Is it allowed to giveaway region locked games on certain groups?

Came here to yell at n00b for not reading FAQ, left puzzled and wondering.

Came here to see people raging and claiming that no-one reads the FAQ, was disappointed...

There's cases like private and group giveaways where you can use region locked stuff, but you need support's approval and need to make it clear to the entrants that its region locked....as far as I know.

good question, i say they should all be banned, private group or not. restricted is restricted and rules are restricted is restricted on SG, cuz we like to put restrictions on restrictions

Don't know what official support answer to this question is gonna be, but can tell what I know - sa you mentioned polish community, and I'm part of it - so yeah, I've seen plenty of these GAs as well. But the thing is that I'm aware of at least one case when guy posted a GA in group called Poland with description "it's polish region locked" and so on and on, but as group is public and there were a lot of non-polish leechers, someone from different country won and wasn't able to activate. Even thou group was "polish only" description clearly stated it's "polish only" etc - guy didn't receive a reroll. So I guess anyone in same situation won't receive reroll as well.

So if you want to screw with these people just enter their GAs and in case you win demand a region-free copy ;p

Also a lot of users tend to falsely inform that their GA rules are "accepted by support". Support has literally no way of checking each GA to catch all such a cases, so people use it to their advantage. I've seen a lot of these "fake rules" even in public GAs, so don't necessary believe that something is support-approved just because someone post it in GA description. User may be posting false info just to make sure that "people from other regions won't enter", even if they would be eglible to enter.

Bumping this ._.

If it's region locked and mentioned in the description, I don't see a problem with it.
I am aware that it is against the rules, but why take something you can't use when there are several others who would like to use it ?

If its in a private group that's aware of the region-restricted games, I wouldn't see an issue with it. Its not like there's a Polish or Russian version of Steamgifts, so that's an easy way for them to have their own little corner, while still being part of the larger SG community.

It is against the rules, but unless someone does report those giveaways not much can be done about it.

I assume it's still against the rules. Some people will enter even if they aren't from that region seeing it as an easier chance to win since there will be less people due it being region locked. They use a VPN to activate it and the game gets removed or they get banned and blame steamgifts and/or the gifter and it becomes a mess.

As long as you are giving the winner a copy they can activate without VPN/etc., there shouldn't be issues. I think it boils down to this.

Here's my official answer: Kinda?

When I first joined support, I was told that recently they had quietly given PL users permission to gift PL keys in their groups, due to the high number of PL keys that were coming to the site. However, if someone won that couldn't activate, the giveaway would not be re-rolled; the groups would need to control their own members.

Problems with this though. The Poland group on Steam is completely public, and users from any region can join and potentially enter those giveaways. If they win, they may be tempted to use VPN to activate the key, which is something we definitely DO NOT want them doing. Many PL keys have been gifted to this group.

But why PL only? The RU/CIS group is huge too, and lots of restricted keys there, so shouldn't they be allowed? I, personally, have seen RU giveaways in private RU groups and have looked the other way. And there have been a TON of Dark Souls / Valiant Hearts giveaways in these groups lately that I'm sure are all restricted. But again, the Russia group is public and gifting restricted keys there is a bad idea. Then, what about everyone other region? I don't think it's a good idea to let this continue.

However, among groups of friends, I think it might be acceptable. Say, you have a small group of real life friends and you want to make a giveaway for them, you know for sure they all live in the region, why shouldn't it be okay? Problem is WE don't know that information, or something can say they're "pretty sure" they're all from the region. Again, someone could use VPN, put their account at risk, we don't want that. I've seen other mods delete private giveaways for region-locked keys between supposed real life friends.

Probably something we should get ironed out before SGv2.