Should games given free by sites be banned from GAs a year since made free?

If you want to be sure to check what people gave away, don't look at their number of giveaways but their Real CV, that way it's clear they gave away free stuff and I doubt many people would stop grabbing many copies of a free game if we ban it here + you always end up hurting real givers as well.
They had a rule here some years ago that free or bundled games couldn't be given away and they changed that rule, doubt they will change it back.

who cares about number of games given anyway?

I'm not bother giveaways of an already free game here, but I can't stand people making multiple accounts to take bunch of copies on official giveaway site and regular users don't have enough time to take one for themselves the same way. If some limitations here can make abusers stop this practice - than it's not a bad thing.

That's not a good idea.
The same game given away for free today, will be sold for full price or bundled a week from now.
So you're basically limiting the ability of people to give away games they bought at full price.
Not to mention the fact that people miss fee giveaways, so they don't own the game, and would love a chance to win it on SteamGifts.

I also don't like that idea
Yes, I've made GAs for games i got for free... as well as entered GAs for free games.
Often enough because i don't have the access to those free games or choose not to get those for free because i don't trust that site it's on as they have dubious requirements (e.g. liking facebook pages, joining groups, joining twitter, etc.).
So if a game actually interests me and i don't want to get it from a specific site I'm glad i get the chance to enter in those GAs here on SG.
And i'm sure others feel the same.

Of course i also don't look kindly on those that somehow amass bunches of keys. 1 should be enough, no?

The games should not be banned, but the users abusing other sites should ;)

This rule existed a long time ago and was removed because it was ridiculous.

1. It prevents people from giving away a game they bought / got in a bundle just because it was free once upon a time.
2. To prevent abuse free games already give no CV.
3. Even this small party of mods who still persevere would give up if all that work of deleting giveaways and suspending unsuspecting users for giving away a free game.
4. Who the F cares if someone wants to win that game let them enter the giveaway.

LOL. Even as I speak I realize my leftover keys from couple of years ago are now 0 CV most likely went free some point in my prolonged absence. That said wouldn't mind them shown as 0 Given away. Just don't see how people end up GA 50x keys same day it goes free.

There are people making it to level 5 on free shit or even higher, i reported some a few times, last time i actually did get a reply, saying it would be a lot of work to get everything on the free cv list, yeah it might be but then it might actually stop the spam, and i even offered to help even but as usually since then i didn't get answer back. Some profile you can just easilly pick and figure out all their giveaways been free.

As others said users that abuse it should be something done about. So many abusing the system, we let them, so why would they stop on their own?

Nope.

In response to the question posed in the title. However of course I'm not a big fan of someone redeeming multiple keys just to giveaway a bunch of copies of a game. It discourages Devs from doing it in future which is not in our own self interests. Whether people should be punished by the site I'm not too keen on, since there's room for people being punished for giving away a large quantity of a free game who may well have bought them through a grey market seller or traded for them.

I guess that only leaves voting with your BL if there are people exploiting those free keys.

This was discussed (ad nauseam) a couple years back when they used to be removed from the giveaway list. People voted, and cg decided it was fine to give them away.

For my part, I'm completely fine with people making giveaways with them (though I wasn't at first), for all the reasons NB264 listed in his comment. If you don't approve of someone giving away freebies, for whatever reason, you have the tools at hand to exclude those people from your own giveaways.

Opinions?

That this has nothing to do in general, belongs to suggestions.

Suppose you have Given away 10 Games and now Give away 5 of those botted free games after it went free, You should be allowed to GA keys but your Given away games should still read 10 not 15. With 0 CV that would stop both CV and level manipulation.

There is no way to win on this one. If you stopped people from giving away free games it would also hurt people who already had a copy of the game to give away, or those buying it after the free game stops being free.

That said, I would have loved to get a copy of Dark Souls when it was given free but it was hit by bots so hard that they ran out of keys, then to add insult to injury it was given away or sold by people who should not have even had access to the giveaway. Yeah, I'm still bitter.

As a couple of people mentioned, I don't think professional botters who leech mass GA keys do it with the purpose of creating a bunch of GAs on SG. I'm pretty sure they do it for real profit on grey market sites.

And yes, as others have mentioned it used to be impossible to create SG GAs for previously free games, which was a shame IMO because people with keys couldn't give them away and people who wanted the keys couldn't enter GAs for them. I've won over 60 "free" games and without this silly rule being removed those keys would have rotted somewhere (or been sold, or been ninja'd by bots if dropped there)

Should games given free by sites be banned from GAs a year since made free?

no, this is why: https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/UUGiG/allowing-giveaways-for-games-in-promotions-or-games-that-are-temporarily-free

With 0 CV that would stop both CV and level manipulation.

they are already 0 cv, they only give a +1 sent count (they should give nothing at all, but i suppose it's complex to code that into sg without messing things up).

but i would say YES to banning all free games from promotions, like sg was almost 3 years ago before this: https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/RCZPq/reduced-cv-and-no-cv-giveaways

btw, you guys need to find a new hobby instead of getting angry at everything everyone else does on sg. finding someone that farmed 50,000 copies of some trash game NO ONE would ever play, is just a waste of time. it won't kill the site, and it doesn't hurt anyone.

I'll just leave this excerpt from the current FAQ here:

After you give away a game 5 times (whether in the same giveaway, or in multiple giveaways), it will begin decreasing in value. The value is decreased by 10% for each additional copy. This means if you decide to give away 8 copies of a $10 game, it would add $74.39 (10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 9 + 8.10 + 7.29) to your contributor value. This has little effect on the majority of users, but prevents individuals from receiving a high contributor value from gifting a large number of promotional gifts, games obtained through pricing errors, or keys from contacting game developers.

I'm content with prior discussions and decisions at SG.

If people give away a game that was part of a mass giveaway, SG mods tend to give that game "No Value", and it doesn't count toward (Real) Contributor Value, period. Counts of No Value games sent is available on profiles by mousing over "Gifts Sent" # and (Real) CV is seen by mousing over Gifts Sent $.

It'd be nice if group stats counted (Real) Contributor Value, but they don't. So group admins like me just pull from ESGST's API and/or barter.vg's giveaway list, and compare group giveaways to that to make sure people aren't abusing groups with tons games previously given in mass giveaways elsewhere.