to leveled giveaways as well. Also, you can just click and enter a lot of groups. You need to pay to get to higher levels

edit: I just realized that the level disparity partially comes from the issue you made the whole topic about. It would be interesting to see how the user levels would change if group giveaways would need idk, 50 members and/or 20 entries for GAs to count. Maybe a higher number? You know, something like this.

Private GAs can be the same as group giveaways. Removing CV from group GAs will not "solve" the issue, as some invite-only groups - like Unlucky7, Playing Appreciated etc. are not here to casino-trade-1:1-giveaways like the ones you want to tackle. Only way to tackle those is to rise minimum number of people required to get CV. But then expect retaliation from monthly-subscription-trading-groups. As people do like to be in them apparently.

Instead of removing group CV from total CV - we could have public and group/private. Or public and total CV. Then people could decide if they want to gate their GA from people who made certain number of public GAs or not.

It doesn't solve problems of people who make a lot of private GAs as part of the puzzles or events though. It's like whack-a-mole. Or people who are tired of rule breakers and "leechers", so they migrated to WL and small groups. You can't "fix" one thing without creating issues in another.

Why remove CV from groups and not from whitelists or private giveaways? I think that this line of thinking could lead to the right conclusion, that the CV system itself is the problem.

CV was introduced as a way to encourage people to give. However, it's used by most as a measure of how worthy a person is to win anything.

That's not a very good criterion. Suppose someone who won hundreds or thousands of games made all their CV with public giveaways. Does that make the person worthy of winning more? They certainly don't need to win more.

A good solution would be to make people who win a lot have a harder time winning more. One way to go about it would be to create a criterion of "number of times won" or "number of times won in a year", which will allow limiting giveaways to those who haven't won a lot.

I said it quite a few times before, but I don't think such an idea will be accepted, because SG isn't really a giveaway site. It doesn't exist to let people give games to others who need them, something which isn't needed that much today. It's for collectors who like to get more games also giving games to other collectors -- in effect, random trading.

Since that's purely a game, rules can (and are) arbitrary. No CV suggestions will actually achieve anything tangible, because that'd assume in the first place that there's meaning to SG giveaways, where there's none.

I'm not sure I got your idea correctly : it looks like a matter of audience.
So, following other's ideas (dooder, PotiNator and DingDong2), I'll provide you my own similar suggestion :
Why not multiply CV by the number of entries in each GA ?
It will make unrealistic and stratospheric values, but at least it would scale the CV with the audience really reached by each GA.
Big drawback is that it favors famous games (AAA mostly) rather than lesser-known good games.

Whether it's counted or not i would just like that it remains easily understandable.

Same as others, I like to have some chance game ends in good hands. Some games were unwanted trash, but some games I bought just to giveaway them, cause it were titles I love and would like to give them to someone, who would like to play them. For example Elex, Control, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Prey. I was seriously disappointed when I saw some of them even in tiny groups wasted by people who won't play them and just wanted cards.

First i need to say, it's unimportant what we throw here in the ring because cg will not do much work if it don't hit his money purse -and force him that way-.

I don't think your idea are good, not because of my level or my group GA's, only because i see cv as a motivation to make more GA's.
To be very clear it don't bring much advantage, so if i am level 3 or 7 is nearly the exact same, besides the fact that i gave away games for $1k+ more as when i would be still level 3 (to lazy to check how much exactly -it isn't so important-).
So it is in all cases above level 2 or 3 a bad deal if someone only do it to gain something (besides the motivation) from it.

From your own words "trimming CV abuse" ...
If you want to trimm the cv abuse then set all games from the shady RU stores (and the asian ones that are around but in a much lower ammount -and i am more specialised on the RU stores-) to 0 cv.
Because right now bring a 20€ shady RU store game that get bought for 5 - 12 cents then first 20cv, later MAYBE 3cv.
That are a big bunch if you calculate then that this game and all others not only get gifted with one copy.
Let's say 5 games/week with each 5 copies = 25x20cv = 500cv or 25x3cv = 75cv, bought for (lets pick high) 25x10cents = $2,5.
You see if we would pick low it would be the half of this costs and the people that use that "loophole" do that daily.

Same for asian and russian groups that exchange the private only links to their GA's.
Your group cv kill or adjustment, would not hit them but they don't do something else as a "closed group".

And that are only a few fast examples. I would have much more...

I think it is good said here:
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/Bo0c0/removeadjust-cv-from-group-giveaways#ieSmRMR

Removing CV isn't going to stop these people from abusing the system. Look at the Evil Genius giveaway from the other day. They were 0 CV to begin with, yet we saw people giving away 5+ copies. They do it to artificially increase the number of games given away on their profile. They just inform everyone that they've been exploiting mass giveaways of certain games. lol.

Also, Lootboy put a DLC for Warhammer Underworld Online in their Gold/Thank You Pack. I gave mine away because I don't have the base game. Not many people would actually get it due to it having to be your 10th pack. I saw someone giving away 16 copies here almost immediately, meaning that they have multiple Lootboy accounts. That is, unless they've changed it and it's now turning up in regular lootpacks, but still, 16 is excessive for one account.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter, they will always find a way to "cheat the system", if you want to call it that, and some of them are not doing it in groups but in public GAs. If you have a really great game and you want to give it to someone who will actually play it, consider joining Playing Appreciated or some of those groups. Yes, they're private groups, but they were created for the very reason that you made this thread.

I haven't the best record of playing my wins, but then I haven't the best record of playing any of my games in the past few years due to health issues so I haven't joined PA, but I still enjoy SG. IF I had a highly wishlisted game to give away, I would certainly ask to join one of those groups temporarily to ensure that it went to someone who really wanted it. You know?

[I agree largely with MSKOTOR's observations, and some of my comments to them apply to your main post]

I'm normally all for exposing more data, though I personally don't like providing SG functionality that reinforces a stigma certain people have with how much people give publicly versus group/invite/WL because it would aid a specific value judgement of users: That public giveaways are the main or only way that someone contributes to the SG community.

I respectfully disagree with that value judgement, as I think the only widely popular stigmas that SG users have of others (for better or worse) are:

• Users who have more Received/Won CV (real/raw or otherwise) than Sent/Gifted CV
• Users who have any Not Received giveaways, regardless of underlying reason or long pending support ticket to resolve

...so it makes sense that we have stats around those things.

If you want to blacklist people who do or don't give mostly public and/or invite only GAs, then you can skim through their list of GAs and easily eyeball GA types (public, invite, group, WL). I personally don't make that kind of judgement, because I don't assume that people have a "bad" motive or are a "bad" user for gifting mostly to groups/WL/invite GAs. For all I know, they merely create group/WL/invite giveaways because they want to give other people a better than long shot 1 in 1000+ chances at winning a public GA once in a blue moon even if users spend their points consistently.

If you want to blacklist people who don't participate in Discussions forum, then you can view the user's profile and click Discussions to see the posts they've made and/or look at their comment count.

BTW there's a ESGST plugin that makes extracting & exporting giveaway lists easier (from SG page: Users, groups, etc).

lol who cares about CV?

In some cases sure they are. But at least they are not trying to cheat the system.

So winning 600 games without ever giving one, not even a freebie is not cheating the system but giving away games is cheating the system?

Thank you for starting this discussion! I've learned a lot from the responses so far.

I think more transparency would certainly help reduce the value of "abusing the system". It seems like there is already a decent amount of transparency, for those who know what they are looking at (I don't. Lol).

A couple things I'd REALLY like to see on SG:

• a user profile that's semi-customizable. So I can learn more about you all, and share a bit about me.
• more tools for those running groups. It's no doubt time consuming to run a group fairly. I think making that easier to do, would go a long way.

There are clearly a lot of bots and people with multiple accounts.

One thing SG could do, is "are you a real person " questions periodically. Answer question correctly, get 50 points. Fail to answer the question over the course of a month or something, and get flagged.

Any change/improvement to the site, is no doubt way easier said than done. I really enjoy the site as it is, and am hopeful the people running it are trying to make it even better!

I don't feel super invested in all this, but I see your point. Personally the two things that would IMO improve fairness on SG are:

• the value of your GA is frozen at the time they were created. No more level dropping
• leveling up requires a progressively increasing ratio between GA created and won