Are you lucky or unlucky on Steamgifts? Have you always been? The definite way to find out!

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This is so cool. kelnage has made a script that lets you find out everything about your luck at Steamgifts. The latest version of the script gives you a graph that shows your expected wins and your actual wins.

Some of you might wonder - what are expected wins? That's simply one divided by number of entrants in a giveaway you have entered, and adding up that number for each giveaway you ever have entered. As an example:
You enter a giveaway with 9 other users, 10 entrants in total. Your expected win is 0.1. After entering 10 giveaways with 10 entries, you would expect to have won 10x0.1=1 giveaway. If the giveaway is for multiple copies, you are expected to win more. A 5 copy giveaway with 10 entrants gives you 0.5 expected wins, so you only need to enter two of those to get the number of expected wins to 1.0.

Of course, everything is decided by the RNG, and it's totally possible to have 20 expected wins, but 0 real wins. There we have being unlucky. At the same time, there will be people who win more than their expected wins (those lucky bastards ;D).

People often say that about 1000 entries are required before winning something. That's maybe a good average for the new level 0 user who enters a lot of public level 0, 1000-entry giveaways, but some people get in on puzzles, forum giveaways, and smaller groups, and might expect to win sooner.

With the plot generated by the script, you can easily track your luck.
Yellow line above the blue bars = you are lucky, you have a higher amount of wins than expected. The higher the yellow line is above the blue bars, the more lucky you are (higher number of games won than expected)
Yellow line below the blue bars = you are unlucky. Less number of won games than expected.

Using me as an example (see my plot attached at the end of this post):
I started out about a year ago, and won something my first week, quite a lucky win, since I wasn't expected to win anything that soon.

More entries followed, and soon my expected wins caught up to my real wins. I was slightly unlucky until the end of May, when I started winning more than expected. I had a really good run until the end of July, when the wins almost stopped, but the expected wins kept growing quickly (I was entering a lot of high chance giveaways, but with no wins).

In October I started winning again, but I was still behind a bit on the expected wins. I started catching up with some very good luck near the end of the year, and everything changed at New Year's when I was in the Simultaneous Giveaway event, and "got even", since it ended with me having the same amount of wins as expected.

Then I had a small period of extra luck at the start of the year, but right now my expected wins are higher than my real wins again.

So, following this, I'm guessing everyone will get how it works. Most of us will probably have some periods where we are lucky, some when we are unlucky. There will be those who are lucky/unlucky all the time. That's just the RNG at work. Theoretically, everything will even out over time, so if you're unlucky - just keep entering the giveaways (hopefully only for the games you actually will play) and sooner or later you might start winning big ;)

I hope this was interesting, feel free to share screenshots of your expected win plots! Tip: You can click "Save and edit plot in cloud" (second link from the left, disk icon, on the original plot) to get a larger plot.

Link to the script

Edit: I forgot to mention that it's also possible to see how likely it is that you would have won a certain game. Go to giveaways/entered and do a search. The script still comes up with the specific game search result, let it run (a lot faster, since the entries for a single game is faster to scan than entries for all games) and you'll see the results.

View attached image.

View attached image.

8 years ago*

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151 Comments

juanger

You are 144% lucky!

8 years ago