I believe it is "Pink Sunday," which seems to be holding true.
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Well, here goes Reddit with its collective god complex. That really puts a damper on the Summer Adventure stuff. I didn't expect to be the statistically unlikely recipient of free games, but it would've been fun to root for my team and not know the outcome.
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And why exactly so much trouble? so 30 can win some games? Jesus.. go mow your neighbors lawn or something.
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It almost looks that way, but in Lord Gaben we trust. If they are rigging it it's because they realized mean-spirited chums were making exploits or something. If I was VALVE I would have made it so that each day people get reassigned to a new team randomly.
EDIT: aaaah! It's reddit, huh? Gotta hand it to them, they are making it very egalitarian.
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Reddit organized the giveaway so each team has a designated day to promote fairness.
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I love how people think Valve is too stupid to rig a competition without everyone noticing.
If Valve wanted to rig the wins it would just implement a back end script that randomly assigned a very small percentage of points that a team earns to the team it wants to win that day. It would do so silently, in the background, without anyone ever noticing. If you allow the chosen team to have just 1 of 100 points that rightly goes to one of the other four teams you'd have an excellent chance of your designated team winning every day so long as there wasn't a collaborative effort on the part of the users to rig the results.
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I wish there were actually more in game achievements you could do. as it is it's click click click buy buy buy.
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When the team of the day uses steal points items, it uses it in such a fashion to continue to keep the other teams close because the top team has an interest not only in winning, but apparently by as many points as possible. That means a mostly even distribution of points to the other teams, rather than burying one while allowing another to distance itself as a clear second place.
As evidence of a concerted effort emerges it foments an interest in other master badge crafters on other teams to join the effort (or abandon their efforts) rather than craft a ton for a team that will not win.
Additionally, the margins narrow from day 1 to day 2 not only because of the above effects, but also because the trailing teams are more 'even'. People whom craft so much that they are as significant as hundreds or thousands of other Steam users comprise a very small percentage of the population and are more likely to have been unevenly distributed among the teams at first. As evidence for the effort to manipulate becomes clear they are likely to join the annointed team and decrease the disparity of master badge crafters on the other teams.
Lastly, master badge crafters whom do not care about the competition at all are likely to, if possible, do all their crafting at once, and most probably on the first day, or near the end when they feel the card prices have approached their nadir.
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It's rigged, definitely and not because of reddit. Yeah, reddit might influence several people, but also there're competitive people who don't give a shit and just want their team to win as many times as possible (or they don't read reddit/didn't see the thread). Also four teams are constantly within 100-500 points from each other while the 1st team is leading by 500.000? That's just plain stupid. Valve isn't even trying to hide the fact it's rigged.
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Agreed. Each day having a different team winning might be a little odd, but not too bad. People who put time, effort, money, etc. into crafting badges to win one day might not be able to or want to do it again right away. What I think is the most suspicious thing is the point totals, as you pointed out. The winning team having 2-4 times as many points as the losing teams, and all of the losing teams having essentially the same number of points seems really unlikely to happen naturally. I also suspect that this is not a completely fair competition, but I'm not sure exactly who's fudging the results or how they're doing it.
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Umm... I'm in the Pink Team, but how the f*ck do we have 800.000+ points o.O
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Whoever it is (VALVe or Reddit), it is better to give every team two chances of getting free games than PURPLE, RED, PURPLE, PURPLE, RED, PURPLE, PURPLE, RED, PURPLE, PURPLE.
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I already reacted but saying Reddit controls it, is bullshit. Yes, the event is rigged. The points are unrealistic, every team has around the same points and one has a lot more points. Like, how many users practice in this event? How many of these would read Reddit? It's probably rigged by Valve. However, I'm not saying Reddit is bad, because if the event wasn't rigged it still was very nice that they wanted every team to win once. Afcourse, also very nice of Valve to make every team win, but it isn't really a competition is it? Not that I really wanted it to be, because then obviously it would always be the same team who wins...
EDIT: Sorry for being an idiot and assuming Valve was it, I'll go hide in my hole of shame now.
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It's obviously rigged by Valve. Because Valve, in their infinite wisdom, would rig it so that it was obvious.
The absence of critical thinking during this Steam Summer Adventure team competition 'controversy' is mindboggling.
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There's nothing unrealistic about it. Enough people are participating in the reddit orchestration that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the absence of any incentive, with people being assigned in roughly equal numbers to each team randomly, points can be expected to be evenly distributed. There has been no significant population shift, because it costs $20+ to switch teams, and even if thousands of people were willing to pay this, it still amounts to basically nothing compared with the millions of people assigned to teams.
Likewise, people who craft ridiculous amounts of badges don't count for enough to matter either. Say someone crafts the sale badge up to level 1000. That's 10,000 points. The differences between teams dwarf this amount, and it can be nullified with just a few steal tokens, which are handed out randomly.
To get to the self-fulfilling portion, enough people are going by the reddit schedule that the team for that day develops an early lead while others hang back. People who might not go along with it or who would otherwise be free, non-participating agents, recognize that their individual contributions cannot shift the totals significantly and resign themselves to the pre-determined outcome.
Consequently, the winning team of the day has points that go through the roof, especially since everyone makes sure to craft to get their cards and a chance at the free games, while other teams' points languish at around an even level as other people craft normally at a typical average rate.
It's just common sense and very basic statistical analysis.
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Well said, wbarton.
Of course the critical flaw these proponents of Valve-rigging fail to acknowledge is firstly that rigging something in a contest in a way that draws attention to it is not the way to do things.
Secondly, these people fail to understand that if Valve were to rig things they would rig it so that the competition was tough and tight between perhaps two random teams during the last third of a competition day, thus spurring people to craft badges in the event that their team won.
And yeah, I meant to get at that normal distribution is less than people find intuitive in my post below and even started to edit but my post was already overlong and I just mostly focused on what the master badge crafters were doing. Mostly because people think the master badge crafters have a larger effect than they do. When that guy Duality crafted 150 regular SA badges and one foil SA badge the first day lots of people were all "OMFG PURPLE IS GONNA WIN EVERY DAY" even though he had contributed only 1600 points.
The funny thing is people talk about how "fishy" the results are while ignoring that the first two days have clearly typical results of a contest of this size. Then the reddit effort kicked in and the contest turned into a lopsided conspiracy stew.
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Come to think of it I didn't bother to search reddit but suspected that reddit might be a place where this was being organized during the third day as green began to destroy the other teams. I immediately thought it was user-driven and still can't wrap my head around people immediately coming to the conclusion that it must be Valve.
But then again we live in a time where people harass the family members of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting because they think it is a vast conspiracy by Obama to steal their guns.
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Has there been no significant population shift though? We have no information on whether the teams are kept at equals numbers and if anyone used tokens to switch to Purple near the start. We also don't know how many people are actively participating across the Steam userbase. Like you say, a lot of the points could be general day to day badge crafting.
I agree that if a team has enough of a point lead then the other teams don't want even the slightest chance of not winning in a day when they pooled all their efforts. I also think that once a team is in the lead, it'll gain momentum from that point on. What I don't get is why all the other teams are so close in points. With no numbers to back it up, my gut tells me that it should be in the range of a few thousand, not 2k (Pink 242.7k - Red 240.7k).
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If those teams aren't making a concerted effort at crafting, then, with roughly even distribution of number of team members, crafting can be expected to occur at about the same rate among them, hence roughly even points. Big numbers make things even out, basically.
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I understand how large sample sizes work out. If we assume that everyone in every team is the same, then the number of crafters and badges crafted will follow the same trend. But can we assume that the same number of active participants in every team and that each team has the same number of heavy crafters. Steam's userbase is huge, but is it huge enough to create five team with such close crafting tendencies?
I'm not saying it's rigged. I don't see how Steam would benefit from that. And looking at the final tally for Day 4, there's a 5k gap between 2nd and 5th. I say that spread is more realistic.
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Well, the total number of Steam users is many millions, but a lot of those won't be assigned to teams, and a lot of the ones who are won't be very active, but I think that at least several hundred thousand is a conservative guess. I have no doubt it's large enough to be able to discount the contributions of most outliers.
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You're not taking into account the stolen point items. I wasn't going to crunch the numbers but I realized I didn't need to crunch for all the teams or even the whole day. I just did the 10AM to 2PM PST for purple and pink.
Purple had 32,900 points stolen. Pink had 74,100 points stolen. They were obviously not 40,000 points apart at two o'clock. They were much closer. Members of the team of the day have the most stolen point items and are likely to use them on the team that is the early threat, as pink seems to have been, and later they would most likely have a mild bias on using them on the nearest team (to create a slightly more impressive ridiculous margin). Whereas for the teams that know it isn't their day, they obviously are likely to try to suck some of the wind out of the team of the day, but also would have a natural mild bias toward attacking whichever team is second (if they're not) or third (if they are).
Additionally, the points earned/stolen bars on the each team's line are relative to the line, so the largest bars on the line represent the largest figures for that team, but cannot be used to compare a bar for another team. While each team has at least one big long bar on either side of the line, for blue it's 21,832 and -13,000. For purple it's 9,170 and -6,200. For pink it's 10,905 and -12,100. For green it's 9,032 and -6,100. For red it's 7,703 and -5,600.
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I asked this same question over on Reddit yesterday, the answer is YES. Summer Adventure is Rigged.
from detoxpenguin via /r/gaming/ sent 15 hours ago
Can't believe I'm this late, but hopefully people see this. Rather than have everyone constantly throwing money at Steam every day(for a tiny lottery) we figured it was easier to simply assign days to everyone. So, on your day, cash a badge, and you're in the lottery. Granted, as /u/sub_par pointed out(with maymay speak), we do not have that much power over everyone who uses Steam as a platform. But clearly there hasn't been a "loss" from our schedule yet. Take that as you will.
Link to the thread that lists the dates: http://www.reddit.com/r/SteamTeamPink/comments/28qpbo/operation_everyone_work_as_a_team_pink_sunday/
If you're lazy: 19th: Purple 20th: Red 21st: Green 22nd: Pink 23rd: Blue 24th: Purple 25th: Red 26th: Green 27th: Pink 28th: Blue 29th: FFA
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Valve just changed the competition.
"Starting today, more people will win free games!
1st place team
30 team members who scored points will win 3 games
2nd place team
20 team members who scored points will win 2 games
3rd place team
10 team members who scored points will win 1 game"
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Hope so. I have Steam account alts for no nefarious purposes and was making decent coin selling cards the first couple days. Prices started to crater yesterday.
If card prices recover I'll be able to pick up some things during the encore that I had previously skipped over.
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10 days total - 5 teams = 2 wins each.
Both teams won by taking large margins at the start and looks like green does it today.
So is it actually rigged to create competition to increase number of craftings?
No giveaway because I'm lazy...
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