A few Stats nobody asked for

have you ever woke up and thought to yourself, heck, i wonder how long it takes to get to lvl 10...?

have you maybe asked yourself, darn, how much money would a guy need to reach that prestigious SG status symbol...?

well, boys and girls, look no further! im here to provide some long awaited insight not only into those burning questions, but also to some related topics as well, by sharing my humble experience, fueled with my obsessive stat tracking, hand in hand with a few other tips and tricks and even concerns you might find useful!

first of all, yeah, a vague introduction, well, if ive done everything like i usually prefer to, you should not know me. i favor wallowing in absolute anonymity of my own bitterness, on the fringes of any activity i enjoy, and, let me tell you something, SG has given me more enjoyment than im willing to admit!

now, back to the task at hand. i invite you all to a numbers game! being just a regular joe, i would consider myself to be a pretty default SG user. i buy games, most from bundles i deem worthy quality or quantity wise, sometime directly on steam reaaallyy rarely, i dont have access to free stuff, i dont use unlicensed vendors, so, bottom line, i do what an average user can and is probably doing. well, okay, there might be one difference. im painstakingly meticulous, and now that i have reached lvl 10, lo and behold what it took for me to get there.

so, hell yeah, brief intermission, shout out to me yay!, im freaking finally lvl 10! it was not always my goal, but, gawsh, it feels good, guys!

of course, i am not the first one to get to that special club, at the moment i hit it i was actually number 451 of active users, respect to each and every one of them!

TIME:
i registered on July 3rd 2016, and i achieved lvl 10 on April 10th 2022, so it took me 2108 days almost 6 years.

breakdown per lvl would roughly looks something like this:

• lvl 1 in August 2016, after i, khm, realized i need to give stuff too
• lvl 2 in September 2016
• lvl 3 in September 2016
• lvl 4 in September 2016
• lvl 5 in October 2016
• lvl 6 in November 2016
• lvl 7 in February 2017, after 4 month effort
• lvl 8 in February 2018, this is where it gets hard, took me a year for this
• lvl 9 in March 2019, again, more than a year for next lvl
• lvl 10 in April 2022, last step, which i never thought i could reach, took more than 3 years for it alone

COST:
in total, over all that time, i have made 329 steam game purchases. meaning, each purchase is either a single game, bought on steam or licensed vendors, or, more often, a purchase of a bundle, from which i have kept some a few games i liked and gave away the rest.

in order to make those 329 purchases, i have spent somewhere around 1120 EUR. pff, not great, not terrible, you might say, right? but, in alls honesty, that just means i spent 3.4 EUR per purchase, lets say a bundle, and with many of them containing games on more than 90% off, that is a lot of games... and over a period of almost 6 years, i can safely say it was not too big of an impact on my wallet, resulting with like 15 EUR a month. i spend more than that on bubblegum!

if anybody is interested, these were my main maybe even only bundle vendors over time: Humble Bundle, Fanatical old Bundle Stars, Indie Gala not for a long time though, Daily Indie Game DIG, Groupees few times, Otaku Maker RIP, Otaku Bundle RIP, Game Bundle RIP, Go Go Bundle RIP, Cubic Bundle RIP, Indie Game Stand RIP (just wanted to remember some of the lost greats...).

GAMES:
like i said, there is a lot of games involved indeed, as in order to get to lvl 10 i have given away 3239 games, in 3008 GAs some were of course multi copy GAs.

just to get a feel of what kind of games i gave away, it was:

• with Full Value: 40
• with Reduced Value: 3159
• with No Value: 40

which goes in favor of my initial statement, i mostly gave away bundled games i bought, so no fancy purchases, no giving away full value games i got from someone, making me a pretty average giver.

if someone is wondering, this is the breakdown of GAs i created per type:

• Public CV: 1243 GAs
• Group CV: 940 GAs
• Whitelist CV: 794 GAs
• Private CV: 83 GAs

meaning overall i gave away quite evenly, not only to public and groups, but also to whitelist.

you can check this in more detail here the number are a bit different by now, hell, did you think imma stop giving now!?.

REWARD:
during the whole process you guys were too good to me, and i cannot hold back on emphasizing that fact!

over these 6 years i managed to enter exactly 159199 GAs, win a whopping 4751 of those, and yet still be called unlucky by the sites Probability of Winning Per Day chart, stating how i won 43 fewer gifts than estimated since i first joined, hah!

what is also kind of implied is that the community does recognize a giver, even when he is not the most active one, like me. i was graced with 520+ Whitelists and only 20 or so Blacklists.

TIPS:
i would have a lot of tips to share i accumulated over time, about behavior of the users, GA creation suggestions, timings, the whole shebang, but, hey, that would take a whole other discussion. so i will boil it down to some basics anybody can follow:

• getting to at least lvl 4 should really be relatively, if you can afford it easy, with lvls 5 and even 6 just around the corner. from there, you are basically settled, in SG terms. please, give at least a little, it goes a long way!

• i dont want to sound rude or snooty, but refrain from giving away with no lvl set or even lvl 1. those games would just most likely be snapped by bots or worse.

• build a healthy whitelist! it is so much more rewarding to share among users who acknowledged one another that way.

• connected to that, if you enter whitelist GA of a user who was kind enough to blue shield you, you might as well return the favor!

• dont multi account grab all the games given away free anywhere! get your one copy, there is literary no value in giving away bunch of free games except for pissing off guys that you got it before, if you get off to that.

• use ESGST. simple as that!

CONCERNS:
i would also take the opportunity to bring up a few, well, opinions more like raise a few concerns, khm about how some things functioning here, based on what i always wondered about but never dared to ask, some of which can even be consider site bugs. in order to avoid discussion on these topics here, i will open a follow-up thread for each of my observations to get your honest opinion, and just list them all here.

1. GA for Group + Whitelist is an exploit

2. no CV games should not contribute to ratio in Groups

3. why is replaced key still revealed?

4. non-SG related how come SteamDB rating is not more relevant on Steam pages?

last but not least, some obligatory goodies, packed into a short train starting somewhere around here!

all the best, my fellow SGers, love ya alls!