So I decided to do a small experiment in regards to the community

And the results were quite nice actually.

I've heard claims from people that there's a lot of "in-gifting" among the more prominent members of the community, and that getting selected/nominated for things is just based on how much you give and very little else. So I decided to test this idea.

To avoid anyone feeling left out, I've decided to not mention any names. If you were invited, please don't tell anyone.

Now first of all, it's important to notice that one of the issues with this experiment is selection bias. The selection bias is in fact really strong here. What I did was that I picked out a bunch of people on my friends list who I view as prominent members of the community (sorry if you were not among the people who were allowed to invite people, I wanted to keep this easy to manage, even if it meant that the data would not be as reliable, I'm just doing this as a bit of fun, not to write a thesis about it), then randomized 5 members from this list and gave them two links to two different games, Pillars of Eternity & HuniePop, and told them that they could invite 4 other persons, without checking who had entered either of the GAs. If someone declined, that still counted as one of the 4 invites. What I wanted to see was who they would invite, if people would prefer to minimize the number of entries for the game(s) they wanted and if people would be comfortable actually inviting people to the HuniePop GA.

While this was of course a bit of a popularity contest, it was not just the same few people who got invited, instead the spread was quite good. Being active on the forum absolutely helped with getting invited to the GA, as most who were invited are seen quite often around here, but it did not seem to be the same small "in-crowd" that got all the invites.
As for levels, the invites were very mid-level-centric for Pillars of Eternity, most entries are between level 4-6 (though there were 1 level 8 and 1 level 9). For HuniePop the levels were a little bit higher, and with significantly fewer entries. The sample base is obviously quite small here, but it would seem like being high level is not important here, at least not among the people who I view as being among the more prominent members.

People were very keen on inviting others to the Pillars GA. So people were not egoistic. Some people also expressed discomfort with inviting people to the HuniePop GA, which I can understand.

It would be interesting to see how this would play out if I just picked 5 random people from the forum, but Pillars of Eternity does not grow on trees ;)

Also, as I know how this forum works: http://www.sgtools.info/giveaways/3adc22ce-cb77-11e5-8df7-04019cc0dc01