Yes, but my invitations are easy to come by. I am under the impression that this is a private group which is an exception to the OP's generalizations.

No it's not.

Giving chances to win games to the people I like seems fair to me, doing that in base of their money spent does not.

...well if you're gifting specifically for cv it actually discourages that(quality aaa games) if you know how it works.
don't gift bioshock infinite, it'll devalue(cv is tied to steam's price and keeps recalculating), in a year your cv will be 30.
spend that $60 to gift 12 copies of badrats, that price is stable and you'll still be at 60 from it next year.

better 60 copies of crazy machines for a stable 1200 cv.
(better yet buy 60 copies of humble bundle weekly thq and get 2820 cv for the same money)

(or if you're only shooting for a lower amount(just starting out and looking to get over the .01, 5, 25 or 30 humps)(or to pad your existing cv a little(as long as its already over 20% of the value)) regift free keys like faiery solitaire that were intended to go to people who actually wanted them. or basically stolen free keys from some polish website)

(or maybe find 2 friends looking to buy anyway (or willing to say you gifted) some game like bioshock infinite, make a private givaway with their 2 entries. get your 60 cv and the name of a aaa title on your list(of course it'd also show your only 2 entries). or form a group of 4 chipping in to buy a 4pack, make a givaway with 3 entries 3 copies ect)

so you only really gift aaa games if you don't actually care overmuch about your cv. cv doesn't encourage it.

People who have given what? Shadow Harvest? Crazy Machines? Darksiders? RF:A? Zeno Clash? Bad Rats? Toki Tori? Ignite? Bundle keys? Free keys they swiped in an online giveaway that should have been left for people who actually wanted the game? All the system has done is foster abuse and rancor amongst the community.

Read what wbarton just wrote. The CV system is highly abusive. Cg creates alot of 3000+ CV giveaways, those are nice because not many have that much, but when it's up to 1000 alot of people still have that because they abused the system by buying bundles and simlar.

You get points based on the value of public giveaways created, not counting your own. If those giveaways were public instead, it would just generate that many more points for people to enter, and they would all enter those giveaways preferentially. Nothing would change.

Go on then, make a few great giveaways for the entire community. See what happens.

That is so on-topic.

The wheel is everywhere on all our cars, trains, planes, machines, wagons, and most factory and farm equipment. What could we move without wheels? But as important as the wheel is as an invention, we don't know who exactly made the first wheel.

Stalin almost destroyed the USSR (quite possibly the entire world), thanks to Communism. No economic boom would be worth it if that happened. Industry is just one aspect of what makes a country stand on it's own two feet.

Now I was referring to equality in communism, which can be found in all variations of communism. I'm not sharing my games with people I don't want to share them with.

I'm already in good giveaways. Do you know how I got into good giveaways? By giving a lot of things away.

Now explain to me why you would give the privilege of entering better giveaways, to people who give absolutely nothing away? It's simply not fair. Why give to those who don't deserve it?

That doesn't contradict what I said above.

Then why people who have given more deserve better chances?

Are they special or something? Are they better? Having more disposable money makes you better?

YES I AM SPECIAL AND YOU ARE PETHATIC

Dafuq nosey o.o

BECAUSE

Seriously, you need some logic classes.

Ok... though I honestly still don't see any valid points to "convince" people anything.

But, never mind that. The way you say how it's affecting you negatively kiiiinda makes you sound like you're pissed that you're not in any of those groups(that is assuming you're not, with emphasis on "assuming"). Also by your logic (as already stated above by other), contributor giveaways also don't give some people a chance so they are affecting those people "negatively" too. You claim those are just fine. I think the word for that is hypocrite but I could be wrong.

You should pay more attention to what you said. Please read your original post. You said, "Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the possibility of creating private or group giveaways shouldn't exist, but I feel they have been overused and it's been detrimental to everyone."

Edit: In case you're having trouble understanding yourself, let me clarify something: "I'm not saying that the possibility of creating private or group giveaways shouldn't exist" is the opposite of "I'm arguing in favour of not having any kind of giveaway groups, of making all the giveaways public."

Decreasing options available to contributors does not encourage people to make more giveaways. Even if contributor system would work perfectly (and everyone would be happy), all those private and group giveaways would not magically transfer to public ones. Even now people have the option to make giveaways for everyone or for their friends. For their personal reasons, they choose the latter. If that option is not available, that giveaway would not be made.

let me answer your 4 questions:

1. You are in group with people you like, you don't like ppl in your group you leave it and find yourself another one. Also in small private groups with limited members, if group is active everyone knows everyone. It's much easier to solve your problems in small community - and you know admin from chats/forums/gaming-together, so if someone is being unfair you can easily talk-it-through with him. Good luck doing the same with community of 200k+ sers.

2. No we don't - it's full of spam, whining, begging etc. Sure - it's moderated - but you will never get any of this in any good group.

3. Yeah, sure, becase it's sooo easy to know and befriend 200k+ community.

4. If you don't like certain group rules - nobody's forcing you to join it. There are a lot of different setting - monthly GAs is just one of them. You also get play-together groups, reviewing groups, puzzle-groups, ratio-based groups etc.

I think Zel hit the points well enough to not warrant my own response to each.
In regards to #4, most my groups are not mandatory and the two that are I don't really even expect to win much and join mainly for fun.

There's several arguments why private giveaways shouldn't contribute to CV.

First, though, it's important to talk about why we should have CV at all (since you seem to be arguing it should be taken away, or at least that giveaways with CV limits should be taken away. I've seen people saying that before, so it bears answering.) Optional contributor value limits for giveaways is useful because it encourages people to buy games that are on sale and give them away in order to increase it. There is absolutely no question that there would be far fewer public giveaways total if CV weren't around to encourage it. (There are really relatively few giveaways with a high requirement, too -- so it seems very likely that we're getting more giveaways from the incentive of CV than typical users are losing by being unable to enter them.)

But in that respect, CV is really only useful to encourage people to give games to the community. If you're in a private group, you don't need it -- it already has its own rules; that's the whole idea behind private groups. This is probably why you're saying it's unnecessary. For you, it is, because you're in groups that provide other incentives for people to give away gifts (via rules or just by having a close-knit community.) But for other people, it's useful.

Second, with that use in mind, very small groups dilute the meaning of CV. A handful of friends who buy games for each other and make a group to do it is not at all the same thing as someone who buys games and gives them to random strangers. Again, I can see why this isn't convincing to you, because you're not using CV -- you rely on groups that provide other, more solid incentives for giveaways.

I don't seriously expect it to change, and it's not like I think it would really make much of a difference either way. (Sure, the numbers are a bit meaningless due to sales and ambiguity over what qualifies as a bundle game.) But even if someone gives away a public dozen copies of a game on 90% sale and gets ten times the money they spent in CV, they're still giving something to the community; that's behavior that should be rewarded and encouraged in some form (even if the system is inevitably imperfect.)

Trading games with your friends via SG in a semi-random fashion -- that is, in a group where you know they're going to give you about as many games back as you're giving them, statistically, because the group's rules require reciprocal giveaways -- that's not the same thing at all. I would say that from the perspective of what SG as a whole wants to encourage? Giving away one bundle key should add more value than giving ten copies of Bioshock Infinite to your friends in a private group.

It's not that there's anything wrong with giving copies of Bioshock Infinite to your friends in a private group! You shouldn't be penalized for it, no. It's totally cool and generous of you. But your reward for doing that is giving it to your friends -- your reward is in the fact that you know them. Steamgifts doesn't need to incentivize you to give gifts to your friends -- that's silly.

(Obviously I know that there's really a range of groups; it's not all five friends trading games. So it's really a bit more complicated than that. But ultimately CV is just about recognizing and rewarding certain kinds of behavior -- and there's no particular need to recognize or reward giveaways in smaller private groups, at least, since those have their own incentives.)

It's not a matter of deserving this or that, or fairness, or rewards, really. It's about incentivizing certain kinds of behavior. CV is a total failure at fairness, and honestly you don't really get much reward for it until you get into the thousands level, but it's shown itself to be excellent at encouraging people to give away games, which is the real purpose for it.

Anyway, the simpler explanation of why Midnighter cares: Obviously, changing the incentive structure like that would encourage people to give away more public games and fewer private games. (It would particularly draw giveaways out of large impersonal groups with no rules or incentive structures of their own -- groups like the ones you're in would still do fine, since, I mean, nobody is going to win 100+ giveaways in public groups either way.)

Whether that's a good or a bad thing is really up to you. Having said all that, I don't think the impact would be particularly large, so I don't care too much either way. I don't agree with the OP; I do think private groups are fine things, and SG totally should have them... it's more that I see no particular reason for SG's underlying structure to incentivize people giving gifts away in them.