Yes, some jerks might wishlist absolutely everything

and that's the biggest problem :3

It's been suggested countless times, and to be honest it punishes users who don't keep a wishlist updated, or in my case, where I whislits mostly everything I am remotely interested in, it does not reflect actual willingness to play the game.

People would be adding every current bundle / AAA game etc to their WL. It's inevitable.

The only way would be to have like "no more than x games on WL". But it would be far to great pressure on people accounts from SG side.

I have seen people with thousands of games on their WL. With WL only GAs we'd promote them and punish people wish small WL.

Yes, some jerks might wishlist absolutely everything, but I suspect few people would bother.

You underestimate people.

Trying to come up with ways to get round the 'wishlist everything' problem.

I did think that making it top 10 or top 25 in people's wishlists might work, but that would require SG to know which games were in which position in everyone's wishlist at the time you made the giveaway and that would be a lot of data!

They could go with top 10, top 25 or top 100 positions in people's wishlists etc., not collect the data beforehand, and make the giveaway only viewable to those who did have the game in one of those positions when they log in. Best I can think of off the top of my head, but even then you'd still have problems. People would end up telling their friends to bump certain games higher up their wishlist if they spotted a wishlist giveaway, and they'd collude/work together.

Edit: You might even get people inventing wishlist shuffling scripts with the second idea!

Wishlist is not an indicator. I can really love to get one game, but simply forget to wishlist it, while I might wishlist a total crap I'm not interested in, just because I want or because I want to keep an eye on it.

And because wishlist is entirely user-based, including sorting, there is literally nothing stopping anybody from not only filling it with everything, but also sorting the way he wants, and even if you'd say "okay let's take last 25 results", user can still delete ones he wants, and add ones that are currently needed.

The concept is flawed and won't work, even though the actual idea doesn't seem bad at first. There is just no way from turning those giveaways into massive abuse-driven ones, which will eventually lead to nobody using it anyway, and even "current" wishlist giveaways being abandoned. If you really want to give away a game to somebody who will enjoy it, why not make a thread about it? It's not like you can't review every potential user yourself, his games, his effort and hours put into particular titles - you're the creator, you decide.

I want to remove half of my wishlist but can't because it's too painful to run trough reloads of pages

nope

I do love the OP suggestion, but I understand people saying it won't work too.

Maybe, SG could add an option here to build your most desired list (it may be limited thought, 10 or 25 could work) and an option to create 'only to desired' giveaways.

Necroing this thread, because I had the same idea:

I would put "wishlisted" as group. So if you check it only people having that game on their wishlist can enter. If you mark more groups/whitelist users from these groups can enter without having the game wishlisted.
If thats to hard to implement put it as different section (like Invite, Everyone...)

Let's wrap it up:
There might be users wishlisting everything (or "on demand").

But compared to "public" it only can be better. So even if every single user totally abuses that system we would just get a normal public GA
with one difference:

It will not be possible to enter DLCs you do own anymore, because you can not add them to wishlist!

Thats what came in my mind. (After 20something rerolls today...)