As usual the site failed under pressure at the moment the vault went live and by the time it managed to load like a minute later the most desirable games were long gone, luckily there were multiple titles that interested me this month so when I saw that Soul Reaver was out of stock I just got Parcel Corps instead :)
Now, I do hope they do like last month and allow us to get more than one game if there's still stock late into the month because I wouldn't mind double dipping and getting Paper Trail too.
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Reminder that you can play Paper Trail for free on mobile from Netflix games!
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If they continue like this they'll have to add a Tier 6 and the most demanded games should be a lot more expensive. It doesn't make sense that the 3 most wanted games were tier 4, 3 & 2. They should be top tier (5) and more expensive. With the rest of low demand games they can set whatever tier they want, they will not run out of stock even at low price.
There are members sitting on top of tens of thousands of ARP which they can't spend because they don't live in countries where that ARP is useful to get Alienware hardware (Dell Rewards) instead of games on the Vault.
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I think the prices are fine, but a tier 6 could definitely help. But there's the risk of it turning into a runaway situation where new tiers are so hard to achieve for new users that people are discouraged from even trying, resulting into only old users hanging around and the userbase slowly declining, which I imagine is something AWA wants to avoid.
And yeah, for me ARP is only good for the vault games at this point since I'm already at tier 5 and the Dell rewards don't work here, but unlike others instead of hoarding ARP I just spend it whenever I'm able to pick a game that looks interesting, even if getting the "big" titles is nearly impossible they still have a pretty robust selection of indie games almost every month.
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I think the prices are fine
No, prices are definitely not fine if a game runs out of keys in seconds. That means low number of keys, too many members with lots of ARP to spend or too low price (maybe this time all of them at once).
There has been inflation since they released the game vault, that is fine and normal. It is pure supply and demand.
the userbase slowly declining
The userbase will decline for sure if they continue to make all these wrong decisions. It's simple: you want good games? Reach Tier 5 (or 6). The rest of games without demand could stay at tier 1, it doesn't matter and will be an option for low tier members until they reach higher tiers.
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it doesnt matter if the site doesnt load up at all and you cant buy anything there.
And when it load up the desired game is gone already...
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I know and I guess it will happen again next vault opening.
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It's mindboggling to me that they haven't at least added a captcha. The most wanted games would still go really quick, but at least they'd go to users rather than bots. At this point, the only reason I can think of for why they've not added a captcha is because it somehow benefits them not to, i.e. causing FOMO or similar.
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It's effectively a DDoS, there isn't that much they can do. I'm honestly content with AWA's Game Vault tbh, it crashes instantly but comes back in a minute. I got Creatures of Ava at :02 minutes this time, last month was CATO 2 minutes after "launch" too.
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They are the ones funneling everyone into their site at the same time by planning it as some sort of raid, if they diffuse the traffic over a longer period of time this wouldn't happen, or at least not as badly. Like, instead of having the vault open at the same time for every game they could simply spread it over the month and open each game individually every few days, or make it into a smaller weekly event.
The obvious solution would of course be a raffle system but they seem very unwilling to implement anything other than a first come first served system.
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Well, at least they're testing something behind the scene:
https://discord.com/channels/97149047281827840/1069815160157511730/1309668294151634964
- If Game Vault were a raffle - we'd have to eliminate over 90% of the countries of the world and DRASTICALLY reduce the number of keys we give away on it. So really only people in like 3-5 countries would be able to participate and there'd be way less codes, so you're probably going to be less likely to get codes.
- You're seeing the errors because it means you're hitting the server requesting a code but those codes have run out (and yes they run out that quickly because there's like 10s of thousands of people trying to get codes at the same time. We have been looking for better ways around this but haven't come across a solution that doesn't introduce more issues than it solves. And no - a queue system isn't going to make it better unless we gate people from being allowed to join (like charge an ARP fee to get into the queue and that's not something I want to do).
- We have been talking about solutions for people who seem to be claiming keys just to resell them, but stay tuned on that one, it's not ready yet. Plus there's a whole philosophical debate around ethics on that we're still weighing.
- What I would like to know, and let me know in <#1199696531855527937> what are some other things you folks would like to have to spend ARP on outside of the Game Vault. I'll let you in on a little inside baseball here (and yes I know many of you won't care about this lol) but getting keys for the Game Vault is hard. There's limitations from the stores of how many keys publishers are allowed to give out to us, there's a lot of legal work involved from the publishers on stuff, and a ton of other limitations that make it a problem you can't just throw money at to fix. So I am just curious what other things people would like to see beyond game keys that might be cool.
I can assure you we talk about this A LOT and we want to make it a better experience for everyone, so don't think we're just sitting around not caring. I care very deeply about all this stuff (as I respond to this and the DMs at 7pm on a Friday night) but just know that these aren't easy problems to solve. BUT calling me an idiot or other names that'll get me banned from my own server for repeating isn't going to have the outcome you're hoping for 😄
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Right. I always forget how much of a hassle raffles are on the legal standpoint for companies. 😴
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It's mindboggling that after repeated statements from the upper echelon bosses that it isn't a bot issue, every month the same old "bots are grabbing everything" discourse gets booted up.
It's a load issue, their servers cant handle the amount of people lining up trying to grab a key each month.
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Upper echelon bosses insist site with zero bot protection isn't being botted.
Riiiiiiiight...
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They have an invisible captcha. Sometimes, you'll have a captcha validation error, and can't claim the game. It'll go away if you keep trying, though.
You can observe in the browser network monitor that by just opening the game detail popup in the game vault, the site will send network requests to https://www.google.com/recaptcha/enterprise/*.
In my opinion, captcha is stinking bad, and nowadays, bots could solve captcha better than human, and there's captcha solving service available for cheap.
There were multiple times in the past that after wasting 10 minutes, I still couldn't verify that I'm a monkey, not a bot.
Have to resort to technical measurement for that.
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First congrats to all people managed to get their game of choice on Game Vault this month.
Second... I might want to ask a favor, if people can share the Package ID (SubID) of the game you activate?
If you're not familiar with it, even the duped key is ok to post to check (assure you have already used it before posting) so can check that info out of it.
Since I'm taking note of each Game Vault Package ID and if future a GA repeats, we might know if it's Special Edition, includes DLC or Pre-Order, since those kind of things make difference on what game will people pick.
Sorry for the long text and thx everyone, once again congrats!
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https://steamdb.info/sub/827212, Creatures of Ava
Info from friends:
https://steamdb.info/sub/906286, Soul Reaver I-II for Beta Testing
https://steamdb.info/sub/551935, DREDGE (Pre-Order)
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Have one of the older ones that's missing from the list:
https://steamdb.info/sub/590567, Karmazoo (22/12/2023)
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Thx 💟 Really appreciate that!
Time to fill-in the blanks!
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Not too sure on "vanilla", but with the SteamDB extension it just shows up as a hyperlink.
https://steamdb.info/sub/1053462/ - The Thing Remastered for Beta Testing
(basically we "try to activate" the key, and the error message will display the key's information)
Also, it seems that The Thing is too new and SteamDB doesn't have any info about it yet.
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Without SteamDB add-on: https://www.steamgifts.com/go/comment/LOdi3Yo
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Oh yeah, I assumed it'd be the ajax thingy. I remember that's how I'd check what keys were activating (wasn't interested in checking sub ID). Then I finally decided on installing the SteamDB extension. 😆
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Sometimes AWA repeats the Game for future Game Vaults (Like previous Resident Evil 4, Street Fighter 6, TESO Gold Roads DLC)
But since they most times don't specify if they're Standard/Deluxe/Ultimate Edition (Like the previous Space Marines 2),
some people skipped them due to they thought it was only the Base Game.
So knowing if AWA has given certain Edition in the past, might help in future if people sees the same game, to know what probably it'll be and make changes to their choices of games on each Game Vault.
But... well, I guess it's not important as those one people provides for HB/Fanatical ones to see region lock or things on keys like that.
Either way, thx for the key, added to list as well. 💟
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I got this one: https://steamdb.info/sub/443452/ (DeathSprint 66)
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https://steamdb.info/sub/1053462/ - The Thing Remastered for Beta Testing
got it with the help of some others!
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