Point Distribution

I think it's a good idea, I'm usually at 300 anyway and I'm not gonna argue with better odds. Let people spend their points on games they actually want to play instead of entering everything, enough games go unplayed as it is (and I'm just as guilty as the next guy, just saying).

I also agree that point generation have to be controlled, BUT still as many have stated when Humble Monthly or any good bundle comes up, there will be high value games in it and feels a bit unfair to get to enter about 10-20 games :/ I like the idea of sb who thought that maybe points regen shouldn't be calculated from Retail value, but CV value; or just skip those under 5$ games from regen if possible?

@cg

Just to put things in perspective. Could you post the image again, but with a graph added for the development of member count from July 2011 up until now?
I wasn't around in 2011, but having to enter 6x as many giveaways wouldn't mean that much when there are i.e. 8x as many members on SG now 'competing' with you on a giveaway.

Edit: found it myself in the Stats section and I was pretty close with 8x ;D

July 2011: 12,421 members
July 2017: 1,012,177 members

Like the idea,think that people must enter giveaways with the games which they're want the most.

Loving the idea too, especially if it means people entering ga's only if they're really interested instead of just spending points to avoid reaching 300...

Personally, I think the current "points on demand" system was great. The more giveaways, the more points doled out. That said, it could be tweaked. Cut back the generation of points to ahalf, third or quarter. Raise the points cap to 500. And make the minimum length for a giveaway be. 4 hours and things will be better. Fixed points would just mean slow days everyone will have nothing to spend it on and busy days, everyone will have too much to spend them on. I think raising the length of the minium giveaway is the most important fix, if you are worried about SG consuming people's lives.

I am strongly opposed to these changes - and inb4 someone asks - no, not because I need all them points to win all them gibs, I believe that point regeneration on SG is ridiculous nowadays and it needs to be adressed, I just don't believe this is the right solution to the problem. Main problem with what cg proposed is that system is not flexible at all which is a huge step backwards from the way SG used to work in good old times (before crazy regeneration). There are days when there's really nothing worthy popping up on SG, just same shovelware from another dollar bundle or otakumaker, yet in such days with constant point regen users will be pretty much forced to enter this stuff anyway cause there is nothing else. On the other hand there are days with something very good and users will not be able to enter. I don't buy "you will still have the same chances" argument, because it works good only in theory, not in real life. If you consider all your daily points ofc nothing changes, but you don't consider that people may have already spent their daily points let's say 1-2h ago, most GAs ended and then something goods pops out. Let's say it's a great sale for 60P game. User who just logged in to spend his daily points will be able to enter 5 GAs straight away, User who was unlucky enough to spent his points 2h ago will be able to join maybe 1GA in next few hours. I believe SG needs a way to adress situations both when there are less and more GAs, when there are less and more ppl intresting in joining, and old system did it in a right way before it went to shitter cause of flood of free or shovelware stuff. But I believe there are a few better solutions to adress this issue instead of destroying our flexible system.

1. First of all points regeneration whould be lowered - it is obviously too high, it should be 50% lower (if things I talk later gets introduced) or even 66% lower if it's to be the only change.
2. Big spikes in point regeneration are commonly caused by 3 things 2 of which can be easilly adressed. Free games, cheap bundles with lots of worthy stuff and good deals like Humble Monthly a=or big sales. Fact of the matter is most users are really intrested in good games from third option, so if we leave third it should be fine - there will be bigger point regeneration but mostly for stuff ppl want to spend these points on, also 1st two situations are much more common every average day, so all in all free games regenerating 300P per day for a month is more important to adress than monthly regenerating 2000P in one day once a month.
3. So about free games - they should not generate any points at all. Keep in mind that for most popular freebies they go on GAs over and over again. Even if something goes free for the first time it will generate extra points only once, won't keep generating them for eternity.
4. Cheap bundles usually are full of repeats, thus easiest way to fight this is having bundled games generating less points compared to non-bundle ones. At least 50% less. Since most of GAs on SG are bundled it will slow point regeneration a lot, but in case of good non-bundle deal it will still generate points and let users join good deals freely. Also same as with @3 - if sth new gets bundled it will generate points, but most of the time games get bundled over and over again - and we are then prepared for future cases.
5. Inaccessible GAs should not generate points. Group,Invite,Regional,WL GAs are accessible for small % of community, while give points to whole community. Majority who cannot join them spend points elsewhere which is a major factor in this issue.

If I think about anything more I will add it ;)

If you're going to do this, you might consider eliminating the 5 entries minimum for private and group CV, because what this change is going to do is not just effect public bot entries, it's going to have a potentially severe effect on how people make choices between different types of giveaways. Now the person who may have joined a group or private giveaway is out of points, and that's more of an issue for the giveaway creator.

On one hand, since it seems a rather rare occasion that a user makes per day GAs adding up to more than 480p, daily hard cap would sound reasonable as to spread entries out more. (whereas in case of that majority of users would be making 500+p GAs per day each with hard cap at 480p, that would logically mean that all users together may be at a point where they don't have enough points to enter all GAs - but as said, very unlikely for such amount-volume of GAs to happen)

On the other hand, when amount of GAs is rather low (in value and/or amount) then mentioned points-per-time would mean that there is easily HUGE discrepancy in terms of that every (public) GA on site gets perhaps even thousands of entries as users will have soooooo many points to spend on quite few GAs. And that just gets even more amplified when more users are joining the site while amount of GAs made doesn't increase as much.

So, daily hard cap sounds quite fair to me (and in case of GA flood, who uses up their points and can't enter additional ones, such leaves more room for others who may have logged in after a wave of flash GAs happened, etc.). The points-per-time doesn't sound great tho due to that issue of eventually not many GAs being made in some time frame, ergo the currently existing sort of soft cap still seems reasonable as to ensure that in case of few GAs there isn't way too many points around. Nevertheless, if GA makers had among options to apply a points-multiplier (so that a GA with value of 20p could get an e.g. 5x multiplier added and by that requiring 100p to be spent to enter that GA) then that could moreorless alleviate that mentioned eventual issue of "too many points for too few GAs" as some GAs would take more points to be spent on and those 80p extra not ending up as entries for other GAs, ergo points-per-time would not necessarily be as an issues as mentioned when quite few GAs around.

That mentioned "points-multiplier for GA entry" by the way something I would personally like as option in any case as it seems that it would increases chances of winning for those willing to spend even more points on a particular game they may have been looking for for quite some time already (and arguably also make public GAs a bit more attractive to be made as increased points required would mean that many would spend a few seconds thinking on what they actually prefer instead of just entering anything).

Why not implement something similar to lowering CV when creating same game GAs? And with this i don't mean changing anything with CV.

If you see some of the recent stats on bundle starts 1$ 50CV bundles several Midnight Mysteries games distrubited 15k points to each member, while 7 Wonders gave 12k points to each member if i didn't screw with calculation :D, and there are 23 more games in that bundle. So influx of points comes from a lot of those cheap and easy to level up bundles.
E.g. every 50-100 GAs of the same game give 20-50% less points, so if one game is given way to much it wont give points to others :D Or maybe only lower point distribution if game is bundled or created many times per day so it doesn't have to wait for bundler to add it to the list?

Also notice that there was a certain bundle recently with like 20games and everyone was giving it. Usually bundles are maxed at 10 games

well i have 300 points and practically never use them..because i only enter giveaways i would play...thats why im unlucky and won less than expected xD

This is a good and reasonnable tuning.
Requiring people to log in twice a day is much better than requiring them to check site 8 times per day which can turn people a bit borderline.

• There are much more users now than there was several years ago. Private groups making giveaways have increased also I think. I believe there is a connection between these things. That trend is also pretty consistent with the increase of cheap bundle deals in the recent years. So, the more GAs are posted, it's totally logical more points need to be generated so that users are actually able to enter those GAs. It would make at least my SG habits even more stressful if point generation was changed to fixed. It is very illogical to me that there would be fixed amount of points to spend, because the users post the GAs as they wish unpredictably. How many GAs get posted tomorrow can't be known in advance.
  Compare that point generation chart to this chart regarding how many games are released on Steam yearly:
  https://twitter.com/Steam_Spy/status/804072335997358084 https://www.vg247.com/2017/09/12/the-number-of-games-released-on-steam-in-2017-is-set-to-overtake-the-number-of-releases-between-2006-and-2014/

• Sometimes there are lots of desired and/or high value games given away at certain times of the year (bundle deals, xmas/summer sales, private groups organize events when lots of high value games are posted simultaneously etc) and other special events like some user posting big train or such. The current fun of entering lots of GAs would become even more stressful because then instead need to spend even more time than now to considering which GAs to enter out of possibly dozens if not 100's of choices, if points allow entering only a handful.

• Every time I visit the site, and on regular days that is many times, I have no problem spending all the points so it's become my habit to spend all the points at every visit if I have time. Most days (even today) I am not able to enter all GAs I would like to, because points don't generate fast enough, and many days I need to make a choice between entering few high point GAs, or many low point GAs. I think it actually takes more time and clicking to consider which GA to enter than just being able to enter them all for the higher chance to win.

• I think the leveling system, groups, whitelist, sgtools etc are already well-working solutions to limit the entries if the GA creator so wishes. I think it's illogical for the site itself to limit the entering radically because the GAs don't appear without the users posting them, and it is the GA creators who decide to how large crowd they make their giveaway available to enter. One crazy idea could be to remove entry points from whitelist, invite-only and small private group giveaways because it's silly entries don't happen there because people don't have points to enter with. Maybe the entry point system should be only used with public GAs that usually get lots of entries regardless? In my opinion more entries the merrier, regardless is it public or private GA.

• In my opinion there is not much sense in setting fixed amount of entry points per day or something like that, because as reasoned earlier, people post their GAs when they like, some days are very quiet and for example humble monthly reveal and bundlestars $1 bundle days are crazy busy. That is why the current dynamic point generation system is so great. I don't understand why even consider changing it to worse system that causes nothing but frustration as I can see compared to current situation. Current situation is very fun because users can enter most of the interesting GAs without having to use even more time to considering which GAs to enter.
  I predict that the proposed system would cause more people setting alarms near the GA closing time to see how many entries that GA gets at last minutes in order to determine is it worth entering at all. Or maybe they entered in advance, but they come to remove their entry if the GA ends up getting "too many entries", and they will instead use the points to enter GA(s) with better chance. So in my opinion if this change was applied as proposed, I predict daily-visiting users would become even more frustrated with the site and end up visiting it even more intensively as a result.

(edited reason) Since I end up with a wall of text in this messsage, I cut&pasted my actual counter-ideas here:

• Regardless if this new point distribution happens, I think all GAs should have 12 hour duration at minimum. Full day (24h) would be my preferred minimum length. I think allowance of 1-2 hr flash GAs is actually one major reason that makes some people visit here every hour if possible. Even now, during slow point generation days it's sometimes impossible to enter high point value flash GAs if there are no entered GAs left to remove entries from to recover the extra points. If points are generated in fixed amounts, this issue would become even more annoying if short GAs are still allowed and/or GA entry points are based on the Steam Store price of the item.

• If the GA entry points really need to be distributed more intelligently than current system, shouldn't the logic be user-based, relative to how many GAs the user is able to enter?

• Is it necessary that the points required to enter GA must be slave to the Steam Store price of the item? I know that Steam Store price defines the CV points and that's perfectly fine as is, but why it also needs to define the GA entry point requirement? I think it's really dumb to valuate game's "entry value" with Steam Store price. With 100P you can enter only two 50P GAs or 50 2P GAs as it is now. High retail price doesn't always mean the game is higher quality or actually worth more. 60P game may be worth less than 5P in cheap bundle deal (if consider points as $value), There are lots of ideas to consider, 2 quite radical ones for example:
  idea 1) (my preference) Remove the entry point relation to the Steam Store price completely. For example set a fixed entry point 1P for all GAs. This would also solve current issues due to Steam API price glitches (e.g. 20P game becomes 100P), This change would make GAs equal in terms of being able to enter them regardless of their Steam Store price.* (as I wrote above, the limitations to who can enter GAs are defined by the GA creator by choosing the level requirement, making the GA private etc choices)
  idea 2) (continuation of above) Let GA creators decide if more points than 1 are required to enter (with certain maximum of course like 10P)

EDIT: instead retyping or copypasting again, more details of the above idea (+ great follow-up idea by Shindo) are here: https://www.steamgifts.com/go/comment/DcQ9GUu

It's a nice idea, i would like it to be implemented. Would make this site a better community and less time-consuming, as you already said. Also it would encourage people to save points for games they would really want. :)

"users should not need to invest this much time into entering giveaways."

if you genuinely want users to stop frantically refresh the site throughout the day, change the minimum duration of giveaways to 24 hours. I don't care for points, always have plenty, but some days I visit the site several times to see if some maniac put up a 1h GA for a wishlist game. :P

I, for one, love the idea. I would actually vote for some point cap that refilled every 24h (instead of 15h), but that is nitpickining.

Like, when you go to a wonderful picnic at the beach, and complain "But the sand overthere is nicer!!"

Cheers!

This means on bundle days, when there's a bonanza of GAs being posted, you'll won't be able to enter as many because you won't have points to match. I'm not sure this plan is well thought out.

.... This actually sounds good.

So, basically, I won't be able to enter long trains any more. Thanks.

I kind of like the idea of less points, at least on theory, as I mostly stay on 300. But there are few times when I do run out of points, like in a monthly bundle with a couple of games I'm very interested in. And while there being less points might give the impression that at least I might get better odds in those giveaways as everyone has less points, in practice what I think will happen is just that it would benefit people that "store" their points by entering many long giveaways they don't even have interest in. So they'll still have the points to enter every giveaway while someone who doesn't "store" points will only be able to enter a few of the giveaways and miss on the others.

Thanks cg for your wonderful site!

I only enter for games I want, but I still run out of points. I much prefer the current system. That said, I wouldn't be opposed to limiting points/gaining points slower if it only applied to those who have not given away a game (ie level 0). Those who contribute to the site (even if it is just a cheap game or even a 0 cv free game) are less likely to be bots.