Right its not really fair.
When you give out a fresh AAA Title you are f****d a few month later :D (thats the worst case)
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This is out of SG's hands. Steamgifts pulls the data from Steam - if the pricing changes on the store, Steamgifts will reflect that information on giveaways. While I suppose it could be possible to implement exceptions, it would be a great deal of work in order to keep the list up to date constantly.
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It would be trivial for them to add the price at the time you give it away to the database that stores your giveaways. Then they could make their calculations from there instead - it would also reduce the pressure on steams servers. They could also trivially reduce this retroactively to account for bundling before your giveaway that wasn't registered until later, and so on.
It's not a technical issue, it's a choice. They have reasons.
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How would that be a good thing? It would mean storing large amount of data on the Steamgifts servers instead of relying on Steam.
It is a technical issue AND a choice. I'm not familiar with servers/etc so I can't say that I'm certain of what I'm saying, but I'm assuming that storing games value information to every giveaways individually would be a huge load on the SG servers.
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You are assuming wrong. When you make the giveaway and when people enter it and all the way through there's a load on SG servers to populate and draw from the database. A numeric value from steam which they have to fetch anyways is trivial and minimal compared to all the other things they are already doing. The point is at the end of it we're talking about adding one handful of sand onto a dumptruck of sand. If done correctly - and even if done incorrectly but not catastrophically - the load increase would be so small as to not be noticeable.
More importantly right now the value isn't stored anywhere permanently, it's stored temporarily and fetched over and over and over from Steams servers. This is already being done every moment they update the CV, which is way too often. If they just stored these values for the long term in the database they would reduce the amount of calls to Steams API drastically, reduce the complexity of the server backend programming and process.
When you sum this together it's simple to see that they would actually gain capacity from this, not lose it. It would make for less load overall on their servers.
They aren't doing it because this is how they've chosen to make sure people are incentiveised to keep giving.
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Yup. They are already storing the time point when a game gets bundled, they could also store a price history if they really wanted to, even if it's an incomplete one.
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They don't really need the full history - just store the exact price at the closing or opening or whatever of the giveaway, or even the price at midnight the same day or something, if they want to bundle the calls.
On any given day they would only have to check the games actually given away on that day, and they'd only have to do this once if they wanted - caching the value when the first giveaway is checked and making that valid for the rest of the day.
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There's another problem: what if there's a price glitch in Steam? When CV is based on current value, it'll sort itself out automatically. If it were based on value at the time when the giveaway ends, it would probably need a lot of manual adjusting afterwards.
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No more than now. Easy enough to click the button to have the CV for a certain day for a certain game changed retroactively. They already do this for bundled games, only difference is they don't store the values.
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I imagine, it's a lot more complicated. With the current system, all they need to do is declare a game as bundled from a certain point of time. If CV would be based on current value, they'd have to set the price manually for every price glitch even if it's only temporary. And they'd have to update the manual price overrides.
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Actually it depends on the glitch. Sure, if it's a rare glitch then they'd have to go in manually and type in the correct price and the date and press the button that sets all giveaways during those dates to the given price. Or maybe just press the button if they want to set it to the current price at the time. Or even have it done automatically if enough people report a price glitch.
If it's a frequent glitch like say the Daedalic bundles thing they could even make it automatic. Since the API calls to steam are so rare they could just say that if the price change detected is over x% increase or decrease, just use the cached price from last time until someone has manually checked it.
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The point is, they would have to check the price on every giveaway, if it's reported correctly, even if they introduce some automatism for the most common cases. I'm pretty sure if someone gets less CV than expected it be sorted out soon enough (because they complain), but if they get more than they deserve it might as well slip under the radar.
Take a practical example: game is worth $20 on Steam, reports with $100. They would have to change it to $20. Then later Steam price drops to $10, still reports $100 though. Now they would have to change the price to $10 manually, but only for those giveaways that ended after the price change, the rest would still be $20. Later on they discover that the game was bundled somewhere between the price change from $20 to $10. That's a lot of things to take care of already. They would always have to be aware of temporary glitches (which sort itself out automatically under the current system).
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They wouldn't though. They just check the price manually when they do so today - when users report a problem.
Everything else would be automatic. They wouldn't have to lower the price manually when bundles occur, they could use the system they have today to do so automatically.
It's true they could lower the price twice in the example with the long price glitch, but again it's most likely going to be one of the typical cases and they'd just click the button if it gets reported.
It would actually be less work dealing with changing prices and glitches than it is now, unless they made huge mistakes in design either now or then.
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It would most definitely be more work overall.
source: cg
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No, that's not 30K values stores. They only need to store the value for each game given away on a specific day. If there are three million created giveaways on this site and the average price is three digits or so, we're talking about a few megabytes of data to keep stored totally, and just a fraction of those, a few thousand bytes? changed or stored a day.
This is laughably small amounts of data to process and store.
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You haven't been here very long. The site has gone through numerous periods of extreme slowdown due to tweaking systems, especially in relation to the steam API. You act as though you know the framework of the site, when in reality you don't.
As dingbat said, it's not a perfect system but it's clear and easy to understand, while reducing the workload to one "bundler."
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I think you are also forgetting another piece of data, those values were not previously stored. Do you volunteer to dig up those values for the past 3 million giveaways and stand accountable for them?
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You are assuming wrong. You speak like you coded this place. Did you do the database yourself ?
No one know how it's done except cg. Your thoughts are just assumptions too.
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You are assuming wrong.
Well, to be fair, you are as well as me, simply assuming. Maybe you're correct - Maybe you aren't. Your logic makes sense, but without a confirmation from cg on his reason for this kind of setup, we're only assuming things upon things.
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agreed with this. storing values would be more fair and well probably more efficient. it makes no sense that cv would decrease in value overtime, that sucks
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Or they can just tweak the reduced/no-value after X date system to fit this as-well...
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It's unfair and it encourages people to stick to small giveaways of little value and punishes people with few giveaways of extraordinary quality, which already give a lot less CV compared to the money spent. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any easy solution.
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Pretty sure the people on the second group does not really care about CV.
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Even so, why punish them?
Also, let's not forget the third group. Those that give mostly bundle crap and then once in a blue moon give non-bundled stuff.
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Didn't mean to say that one necessarily excludes the other, or to place anyone in 'groups'. My point was simply that quality giveaways are punished much more than they should compared to cheap/bundled giveaways in terms of CV, regardless of who and when they are made (by).
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Maybe, maybe not. Still no reason to punish them. If anything, they deserve to be rewarded more for selflessly giving quality games.
Also, whether you like it or not, CV still gives some sort of incentive for all people. If the gap was bridged, we'd see more quality giveaways, which would be good news for everyone.
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My point is that they are not "punished" at all. I can'timagine people give those expensive, quality games becase of CV but most likely they like the act of giving, making other peope happy or whatever other reason they have. It has been stated several time, leveling in SG is just pointless and a loss of money.
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It is true. If I'd taken the money I spent on giveaways like Darkest Dungeons, Rainbow Six Siege, etc and dropped it on Clickteam Fusion bundles and the like I could have been level 10 by now - but I'm not and I'm not really bothered.
But as it stands anybody trying to make nice giveaways is generally doing so despite the fact that it is a silly thing to do in terms of CV. It would be nice if there was a system that actually encouraged 'better' giveways.
Then on the other hand I think that whatever system you put in place many users are simply going to look for ways to exploit it. Most people would just find the new best value things to spam which wouldn't necessarily be high quality.
And aside from that I suspect that a bigger issue that might discourage higher quality giveaways is the many people (and their bots) who can't even be bothered to look what they are entering.
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If you give it for CV then you're already doing wrong...
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I just subscribed a few days ago, so I'm definitely not an expert user, but I agree that its not optimal.
The current system incentivizes cheaper games over bigger and newer games which go full price.
If a contributor has $50 to spend, 5 $10 games will degrade less than a single $50 game, as in time $50 go down a lot, but a game that costs $10 usually stays there.
The flip side, I guess, is that this pushes contributors to keep giving to stay at their level. However this could be implemented with a degradation factor (say, the CV of a game degrades to 90% after each year) with the advantage that all games are hit equally.
Also, more cheaper games -> more winners, which might be part of the reason why the system is like this.
Technically speaking, users/games is already a N-to-N relationship, which means that SG must have a record for each connection. All it would take is to add a field for the price to the record to store the price at the time of the giveaway. Then of course I know nothing about how SG is implemented.
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And you picked all that up in just 2 days ?
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On other hand if the price of game increases you gain more CV...
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For one, why is that better? You spent a certain amount of money and you should be "rewarded" accordingly, right?
Second, which one happens a small fraction of a time and which one happens constantly? Yeah, you have the We Happy Few's, which increase in price but you also have Mortal Kombat X's, Shadow of Mordors, which reduce in price and in extreme cases, Dota 2s, which just lose all of their value.
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nowhere did they say it was better, or insinuate it was better - simply stated a fact
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Technically yeah, but I tend to think that when people say something, they actually have more of a point than just saying something.
I might be wrong here and maybe Ekaros actually just wanted to say what's already been said in the thread itself.
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BTW: You can compare your log here pretty easily http://www.sgtools.info/real-cv In case you didn't know
And yes it's not good, I don't like it, but that how it has always been.
Though someone showed me a counterexample a couple of weeks ago, arguing that it got changed, but I might remember that wrong.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't sgtools also using SteamAPI ?
He wouldn't had see the difference before/after, because both sg and sgtools would have update his CV.
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Yes, it would show the same as SG, but as far as I understand him, he keeps his own log of each game he gave away.
Using SGTools would spare him the need to click through all giveways and recalculate stuff. He can just compare it side by side.
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I'm sorry, I misunderstood your first post ! I thought you were telling him to use sgtools instead of his logs.
But yes, compare his logs to what sgtools return would be much faster. Sorry ^^
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I think it boils down to the fact that SG has no idea how much you paid for a game. Maybe you got it cheaper on a Russian or Chinese key seller. Maybe you got it for free from the publisher or developer. Maybe you bought it on sale or got it from G2A. Maybe you traded for it. There is no universally fair way of doing it, so the current US Steam Store price is what was apparently decided on as the "rule". For better or worse.
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True, but the price of Steam at the time of the giveaway is the market value of the game - the value provided to the winner of the giveaway.
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Not necessarily, the Steam price could also be glitched.
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No. The market value of a game at any particular time is what the market will pay for the game. That may or may not be the "normal price on Steam."
Some people give games because they like to give, and they don't have a problem with the current system. As for those who wish to maximize the CV they receive for their giveaways, they teach themselves how to "work" the current system.
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That's just the way it is. If you gift an early access or beta pack and that is later removed from the store because the game went live or free2play you lose that CV too.
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I complained about this once many moons ago and cg himself actually replied to my comment with an explanation. I can't remember the explanation for the life of me, but it made sense at the time.
I seem to recall that there were some easy exploits to the system if it were changed like that.
Not to mention that you'd need to store the current price of the game at the time of each GA, so that's 80-100 thousand values per month to add to the database design and implement the best solution to achieve the feature based on the current SG architecture.
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Probably to have CV decay to reflect the current value of the games, and encourage more giveaways to be created.
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Yes, "encourage more giveaways" was also part of the answer, IIRC.
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What a bullshit. All you need to store is game id on steam and it's price with date. And thats all. Then based on date that GA has been made it only need to look what price was at what date.
You don't need to store so many information for every GA.
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To clarify, cg didn't say anything about database impact-- that was just me speculating. So any "bullshit" is mine, not his. Yes, there are multiple ways to implement the change to minimize impact on SG (DB storage, DB calls, calculations, etc). I've updated my original comment.
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The game OP mentioned, forma.8, had six price changes since its spring release. Outside the seasonal sale periods, Steam has at least 500 price changes per month, several thousand during seasonal sales. There are also nearly 100,000 products sold there.
Imagine the sheer volume of API calls if you need to match a price to any date for any game when a giveaway is created, even if the price is updated only when the Steam API reports a price shift. Not to mention how much data it would be and how much memory and processor capacity it would need to maintain a database like that—the site already takes rather long just when you try to search the giveaway archive, and that is only 3 million records.
I somehow doubt that SteamGifts runs on enterprise-grade servers. Unless the owner swims in money.
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maybe they should add "legacy" CV. it does not count but it shows for people to see how generous you were?
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This is how it works, here. It's absolutely fair, as all of us are affected by it equally.
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Equally unfair does not equal fair - but I agree with you in principle. It's not a big deal because we all get affected by it equally - it's just that it isn't fair and it has drawbacks. But of course they have their reasons, and their choices go far deeper into the site design than this little thing - so it's not likely to change.
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Considering how fickle the system is and how broken things could be the ways it works now is often only reasonable way. As in other thread suggesting more CV after bundle ends it would just great too much work make life complicated in general.
Main issue is that scrapping info from Steam is not reliable. There is bug, and there could even be intentional manipulation. How about some game creator setting game's price to 1000$ while his giveaway is running. Resulting him gaining level 10 for essentially free...
Just as tracking all the sales bundles is generally a massive pain. And adding extra complications to this only leads to eventual errors.
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more CV after a bundle ends would just encourage people to wait a while before gifting their bundle games.
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Why not fair? CV is a function of money spent, and the value of money in the real world decreases over time as well. This is the incentive to keep the world economy going. It should also be the incentive to keep people giving away here, if we must keep this CV system, so if anything, it should drop over time on its own.
Although I guess as long as the amount of giveaways created is the only monthly stat that isn't showing a clear and accelerating decrease (unlike community activity and newcomer numbers), the system will stay the same.
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ok, clever guy, explain to me how to deal with other markets - does someone in Canada get CV based on the Canadian Steam prices? And someone in Brazil based on Brazil prices? What about Sri Lanka?
And now take into account someone getting the game from an outside source, where they may have paid less. Or more. ~and don't even get started on the bundle price)
There is no "right" way to do this. Steamgifts uses a simple and straightforward way of granting CV. It may not be perfect, but it's easy to understand.
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sometimes i wonder how many people would remain giving away games if there were no levels or ratio.
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Hahaha... please! I, for one, only give away games to farm that sweet, sweet, CV. Rather than spend money on games I want to buy, I'll spend it buying things to give away to gain levels in the hopes that someone will give away something I want and the space cat smiles upon me. So yeah, if the CV levels were dropped I would certainly not carry on giving things away, just for 'fun'.
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oh yes xD 😍
brb, gonna buy more $60 games at $1 each copy to farm!
I EXPECT NOTHING BELOW 60CV
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Think of it like built-in inflation.
It encourages people to keep making giveaways rather than sit on their thumbs.
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The current system is fine. If you are worried about your efficiency in building CV, learn how to do it properly. If you don't care about CV, you are free to continue enjoying the site. Being "stuck" between those two positions, however, will simply subject you to unnecessary stress.
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Wrong. If you gave away a game that was worth $15, don't you deserve to have $15 worth of CV and not have it reduced?
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"Equally unfair does not equal fair"
To quote CedericH
I mean if you don't care yeah, sure, that's great. But I did, and I at least wanted some more information (which I got, from other people).
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And the award to biggest, most unhelpful and most unreasonable faggot on this thread goes to... You sir!
Could you please point me towards these "rules" that state the CV of a certain game is subject to change?
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It had nothing to do with sexuality; it was an offensive yet accurate term to describe how much of an unreasonable pain you are being on this thread. All the other nice boys and girls seem capable of some level of logical discussion without getting completely salty and accusing people of "whining" (which, if you think about it, is whining in itself :P)
Yes, you were incorrect about this being mentioned in the rules. I checked them before replying.
You seem to overuse the word "whining" - both of those said "whining threads" you linked sounded like the OP is genuinely confused and looking for an explanation of a seemingly random occurrence. Thanks for bringing them to my attention though, I actually did do a quick google search before creating this thread but I did not find any other ones on the same topic.
Thank you also for pointing out that it has been explained to me that CV is linked directly to the steam store, I really wouldn't have noticed if you didn't feel the need to state this.
Other people have agreed with me in that whatever the price of the game was when you gave it away should be the permanent amount of CV you receive. However, as I've already said, "Every solution creates new problems." Both systems have their pros and cons, and after reading what some helpful people have logically and reasonably discussed about them, I can see the benefits of the current system. Hate to break it to you mate, but your senseless frustration towards me for thinking differently to you about this did not change the way I see it now.
P.S. Btw, congrats on being CV level 9. No seriously, I'm not belittling you in the same way that I have been for the majority of this post; it honestly is a great achievement. Just goes to show that you can be a really generous guy and still be an absolute jerk towards people whose opinions differ to yours </3
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If you didn't pay $15 for it, do you deserve $15 worth of CV ? Yet I don't ever see anyone complaining about that.
If the system was actually fair, the vast majority of us would have much less CV.
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Exactly. The BundleStar dollar bundle is currently out and giving 49.75 CV for 1 dollar... I wonder how many of users here don't at least part game the system with those sort of bundles.
Not that it's bad thing.
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Speak for yourself - I paid full price for all my CV and I have the receipt to prove it
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I was distracted listening to the end of the football transfer window on the radio and that should have been $ not £. It turns out I paid more for all my giveaways than I had to!
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You are too fixated on CV. It is just a number, and over level 7 it is also a totally pointless number, only there for the user's own number-increasing satisfaction. I lost over 620 dollars of CV on one day; that is enough to drop 5 levels in certain circumstances. This is the third time I ever mention it in the 22 months since it happened, because it is not something anyone should ever fuss about, even when I would bet your income is higher than my (converted) 900 AUD.
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People really seem to think that CV levels are a magical doorway into epic wins. But think of it another way, if you are buying a $60 game to giveaway to gain some levels on here, in the hopes that you'll win another $60 game for 'free'... then... well... rather than spend the money buying something expensive to give away to slightly increase your chances of winning something expensive, buy the expensive thing yourself, cut out the middle man and forget this site exists. Otherwise, if you are giving things away to be generous, don't be sad if your generosity isn't been adequately rewarded, as the act of giving is really it's own reward, and 'levels' really aren't the be all and end all, unless your goal is to get to level 10 as cheaply as possible and then leech off free giveaways for the rest of your life?
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That's actually not what this post is about.
Also, it was a tongue-in-cheek comment about the "level 2 giveaways I'm missing out on."
Perhaps read the title if you are unsure what this thread is about :)
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Yes I did actually, and your complaint seems to be tied into the reduction in CV that comes from games decreasing in price. So my comment was about why CV doesn't really matter that much anyway. People seem to like getting worked up about CV and the ways people earn it and abuse it, which I find amusing, being as it's not really as important as all that. So the comment is not only for you, but for all those who worry about anything that affects CV.
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You know what is funny, currently with investment of 5 dollars one could get almost to level 5...
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Well, pros and cons. In terms of the site, if people are going for CV and level, retroactive reduction incentivizes them to keep on giving away. On the other hand, it may deter some from giving fresh AAA games. How many do that anyways?
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True, person only feels when they 'lose' something. Often happens on border between levels :)
While there is a lot of GA 'unlocking' at very first levels, generally CV is just very crude, floating approximation of user's 'investment', and effectively there is no difference if anyone had +-10-25% of CV and +-level or two on higher levels. No need to keep some system unnecessarily more complicated than it needs to be working fine. Complications are prone to extra mistakes/exploits.
So, just be patient and wait until this level borderzone will be over :) This will be good. And you will get all your presents, only decide what you truly wish.
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Yeah that's true, you know as they say...
"Every solution creates new problems"
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CV should not be affected retroactively, whatever the price was at the time of the giveaway is what should be taken into account and it should be permanent.
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I noticed my CV had dropped a little, which I thought was really weird because I keep a tight log of all the games I've given away, what I paid for each one, and their CV. When the CV on my profile didn't match my log, I was super confused. I eventually figured out that a game that I had given away (forma.8) was $15 on the steam store when I gave it away, and it has never been in a bundle so it had full CV. However, recently its store price dropped to $10, therefore reducing my CV by $5. Normally, this wouldn't be a HUGE issue, except that it bumped me down to a contributor level of 1.99!! It means I'm missing out on all these level 2 giveaways until I can host another one of my own... :(
Personal issues aside, I do not think it is fair that someone's CV should decrease if the store price of a game decreases AFTER the giveaway was completed. (My forma.8 giveaway completed 3 weeks ago, and my CV only dropped less than a week ago).
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