I did some experiments on the user base… [No GA]

Edit: And if you want to know a little more about some other stuff I did alongside this one, you can see the results here: https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/EWTuj/so-about-this-whole-reading-descriptions-thing-another-experiment

Last year I did some experiment by posting 12 copies of the same game, going form level 0 to level 10 in the process, to see how entry numbers will fare.
This year, I did it again, but this time I spiced things up a bit by mixing in quite a few other games into those HOGs. These included games from OtakuMaker or directly from the DIG point store.

Some of these games were not on the bundle list when I posted the giveaways. Some were, but never went into any bundle, it was just the usual Russian prices pushed it over 95% case. All of them, including some of the HOGs, are borderline or flat-out shovelware at worst, cheapo indie games at best. And this is how they went:
(Sorry about the formatting, the site doesn't support table column width in markdown.)

Note: The table is not complete, I still have games left to add more data.

There are a few things to point out:

• Low levels are completely chaotic. Sometimes there is a giant gap between level 1 and level 2 (look at Pester), sometimes the curve is almost ideal, sometimes there are more entries on level 3–4 than on level 1–2.
• Game rating is almost irrelevant on public giveaways. Be it great or a pile of shit, there is not enough difference to draw a direct cause and effect conclusion between game rating and entry popularity.
• Bundled status obviously has an effect, but only a small one on level 0 and level 1. This mostly indicates that those levels have most of the users who enter anything for a win or who use some automated methods to constantly spend their points.
• On the other hand, considering the not-so-great quality of many of the games, we can safely say that people who don't really care about anything but a +1 in the library are common enough on all levels. Almost one-third of the level 10 users entered for Bold New World, one of the universally lowest-rated games on the list.
• Additionally, bundled status won't automatically mean or predict anything. A similar amount (or, on some levels, more) people entered for Pester, a game bundled fifteen times, as for City of Chains, which was bundled about a quarter as often.
• Level 6 and on seems to be the point where users start to actually consider what to enter for or have enough games in their library to not see many giveaways. Still, the allure of a +1 is obviously strong.
• Level 8–10 seems to exist in its own world. Sometimes it follows the lower levels in patterns, sometimes it essentially forms its own little block, oblivious to the trends on lower levels.
• Trading cards only seem to have a mild effect. Polywar and Blaite have similar backgrounds in most aspects, yet their numbers are similar. Same goes for Finnish Roller and Control Craft 3. There is some bump in entry numbers, but not too significant.
• Artifex Mundi HOGs are pretty popular in the user base. Those that were available the cheapest and in the most convenient ways have clearly lower numbers even on level 0, including the only game that managed to flatline after level 7 with zero entries over almost a working week.

I also did another experiment, this time by posting 120+90 keys, mostly on level 0 and level 1, where we suspect most of the auto-entry script users and bots converge. This experiment used delayed starts on giveaways: most went live on the site 12-36 hours after creation. I cross-referenced the numbers to another set of fully open ones where the timing was more traditional, meaning it started within a few minutes to an hour after creation.
The result is that I can safely say that script users and bots mostly prowl the new giveaways page. On the "instant" ones, it took only a few hours to get 2-500 entries, with another 600–1000 entries arriving within the last three hours. The entry number difference between instant and delayed was sometimes close to double in the instant's favour.
So, if you wanted to avoid at least a good portion of the bots, you just had to delay your giveaway by at least a day or more. But this is going to be apparently fixed with the next site update, according to the admin, cg.

Additionally, this large amount of public ones confirmed what I always thought, that those who use Easy SteamGifts or other one-click entry methods mostly enter things that are on the first few pages, meaning the ones that are about to end. Some of these methods offer a pre-defined message along with the entry, and I have received up to a hundred messages from a handful of people in the last two hours before the giveaways ended, but never before.