Be concise & constructive, get a chance to win Grim Dawn [Update: Sent]

yes, they just banned from certain functionality. I'd rather have silent ninjas than silent trolls banning fair users from accessing keybot at all by sending fake reports about invalid keys.

Or you could just change numbers/letters or use really basic encryption like users usually do so that bots can't take their keys.

because of the same reasons you mentioned - people are not aware of site rules, don't understand english etc - and they mark received b4 they get the key. Even yesterday in SGT thread there was a cas of a guy who won GA, he knew the guy so he marked b4 receiving and got himself locke out from SGT. Not to mention a simple missclick - you missclick received only to unmark very next second, but all your other entries are lost, includin irreplacable ones like private GAs.

you like to watch yourself type?
or you like to type?
cause watching yourself means you have hacked into my video feed of you ;)

Honestly? No. The worst thing in any community that can happen is that people have the impression they are being treated unfair. You see it here every week for different reasons. Adding another system (to the already existing ones) which would for the majority of the people add to this feeling could never gain an positive enough effect to outbalance the negative part.

Believe me if I tell you that I wish it could be like you suggested. I have given away four gift copies from Our Darker Purpose which all gave me less CV I actually paid for it. But an honour system regarding the received key/gifts will only increase the stress on the forum.

Every time something is suggested here people go: "No, it can be exploited", but there is never the follow up of "is the possibility of exploits negative enough to outbalance the benefits it could bring?"

This is an excellent point. Many threads with great ideas have a lot of comments that focus on some fringe issues, in some cases theoretical issues that the commenter has no way of proving (the classic "server load" claim). It's fine to bring such issues up, but people need to also balance the pros and cons.

because exploitable undetectable way of boosting fake CV makes whole levels system suddenly unnecessary - because you can boost yourself to level 10 with no effort or expenses and noone can catch you on cheating, because it will makke people less likely to make GAs whatsoever - why would I mnake GA to boost my level, when I can cheat it instead? It's not the first, not 2nd and not even 5th time someone proposes this idea of "gifts giving full value" thinking how he came out with a new brilliant solution - it's not new, it's idea that someone thought of and proposed years ago - like 3-4 years ago at least, for the first time and it got denied and got denied ever since. Because it's explouitable system, unable to detect and SG will never enforce a system they know is exploitable. Simple as that.

Wishlist have the same problem as entries for me, same what I covered - much more people will have wishlisted COD than some Grand Strategy. also number of wishlists doesn't have to indicate quality of the game - No Man's Sky is still 5th most WLed game on SG. You won't tell me NMS is in top 5 best greatest games on Steam ;p WL = Hype, WL =/= Quality.

Number of users who meet entry requirement seems like a much more reasonable idea thou - it doesn't punish no game, no genre, no niche. But here I see a problem with Private GAs - how do you want to calculate them? Theorethically if I make lvl 0 Private GA it can be posted on forums without nothing - it can be accessed by whole community, but I can hide it behind restrictive SGT gate and only few people will be able to enter. What if I hide it behind a puzzle? Theoretically anyone can solve it, in practice most ppl won't even bother. What if I use Private GA to exploit your anti-group idea - instead of posting Group GA for group of 10 users I make lvl 0 Private GA but send the link only to those 10 users. How do you want to differentiate this GA from one I posted pblicly on forums or used in puzzle?

I understand your point of view but I don't share the same idea.
I haven't been for long, but I like the way private giveaways works as now. I mean as long as you're not abusing the system with alt accounts to get CV.
Also I think the load needed to implement your idea would be relatively big. Not much for the calculation process but a lot because of all the request that you should do to get the information needed for the calculation.

Let's start with the groups/withelist first:

1. How will you calculate the the user base? The total number of user less the number of user that already own the game ?
2. When will you calculate such number ? At the start of the giveaway, in a random moment in the middle or at the end?

If point 1 would be the case you would get a lot more CV from groups giveaway rather then public ones since the user pool is incredibly smaller. And still in that case for every giveaway you should make a check request for every group member. For smaller group with level, ratio and CV requirement maybe those request would be around 100 or 200, but if you take in public groups with thousand of user in it the request would be a lot more. Also take in consideration that at on every giveaway you will have to scan the entire group, you could use a "marker" to point out that a specific user is already marked to have the game on a scan successive to the first, this would mean adding thins in the database. If instead you take the whole number of user as it is you would end up with, more or less, a number greater than the actual pool.
If you were to apply the The total number of user less the number of user that already own the game for public giveaways too, to get the the right number for the equation [CV / (entries / possible entries)] the site would implode right away probably.

Regarding point 2. If it's calculated a start it would work for really fast giveaways but not for longer one and cam be abused. If it's calculated randomly it could somewhat avoid abusing it. If it's calculated at the end it can easily be abused too.
Also note that if for some random reason someone win the game but doesn't remove the entry you may end up with more entries that possible entries and thus actually giving a 1.XX multiplier to the CV instead of a 0.XX multiplier.

With private :
You simply won't ever have enough information to apply the method. There are too many variables to take in consideration to even make a fair guess about it.

Ending with public ones:
If you have to calculate every factor for every giveaway I don't really think that the load would be bearable. Even if the database if perfectly optimised and sorted you would still have to check every user almost once for every giveaway.

Those are my opinion if you want to make it "fair", or you would just have to make guesses about the probabilities of the possible entries at given interval of time (eg. 1 day or 12h or whatever) and still this way too you would not be able to apply it to Private giveaways.

What I think could be right is to make sanctions harsher for rule breakers to stop people from abusing and/or give a small multiplier, meaning 1.20 for highly wanted AAA games to make public giveaways for those highly wanted games more frequent.

Totally concise reply. :P