It would be better at a win because other wise it will become normal and ignored entirely,..
And if I remember right at registering people get shown to the faq nowadays.
And the ammount of P is not that massive, its only massive if you are piccy for the games you enter. Indiegala has a massive pool because plenty of games cost only a couple of points...
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If the number of games one can enter a giveaway for (with the average P value of a game offered on the site) is more than, say, 25/wk (50 hours of gameplay at 2 hours per game), then there's not much need for more P - there's not being picky, and then there's irrational greed. I suspect that the amount of P one gets is in fact sufficient to draw on than 250 mean-value games / week, an order of magnitude more than one could enjoy according to basic math. For a particular giveaway, there's no more generosity occurring at 50 entries than at 500 entries. I understand that it would generate more ad revenue for the site, which is important, but at a certain point it's just encouraging regifting and even intentional profit-seeking scams, which was my point.
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It is in the FAQ. Not in the word "regifting" but:
You should only enter to win giveaways for yourself, and if you win a game, it must be activated and redeemed to the Steam account used during registration. If a friend is interesting in joining giveaways, they'll need to register for their own account.Comment has been collapsed.
also the TOS
Terms of Service under "If You enter a Giveaway" >
any Gift you receive is for personal use, and must be activated, or redeemed by the Steam ID associated with your SteamGifts.com account. The Gift should not be used for other purposes, including by not limited to, trading, selling, or regifting.
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When there's already a FAQ and a Guidelines, no one is going to read that unless they are new to the internet or have a reasonable suspicion that they might be using the site in an unintended way. Those things mostly exist to make it easier for stakeholders to have something to point to in order to have the final say on something. If I had been suspended over a TOS violation, I certainly wouldn't make any claim that anything unfair had occurred - sure, it's in there, I didn't read them, that's fair.
In fact I'm not claiming at all that the ban on regifting is unfair. It's just that it's harder to discover than it needs to be, and the high inflation of P actively lead me to believe that it was, if anything, encouraged. The site rules are fine, but the existence of that rule is kind of a gotcha.
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oh i totally get ya.. ~4years on this site and i still haven't read the entire TOS either.. i've read the entire guidelines and faqs pages, but not the TOS. i just pointed that out because i perfer its wording more then the guidelines version of it.
guidelines say wins "should be" activated on your account
terms say wins "must be" activated on your account
xD
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Yeah.....
only enter for things you actually want to play.
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The biggest issue here is people assuming that points are some kind of currency you should use as soon as you have any.
Points are to limit users from overdoing it. They are not a currency you should use as fast as you can because they'll go "to waste". It's nothing more than a limit to stop users from using bots or spending all day entering everything without thinking about it.
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It's is specifically under that assumption that P seems inflated vs. giveaways I can see.
Fixed that for you.
Part of the reason is that you're not seeing a decent portion of the giveaways created on the site. There are hundreds (or thousands) of group, whitelist, and invite-only giveaways also hosted here. As you gain level, give away more games, and become more active in the community, you'll find yourself added to whitelists and invited to groups, and you'll see how many invite-only giveaways are posted on the forums (there are a couple threads posted right now with several hundred giveaways each). Those often (but not always) have much higher value than public giveaways, and their entry requirements often reflect that, but you still accrue points based on the value of those giveaways, along with the public and level-restricted ones.
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Wrong for several reasons:
First, by default a new account (e.g. mine) can see level-restricted giveaways by default. I had to set an account option to filter those out.
Second, according to https://www.steamgifts.com/stats/community/giveaways fully half of all giveaways are public, so I just need to multiply what I can see by 2 to know how many giveaways there are.
Finally, there could be literally infinite giveaways and my point would still be valid - it's not physically possible for someone to play for an average of 2 hours each even half of the games they have the P to enter for, and I suspect it's more like being impossible to play even 1/10th. When I say "physically possible", this is assuming a person doesn't work or go to school. Sure, users need to be able to enter at least SOME more giveaways than they will have time to play, but it is dialed way too high as far as I can see. It only encourages misuse of the site for no benefit.
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I just need to multiply what I can see by 2 to know how many giveaways there are.
Even if you don't hide games you own, DLCs for games you don't own and giveaways above your level, there are a lot of region restricted giveaways that you can't see
it's not physically possible for someone to play for an average of 2 hours each even half of the games they have the P to enter for
It doesn't matter since you're not going to win half of these games, or even 1/10
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Fair point - but again, even if you multiply the giveaways again, by 5 (assuming literally all giveaways are region-locked - I'm in the most populous region, NA, with about 20% of the user base),
there could be literally infinite giveaways and my point would still be valid
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my point would still be valid
Valid but irrelevant, why try to limit users to enter no more than what they would have time to play, when they are only going to win a very small fraction of what they enter
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First, by default a new account (e.g. mine) can see level-restricted giveaways by default.
I never mentioned level restrictions, only whitelist/group/invite-only. Edit: I didn't even mention region-restricted, as Tempete did, which are another good portion.
it's not physically possible for someone to play for an average of 2 hours each even half of the games they have the P to enter for
Entering and winning are two entirely different things. There are games I've entered over 500 giveaways for and not won.
and I suspect it's more like being impossible to play even 1/10th
I don't know anyone on SG who wins anywhere close to 1/10th what they enter, and the lower your level (or the less you give), the less chance you have to win. That seems pretty fair to me. Most people enter 1000 giveaways before their first win (some much more). Those odds go up with level, whitelist/group, etc, but still rarely (except in a handful of groups, which are set up for that) ever reaches 1/10.
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Sorry, I misunderstood what you meant by "as you gain level".
The rate of wins would go up if the entry counts went down, which would the result if the P cost of entering went up relative to rate of P gain. It's necessary to have some amount of wasted entries, but 60 people entering a giveaway doesn't result in less charity than 600 people entering the same one. I personally think "within an order of magnitude of the physical capability of playing the games in all entered giveaways, assuming you have literally no life outside of doing that" is a pretty reasonable ballpark to shoot for - in fact that's my entire point.
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The rate of wins would go up if the entry counts went down
Nothing would change. If point generation went down for everyone equally, the number of entries in a giveaway would go down, but people would be able to enter fewer giveaways by an equal factor. A person's rate of win wouldn't change (except possibly in certain groups that don't get many entries anyway).
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Point generation is fine.
You are low level so you see only a fraction of the givs available and you joined during a sale, so there's a lot of new giveaways (points are tied to that).
If you start joining trains you'll burn your points in a minute.
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Creation.
It's covered here: https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/51Rfd/point-regeneration-and-enter-giveaway-changes
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Actually by default I could see all the giveaways; I had to set an account setting to turn off the ones locked off by level. Regardless, there's already arbitrarily many giveaways so that throwing all those level-required ones on the pile doesn't weigh for nor against my point.
What is a "train"?
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a train here is when people setup several invite only giveaways and chain them together with links one right after another (or here instead of chain, it's "train" :D) then the first link (train cart) gets posted somewhere here in the forum.
this topic is one example.. xD
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The points we get to enter giveaways is based on giveaways created on the site. Trust me, as a level 5 user, there are often times I don't have enough points to enter everything (games I actually want to play), especially on days where humble bundle adds a kickass bundle.
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Surely if there were fewer P and the number of entries per giveaway was lower, your increased win rate would proportionally balance against the fewer drawings you can enter? Remember that not only P income but giveaway P prices are determined solely by the site. It seems more or less equivalent except that extremely inflated P slightly encourages degenerate behavior.
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Regifting will always be a problem here. There will always be some dicks that will win and just give it back after. My biggest peeve is the mass of Bit Blaster XL. This user was kind enough to give away thousands of copies, but there are many that abuse the ToS on this. They win it 2 or more times and regift them all while some people, like me, have entered every one of these GA's by him and have yet to win even one copy.
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I don't understand the point of entering for a game, you don't even want to keep.. That just seems rather glutenous how some people win multiple games and give them away it baffles me...
Since the site is about others kindness when someone is being a clear bag, and have a second offense of re gifting they should be immediately banned. No questioned asked.. Once mistake ok, but if you make it a second time that should really be it..
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I don't see the point of reducing P income. There will still X games for Y players.
The problem is, we give away too many games.
Let's say on average you give one game and receive one game per day.
Do you even complete one game per day ?
And oh, I have just checked your profile. You have barely used SG.com yet, and want to change everything already :P
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It's too late for me to edit the OP, so an addendum to my suggestion: It's come to my attention that the point generation is based on the idea of making sure that the average entrants per giveaway is at most (the entire userbase / 20), ignoring the different weights for cost of entry (thanks to user Tzaar for the link).
I personally think this is misguided. The minimal-effort, no-coding-required way to improve this system is to dial down the point generation ratio until such time as a nontrivial number of giveaways start bouncing with no entries by the time they ended, then dial back up to just above that level. This would increase the average utility of giveaways by making sure "meh sure why not" entries never happened (and therefore never won), and would do so without decreasing the amount of charity occurring. Plus, people would have the satisfaction of having a much higher chance of winning each giveaway that they enter.
Again, this may be unacceptable because of the impact it makes on ad revenues. But from the perspective of end users, I see no downside.
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What you think of will actually decrease the amount of entries in the giveaway and imagine your chance of winning from joining 10 same game giveaway, which based on luck to win maybe 1 in a 1000(high entrant) to just joining 2 giveaway with a higher possibility of winning such as 1 in 200(less entrant), I would prefer joining more despite my rate of winning is low :# (psychological effect?) Btw when you reach higher level, more of the same games will be found given away.
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You what?
Maybe you should get off your high horse. There's a reason why it's set up like that, it evolved over time.
Edit:
Also, from the earlier discussion:
Under guidelines https://www.steamgifts.com/about/guidelines
It quite clearly states:
Winning
Won gifts should be activated to the Steam account used during registration, and they should not be regifted, traded, or sold.
Edit 2:
Back to this part:
Under the faq
What are levels, and how can I increase my level?
If a giveaway is invite only, or for a whitelist or Steam group, it will only add value towards your level if it receives 5 or more entries. This is in place to prevent small groups of friends from attempting to cheat the contributor system, and to encourage users to expand the reach of their giveaways. The whitelist feature offers an easy way to target a larger audience, and you can combine it with small Steam groups to receive a greater number of giveaway entries if needed.
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Yes, I know that. I just meant his experiment would negatively affect group/whitelist/invite GA creators.
Until he deems it satisfactory I suppose ;)
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Ouch, caught me on that edge there.
Aside from the accusative tone, that's cool - I don't know anything about that. Can you elaborate on said reason, and how it developed over time? Just a summary from memory will suffice. I notice that the site is ~8 years older than your account so if you learned it somewhere else then a link would be very helpful, if you can find it again.
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Yeah, nice.
Nice way to show your true nature.
I guess after 3 days you already know better than cg how to do his site.
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RE: edit 1, I don't see your point, sorry. I understand the rule, I just don't know what you're getting at.
RE: edit 2, I can assume you mean to say that people need enough P so 5 people can enter private giveaways. Assuming one wasn't willing to find another solution to that kind of level-boost scam (not that I understand the point of levels beyond, like, 1) you could still use the proposed solution, just to a less-extreme degree (dial down P until people's private GAs with reasonable pools of possible entrants would start falling under the X-entrant line)
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Edit 1 was for the discussion under https://www.steamgifts.com/go/comment/z8YSC3D about regifting and wether it is expressly forbidden.or the rule easily overlooked by users.
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I just discovered this site and I figured if it's going to throw so much P at me so frequently then I'll just spend it all on whatever, and I can flip the games to get some levels. I have some open giveaways from my own collection and more on the way only limited by the new user cap of 3 titles at once, but the number of titles restricted to at least a couple levels is huge so I figured flipping giveaways was a good way to boost my level.
It never occurred to me that this was an improper way to use the site because the P income is huge. No one can possibly play that many games that quickly - yes, I know the odds of winning are low, but they're low specifically because the ratio of P income across all active users is massive compared to the cost of entering a giveaway. P seems way over-inflated for no reason except to make re-gifting easier. Level limits on entering a giveaway is nonsensical to me except to reduce the number of scam accounts, so it made perfect sense that it's just an account-age restriction that can be satisfied by re-gifting. Eventually someone who actually wants the game ends up with it so no harm done - a quirky system, but whatever, the site's apparently been around for a decade, they must know what they're doing...
More importantly than any of the above, it was only by complete coincidence that I was searching discussions for possible search filters to make it easier to burn my extra P that I caught a reference to regifting being against the site rules. There's absolutely nothing in the FAQ about it - the first place you spot it is the first bullet point of the Winning guidelines, which is near the bottom of that page, assuming you even go to it. I was probably going to get suspended in will under a month, just by trying to be a regular user of the site. Steam chat reminds you not to share account info every time it opens, and I think a similar remind should be next to every "enter giveaway" button.
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