Just like any economy, Inflation occurs every once in a while. Due to the fact that this inflation has not lasted even a week, I do not believe anything should be done just yet. There are points when bundles come out that cause a flood of new giveaways, and shortly after an influx of points. Not to mention we are in a time period where there were (at least) 3 different huge cheap bundles (an occurrence no different than a solar eclipse in terms of rarity) If this goes on for much longer, than maybe it can be revisited but it is highly unlikely that this will last much longer.
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Bundles will not be slowing down any time soon. There is almost always 1 active at any given time, in the last year.
Heck, "Indie Royale" has a schedule of a new Bundle all the time. 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off. Thats just one bundle, forget all the "Humble Bundle", "Indie Gala", "Groupees" bundles that could be overlapping and active during all those times.
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free is good. and every bundle gets on the list of exploited, so what's the issue.
IT WILL die down, people won't keep buying bundles every week just to give away. And if they do, all the more power to them. If it kept up for a month or two then sure change the points system again but at present it will swing back to normal soon, imo. It's more usually during an external site developer/publisher giveaway that things go a bit berkers.
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Indie Royale has quality games. The amount of IR games that are given away are far less than IG and Be Mine bundles. Take for instance this current Fall Bundle. Despite IR selling 10,000+ copies in less than 1 day we haven't seen all that much of their games in Steamgifts at all. Very few To The Moon even Blackwell Deception copies compared to the number of X-Blades and King's Bounty and other games that have been featured by other bundle groups.
And soon people would want there to be regulation for sale items as well. Should Deus Ex and Hitman would be subject to similar rules even though that bundle lasted only 2 days on Amazon? SG already has a 300 points cap. Which controls the accumulation of points. Adding further restrictions only penalizes the legit buyer who pays a non-bundle price because they might have missed a sale or didn't get the game for as cheap as the next person.
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Exactly my point. My suggestion would prevent it from occurring in these situations with a big influx of "Bundle Keys" etc. So it wouldn't affect common point generation
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Yeah, I'm ok with that. If the giveaway is considered exploited enough to not award Contributor points, then IMO it shouldn't generate points either. In a way, its another exploit.
Flood the site with giveaways, to earn points to enter more giveaways.
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Yes, but more than one person does this.
I'm not talking about direct exploit for an individual user, or even an exploit at all. My main point is that points are essentially being generated from games that have no value. Point generating currently is %5 points earned to each user, based on the value of the game contributed. If a game is considered "Bundle/exploited", than there are limits placed on its value in contributor points due to how much inflation these games cause for contributor . In a sense, "Bundle/Exploited" contributions, lessens the inherent value of the games themselves. Yet, the points given to the community is not lessened. This doesn't make logical sense.
An example:
TL:DR: Point contribution to community for a regular game is 5%. For a bundle it can commonly be 275%. A slight increase (sarcasm).
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Point generation won't stop during bundle times. What will happen is that there will be a lot more games in total (many of which will be the same bundle games though), but less points to spend. This would likely lower total entries on every giveaway. Not sure if that is good or bad in everyones eyes, but I'd like that.
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Temporary? You could be right. Though i doubt that very much. There will always be a new bundle, or a new exploit.
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They need to cancel out giveaways like the ship so the contribution will be 0. That way people won't be so greedy to use multiple email addresses to get multiple keys to make multiple gifts here to just bump up their contribution levels.
And they should only be allowed to give 1 of these type of giveaways per week, to stop the flooding of the same thing.
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There's already something like that in place. No one is getting more than $30 value without giving away other things. People who have enough legitimate contribution value to cover doing a lot of these giveaways (4x the value, to be precise) don't generally care about their value and wouldn't waste their time and effort trying to get multiple free keys. If anyone actually is doing that, they probably just haven't read the FAQ and learned what I'm telling you right now.
cough
The issue is that there are several thousand active users and most of them want contributor status but can't or won't actually buy anything to give away. It's not like the giveaway spam is the work of a few people who got tons of free keys. It's the work of tons of people who mostly just got one free key, as well as people who are receiving their extra copies, since this game spawns 2 new copies when you activate the key and then those copies each spawn another one when they're activated. That's 5 copies per key. That doesn't change the fact that no one is getting more than $30 without making legitimate contributions. In case you haven't noticed, there have been several threads posted recently by people wondering why they aren't getting their contribution value from it. So, trying to make the system even more restrictive just isn't going to change anything because no one bothers to RTFM.
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I have read the FAQ they haven't of course. And then they would find out, but not after flooding the site with multiple Ship gifts. If they knew before hand it would be 0 contribution due to the fact they got it for free then would they be tempted to get a key to just gift, even though they do spawn it just means a flooded site with ships everywhere (no pun intended).
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Do you know about the add-on? It might be just what you need.
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Well, if the economy breaks, then this site can conceivably die out. Just like a real life economy, except there won't be any "Bail Outs" for Steamgifts.com
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Meh, I think its fine. The situation now is kinda unique, with the amazon bundle, free amazon dlcs and potentially 50 000 copies of the ship floating around. It will normalize in a few days.
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No. If it bothers you that much just stay the f**k at 300P. There is no rule forcing you to spend those points, or like some people like to say: for sake of spending them. And if you want to pull your "economy" here, learn something about it and its cycles.
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Not the point I'm trying to make. This isn't about me. My concern is that this will damage the community, and its overall spirit of giving/receiving.
I don't really mind it the way it is, but its a discussion that i think is important, that isn't being discussed.
O.o
EDIT: As for your "cycles" comment, Economies don't function in a bubble. They have to be maintained and tweaked. Point generation and contributor values have been tweaked very many times already. Clearly some economy balancing has been implemented. A lot of those tweaks seem to be centered around "Bundles and exploit games". Rather than dealing with droughts and drowning, we could look at other balancing tweaks that will normalize the economy.
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I'm not a republican. I'm not from the US, so I'm not democrat either.
Also, I'm not comparing the points generation TO an Economy, it IS an economy by definition.
I accept your assertion that nothing needs to change. A valid view i suppose, though i don't agree.
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Because everyone gets more points, everyone enters more giveaways and thus you can enter more giveaways then normal with a lower probability of winning. It balances out to about the same odds.
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Not really. True, its about the same odds. The difference is, that you have a higher total of different entries. This encourages people to Enter giveaways they don't even care about.
Example: If user "A" LOVES "Barbies Horse Adventures", they enter it. If user "B" couldn't care less about "BHA", they may still enter it anyway. Who loses out in this situation? IMO everyone. "Giveaway User" will often give a game to someone who doesn't appreciate it or play it, and the "Entry User" will not win due to people just wanting to spend points.
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I spent all my "infinite" points on trying to get The Last Remnant, I think I entered +95% of the giveaways available for me... and I didn't achieve to win atm.
I think most of the people has done similar to me, chose their favourite game from the bundle and go for it. No problem.
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More points more chances... if you can't click on 10-15 giveaways then why the hell are you here. The whole point is gifting games...
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Surely everyone can find 5-10 giveaways them want anytime... atleast if you don't buy all games that you want :p
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For people who are trying to win The Ship or other bundles, the economy is functioning correctly - they have enough entries to enter a percentage of those giveaways. Now for people who don't care about those bundles, yes things are out of whack - but the same phenomenon happens for people who own a game that goes on sale - suddenly they get a bunch of points that far outweigh the number of giveaways they care about. I think it all balances out in the end. People who want the bundles have good odds to be able to enter the bundle giveaways, people who don't, have some extra points towards the other giveaways. Luck is the most important factor in a giveaway, I hardly find any situations where I can't put an entry into a giveaway if I really want it. The only giveaways I've ever not be able to enter as many as I wanted (due to lack of points) were these bundle giveaways - The Ship, Rome, etc because there were too many going on too fast to enter all of them.
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I don't see why people are bitching about the Amazon bundles seeing as those are real games up for grabs. They should be happy.
In a week or so it will all die down again like it always does.
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Well, i don't consider that an exploit. Just a really good deal. What I'm referring to, is the giveaways that have the limitations on contributor points.
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Your right, in a few days it will go back to "normal". Then a few days later, it will be back again... Then a few days later... etc.
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My concern is if this will slowly kill the site itself, or peoples participation.
Will this just be the "SteamBundleGifts.com"? Nothing wrong with that i suppose. Will the Site just die? The day after, I'll live on i suppose.
Its not a diehard serious thing to me. Though i suspect to the heavy contributors and Mods, that it would upset them.
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There is no economy on Steamgifts
Economy implies limited resources
The points regenerate indefintely
Please stop
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Points don't regenerate indefinitely. They are based on what is contributed. It is a balance. This is not opinion, or me speculating. Its in the freaking FAQ. It IS a limited resource. If people don't contribute, then points don't generate.
Points ARE currency. In fact, considering that giveaways are bought with real money and thus have actual monetary value, the points indirectly have ACTUAL cash value. Example: If "Skyrim" is a giveaway for 60 points($60), and there are 120 entries, wouldn't that mean that my 1 entry is actually worth $0.5? Oh, and look at that... How are points determined? on ACTUAL CASH VALUE. How is that NOT an economy?
EDIT: Economy definition
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I've always referred to points as being given out 'infinitely over time.' While, technically, there is a finite supply, they might as well be infinite. The alternative is that people just up and stop making giveaways, and if that happens, the site has bigger problems than the point supply. I don't mean to rain on your parade or anything. I think this is a fine idea. I just don't think it will have a lot of impact either way and I wanted to clarify this small point.
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I definitely think it would benefit the site greatly if something is done in regards to point generation. I have a very sneaking suspicion (obviously I don't really have the means to find out whether it's true or not) that the ratio of people who enter giveaways just to own the game versus people who enter giveaways to actually play the game is really becoming imbalanced and not in favor of those who would play the game.
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Jesus, if we cap it to 1 game entrance a day will that stop these threads?
Leave the point generation alone. Its a temp inflation. Yes, we are terribly sorry that the huge influx of gifts/"exploited"/w.e the fuck else has arrived and has somehow harmed you. The only thing I can see that MIGHT be a viable option would be to cap the total number of points generated per day to 300 or 150 but even this seems rather pointless and stupid.
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IMO: I know this probably won' be popular, but all of these "Exploit/bundle giveaways" are spamming huge amounts of points, and ruining the economy of the site.
My suggestion, is to prevent "Exploited/Bundle Giveaways" (thats anything marked with an "*" when creating a giveaway), that these giveaways should NOT generate points to users. Currently, all giveaways created, generate some points to all users. Eliminating this for exploited/bundle, will IMO balance the economy of SG again.
This would make points have actual worth again. It would return users to the days where they had to decide on the games they cared about. To appreciate giveaways. As it is now, with the influx of points, people are just entering every giveaway, even if they don't want to play them.
What do you all think? Yay or Nay or maybe another option for economy balancing?
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