I think rude people. Luckily there aren't too many.
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I misread that as "nude people" and was wondering what I've been missing lately... :P
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lol..What if icaio suddenly decides to get rid of his fluffy Santa beard? I was wondering the year if that ever would happen, but it's Christmas again and I bet he spares us the nudity. :D
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I misread that as "nude people" and was wondering what I've been missing lately... :P
Clothes. You've been missing clothes. They were talking about you all along.
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I answered everything listed, because I see pretty much all of it equally.
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Low amount of people who are able to take a look and do action in support tickets. So not blaming mods, just think that there has to be a way to get more mods and support people who could do actions for support tickets or find better ticket system (sorry, don't have idea/suggestion regarding "better" system but I think this one is not really good) so people don't wait year to get ticket resolved.
As far as poll go I am not sure about bots/mults, if there is big amount of them yeah they are biggest problem but I wouldn't know.
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You seem pretty upset about SG for someone who only entered 465 giveaways in more than 4 years and gave one game.
Maybe the greatest issue are the expectations people have?
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The biggest problem is the number of active giveaways on SG is less then half of what it was just 2 years ago.
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That's it.
Caused not by anything in the poll, but by Steam's gifting policy changes and by changes to bundles generally.
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i just checked all those stats.
i'm not really sure if the site is slowly drying or just saturating.
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Caused not by anything in the poll, but by Steam's gifting policy changes and by changes to bundles generally.
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Steam used to allow you to buy a game as a gift and keep it in your inventory until you decided to give it to somebody. Since almost to years now you can't store gifts in your inventory. That really curtailed a segment of gifting on this site.
The changes to bundles have been happening for a long time now. But generally speaking bundled games are considered less valuable
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The gift changes happened mostly because there were a lot of people buying gift in region where price were lower and selling them to people in higher price regions. That also prompted them to put in place the gifting rules where you can't gift to a region that has price difference of more than 10% (or so I believe)
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I'll argue it's the number of active users participating in site functions across the board. Whether it be registering (SG hit below a thousand new members registered for the first time in it's history a few months ago), giveaways (which is half what it was years ago as jigga pointed out) or discussions (375 new discussions last month as opposed to 2K plus two years ago and it's peak of 3600 in 2013] If you look at any stat on the stat page you'll see a gradual decrease over time.
In short, the site is dying. We need more shit posts to attract the masses.
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Its taken too long to address(not even sure if they have been addressed) the constant issues when people who were contributing stopped or just straight up left.
Add to that the attempts to make it better seemed to make it worse from what ive heard, you've got a hot pot of forum downhill trends.
Which would have been fine, but Steam changing gifting, bundles getting worse, key resellers getting worse meant the old guard leaving was never replaced with new quality contributors.
Shame but its definitely had its day unless there's some way of gaining a wave of new people to join or a way of bringing some older crowd back. Even if that was possible, i think region locking/gifting locking killed the steamgift star.
FWIW, I'd love to see the site come back with a bang and gain a fresh wave of new people making this place great again. There's a lot of good stuff here.
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That's been a trend for forums across the entire internet though. They've all been declining year after year. You have shit like reddit, facebook, twitter and instagram popping up and attracting people there because they're bigger. Bigger isn't always better, but unfortunately it's the nature of people.
... Also discord.
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I mean, regarding the three middle options, you can hide games. I've hidden almost 17 thousand games. Once you couldn't, and I would have quit Steamgifts before winning even my first one if that hadn't gotten added in a bit before that..
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Mob mentality and an ever-shrinking, inclusive group of site "leaders."
But honestly, that's pretty much par for the course for any given online community.
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This site is aged, so the numbers being drastically reduced(giveaway #'s, new members, and discussions) seems like it's just a part of the natural life cycle of any site. Not to say this site is dying but, as far as I'm concerned, SteamGifts was never the "downtown nightclub hip with the kids", so to speak. Yeah, that was a really lame way of explaining my point but SteamGifts isn't exactly the #1 destination on the website. It's had its ups and downs.
I'd argue that stuff like bots and... questionable community clashes over the years could be a factor into, say, discussions but it's always been very minimal AFAIK and I don't know of any severe incidents over the last 8 years. In terms of giveaway numbers, it is true that Steam changed its gifting policies. It's still more convenient to just gift via gift links(e.g. humble bundle which I did for quite a while before I stopped altogether), but I haven't gifted in a while so I don't know what it's like. Humble Bundle makes it incredibly easy to gift games, though. I think Indie gala uses the same system too.
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Well, then the site should be open to gifts form some other places. Like GOG, for instance. I had many keys from GOG over the years and had a hard time giving them away, some went expired.
On the other hand, without Steam gifts and the current reduced value system is really hard to level up and pretty easy to level down. That might put new users away easily. Without new blood, every site will go down.
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I can't even imagine the effort it would take to accomplish that and GOG Galaxy is still in a beta-like state.
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I don't have any serious woes, bots are trouble of course but its common for any site where you can get free stuff. Of course its noticeable that amount of giveaways is declining, but since i am part of the problem cant really complain about it.
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well, I really don't have any serious issue here.. I enjoy a lot my time spent here even if in these weeks I don't have that much time to dedicate to discussions and answers and overall my experience here is positive, I've been living everything here in a sane way =) I enter only giveaways I like with cards and achievements, I make lots of giveaways from bundled games, indie games to unbundled ones, I've got a nice whitelist and some great groups so I really can't vote =P
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Haven't had time to read many threads these days, but what is the multi account thing? I thought if you don't activate on the winning account you'll get banned? Plus there's a minimum account value (that reads unbundled game value) just to be able to qualify for the site. Seems a lot of trouble to make one as a throwaway?
You're also missing a big one: Where are the bundles? It seems fanatical is the only decent source anymore, and humble is a shadow of its former self.
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If an account doesn't activeate their wins that account will eventually be banned, and a Steam account can't join Steamgifts unless it already has at least $100 worth of games so making throw-away accounts like that would be rather challenging and likely have next to no payoff.
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I agree, it's possible and I imagine some have tried it but I really don't see what would be the upside beside maybe cards farming?
It seems to me that it would be a huge amount of work for not that much. Unless I'm missing something here...
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Yes it's entirely possible. Sometimes I'm amazed at what people come up with for a little profit.
I can just imagine what they could accomplish if they put that much efforts into something positive instead...
I haven't seen it that often but it did happened once or twice where I've seen account that looked suspiciously like alt account so I'm
sure they exist I just don't think they are that prevalent on SG and if they don't activate the games they win, I assume they would be found out eventually by the staff.
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If i have to choose one i'd choose bots, because all other mentioned problems are easily avoidable.
The big issue imo is fewer giveaways due to 1. very few cheap-n-good bundles, 2. cheap-n-trash bundlers cannot be trusted anymore (hint: key revocations) 3. valve stopped old good game gifting 4. gray market seem to have raised their price floor for good and aaa games.
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Something else. (specify)
People being dicks in general, really. I don't think bots, giveaways choice, and leechers/farmers are worse than people with a really poor attitude. If you use bots and you aren't an ass to the community while doing so, I'll respect you more than someone who's a damn scumbag but doesn't use bots.
A bot will inconvenience a few people, but toxic behaviour ruins a community entirely.
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I was thinking of the actual inconvenience caused - for example, I personally have never been inconvenienced by bots simply because I've never noticed them enough to be bothered I didn't win a giveaway because of them - after entering a giveaway, I move on with my life and if I win it's nice, but I won't get upset over the possibility of a bot "robbing" me of my win. Bots didn't disrupt my experience on SG as much as a handful of assholes would - But if we were talking about the impact bots have on the website, it's a different story altogether.
All in all, mostly everything you've listed in the poll can have a negative impact on the website and its community, but I still feel that people's attitudes and general toxicity can be worse than anything mentioned, because it destroy a community. Right now, I'm able to enjoy SG because there are more good that bad people on the forum/groups I'm part of. If there would be no bots, "bad" giveaways, leechers and farmers on SG, but the population would be extremely unpleasant, I'd have left a long time ago. I prefer a good community with a few inconvenience than a perfect website but with a poor community. Silver lining! :D
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I only discovered this site around 2016, so I haven't been here for the haydays of 2013.
But from what I see the reasons are:
- Less new people joining. Because most of the people who would use it he site, already know it.
- Less quality bundles (and less bundles overall) on sites like humble or fanatical
- Much easier to sell games on sites like G2A than it used to be. So people prefer to sell their games instead of gifting them.
- The hype is over. Like I mentioned in #1, when SG was young, lots of people were joining, and I guess there were the hype of discovering this new site together. Now the site is old, and full of people who after years of using it are now leaving. So it's not that exciting as it was in the beginning.
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Popular, but less so.
Every project is most popular on release when the hype is in it's height.
And with time it dwindles down.
Especially so in community-run projects, where you don't have a constant investment of resources or flashy PR campaigns.
I'm sure cg (the founder) is not as excited about working on this site as he was when he just started. And has plenty of other projects that need his attention.
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So you see the problem right there.
It needs to be someone:
- As capable as cg coding-wise (and even then it will take him/her a lot of time & effort to learn all the existing code)
- Someone motivated (and will hopefully remain motivated) on working on the site and improving it.
- Goes without saying: Someone who has enough free time to execute all the improvements he/she plans
- Most importantly: someone trustworthy that cg can trust the site to.
So as you see it's quite the feat to find someone who checks all the boxes.
Even more so now, when the site is less popular than it ever was (as in every field, software developers like to work on the popular/sexy projects, not "graveyards"...)
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Excuse me, the real bias is against the sausage roll, cakes get everything birthdays Xmas, Pies at least get halloween? or thanksgiving in the US with pumpkin pie, but the real question is what does the sausage roll get... Nothing
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I don't think any of the listed things are problematic at all for how the community works. IMO the cutback of Steam gifting caused a lot more problems - either because of that or some other reason, but there are a LOT fewer unbundled giveaways on forums. There are less people participating puzzles because of simpler rewards, puzzles got simpler and simpler, and somehow turned into roadblocks (jigidi) instead of actual puzzles where thinking was involved, and solving it felt rewarding.
Also a "generation" got older - more things to care about, less time to even play, people leaving the site and the well-known community disintegrating/shifting. And new people find these lowered activity as the normal, so with time activity slowly spirals down, except a few community events. Somehow current SG forum is at a state where I rather go and look for something to play or watch rather than start browsing the forums. I just don't really feel like it matters much for me anymore, too much negativity, picking on others (I'm also guilty in this on my more tired or disillusioned days, another reason I try to cut back on socials) and ... greediness? It's just seriously taxing. There are better times but I feel to be drifting away slowly but steadily from the community.
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Something else. (specify)
SGTools and puzzles.
Also the fact that the site should be rename into "Steam Humble Bundle Gift"
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Not enough puzzles based on 'zelgh magic guide to basic sg puzzling', cos those are the ones I know how to solve :P
Nah, it's just like 9GAG, or Victoria's Secrets shows...not enough new people so they slowly die.
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