A little Math for the people which NEVER won a giveaway:

-- For each giveaway you entered, figure out the number of participants, say, N.

-- With a nice calculator (the Windows one will usually do), calculate the fraction (N-1)/N; this is the chance of you NOT winning that particular giveaway. (Exception: if there were x copies of the game in that particular giveaway, the correct fraction is instead (N-x)/N);

-- Now, multiply all the fractions you found for all the giveaways you entered; this is the chance of you NOT winning any of them. Let us call this P -- it is your "luck coefficient" (remember, big P does not mean much, while small P means very unlucky, but only if you have NEVER won anything at all);

-- So, if this number P is 0.5 or so, your "not winning" is just like flipping ONE coin and losing, which is not very unlucky at all. Even if you entered hundreds of giveaways, you will be surprised how big your P might be, specially if you are only going for Skyrims and CoDs of life. Example: 700 giveaways with 1000 entries each gives you P=0.496... so you would have a 49.6% chance of NOT winning anything. Even 1000 giveaways with 1000 entries each gives you P=0.367..., which is slightly unlucky, but not terrible at all.

-- In fact, by the very nature of chance, there WILL be people here who never won and have tiny P's... Heck, I did not do any calculations, but, with at least 58000 members who never won, I imagine there might be a few people with P<0.01! If you are one of them, ok, YOU are the unlucky 1% -- post here and cheerfully let us know that you are actually an unlucky sod.

-- If P>0.1, keep trying; if you have won something, do not complain... either way, you are not eligible for the "unluck" prize at all!

So, if you are a member who has never won anything AND have a tiny P, THEN you are allowed to complain. Let us know how tiny your P is! ;) ;) ;)

Cheers!

(Disclaimer: as far as I know, there is no actual "unluck" prize, so do not keep your hopes up on that either. And if there is one, you will end up being 2nd unluckiest person around and miss it anyway. :) :) :) )

12 years ago*

Comment has been collapsed.

I have a HUGE P. Just ask your sister. :P

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

As soon as I saw "how big your P might be..." I knew someone would post something like this.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

The thread was totally empty. Here's this wall of text from someone trying to get everyone to do statistical analysis for his amusement, and it contains a perfect opening like that. I just couldn't help myself. XD

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Is this the kind of member we have in this site? ;) ;)

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

C'mon now, don't make it hard for him.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Please don't erect puns into this conversation.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Deleted

This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

BAM! That's right, I went there.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Why do you track every giveaway you enter on a spreadsheet? That is the biggest waste of time in the world.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Functions

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Because right now I'm procrastinating. And when I procrastinate, I procrastinate HARD.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Rock on sista!

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

+1

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I now want to make sweet sweet love to you for your procrastinating prowess.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I started doing something like this, but I'm way too tired right now to go through all 600 of my entries.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

too much; didn't calculate

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

If N is too high I would suggest to enter puzzle giveaways (yes I'm shamelessly whoring my puzzle giveaways now). So instead of 1/1000 chance of winning you'd have about 1/50 or so :3

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

N = 50 is too high.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

My P is HUGE.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

So it took a little while to enter over 500 numbers into cells in a spreadsheet, but it turns out my 'p' is 0.338925027

So I guess my P isn't too tiny.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

But we love you anyway.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

BTW, if you don't want to do a bunch of individual calculations, then just look over your entries history, estimate roughly what the average number of entries there were per giveaway you entered, go to your calculator, do [that number minus 1] divided by [that number], and then raise the result to the power of number of giveaways you've entered.

For example, if you entered 200 giveaways with an average of 500 entries each, it's (499/500)^200. Which is roughly 0.67. In other words, if you entered 200 giveaways with 500 entries each, you've still got only about a 1/3 chance to have won anything in any of them.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

yeah.. I'm not doing that.. To much work.. But it would be nice to have something like this implemented on site..

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

"...it would be nice to have something like this implemented on site..."

Hell no. This is Steam Gifts not a probability and statistics class. People should learn that in school, not here.

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

P

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

My P is only 0.356751, but gosh do I feel unlucky...

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

For those of you who are curious, but don't feel like manually entering all that data, I wrote a little excel macro that will delete rows that don't contain numbers. Just go to your "Closed" page, copy the entire table, paste into excel (should all go into a single column) and run this macro while it's selected. You'll be left with nice, pristine numbers.

http://pastebin.com/bUULm6En

12 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Closed 12 years ago by Thexder.