Ha, I knew I recently saw someone with Vatican City State on their Steam profile. I think that was you.
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gonna use these region filters at my own leisure ^^
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Well, actually this was abused before, so I see no changes there.
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I just made 20 giveaways for Fight of God for the country Malaysia.
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"Greeks owe us money, so I won't give them shit till they pay their debt".
Ok then, no giveaways for me anymore. ;_;
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tbh it's no different that what we already saw. Way over 90% of Polish region locked GAs were not for stuff with region locks (if someone is giving away full currently running bundle you may be pretty sure these are not steam gifts so no gifting regulations nor some weirdly locked keys bought elsewhere than is said bundle), Russians been doing it even more (I've seen russian profiles that never created a single non-locked GA including hundreds of bundle keys). So this is something that has already been happening on SG for years, yet only users from few selected countries could profit from that. Current change only allows something that was already present to few countries to be avaiable to every country - in this perspective it is more fair approach than the old one.
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I know, I'm joking, but I hope I won't see too many "patriots" this way. :P Also, I'm wondering if that'll allow more people to make giveaways for steam gifts.
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imho depends on specific game and how long it is discounted. I would say making GAs for 24h deals or weekend deals will still be too risky - few hours afk from winner and you miss out the sale. But for longer sales like winter/summer sales or weeklong deals it should be ok - sale lasts 7-11 days, you make 1 day GA and still have plenty of time to send gift.
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As I recall, Poland-only giveaways are necessary because there's some Polish magazine that regularly gives out Steam codes that are only usable in Poland, though.
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Not only that magazine (CDAction its called), but also biggest polish publisher, Cenega, used to region lock a lot of games as well - this way they were able to sell them cheaper on local market. Tjat is the reason Polish region locks got introduced in SGv2, but 90+% of GAs with polish region lock on SG were not things from neither this magazine nor publisher - they are region free keys, usually from currently running ROW bundles, GA Creators do not used regional GAs because game was locked but in most cases because just to limit entries to polish users. I've seen maybe few dozens of Polish locked GAs for commonly known locked games (like from this magazine and I've seen hundreds of Polish locked GAs for stuff that was at the moment in Humble, IG, BS bundles etc.
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If he's Greek, why is he talking to his German grandpa?
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it was necessary, but i wonder how many will use this to exclude people from certain countries.
i guess i will see even less giveaways now.
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I was juuuuust thinking about that :D Now when the "patriots" kick in...
But other than that, I really like this. Will solve a lot of issues and make life easier for creating some GAs
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I think i have figured it out there are you from after a year but no clue why would someone exclude your particular country from their givs.
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It will be misused for sure. It was already misused with the previous (default) Steam regions, now you will see lots of giveaways restricted to a single country. Custom restrictions are a bad idea.
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even without region locks it was missused, long before SGv2, when any region restricted GAs were prohibited on SG at all we had "country only groups" - like groups only for poles, russians, muricans, chinese and so on and on. So this missuse you are talking about have been happening basically from the dawn of SG - and it is impossible to get around - you would have to check everey GA made, crosscheck with steamDB and compare locks to avoid that - so in general nothing changes, it was avaiable for years already, only change is that while in semi-older system (aka one from SGv2) it was avaiable only to some countries (like SA, RU+CIS, PL etc), now every user from every country will have equal chance to use it - either in fair or not-so-fair way, but at least all will have same functionalities which is more fair option.
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anything that can be used can also be misused. but if people are blatantly misusing the system they'll be announcing their prejudice to everyone and probably wind up on a lot of blacklists
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the funny thing is those that hated region-locked giveaways from "exploting russians and brazilians" and used sgtools region filters to keep them away, will now stop using them since they are doing the same. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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:doubt: usual filters were set for like 20-50% of GAs, unless humble suddenly starts to region lock all their games from now on it will be hard for these people to reach treshhold they considered abuse so far.
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Already pointed it out in the Patreon sneak peek discussion thread, and cg has considered the possible consequences but decided to launch it anyway, it seems. Hope it won't cause too many issues.
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Well, current "regionalization" had to be changed thanks to Steam's New Gifting Policy on one hand and weird Europe region locks, where some games had "EU only" lock, others "EU without Germany" locks and then some even weirded shit.
That or cg works for Valve - they also done quite a bit of "we want to hear your critique of new CSGO features" only to throw them to the trash and do whatever they want anyway :P
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list of common EU locks: Whole EU, EU - Germany, EU - UK, EU - Germany - UK, Poland only, Poland + Hungary, Poland + hungary + Czech + Slovakia. It was a clusterfuck indeed...
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he had to do it, i'm not against it.
but it gives more power to xenophobic idiots and people that can't realize why others were forced to make regional giveaways since it was implemented 1-2 years ago.
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i exclude myself enough, no need for external help. o/
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No one takes your country into consideration, for better or worse.
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Not likely, I'd say most think Russia is the most problematic and bot-infested country/region here, plus it is not exactly having the greatest of fame right now in international politics. Few know that the biggest bot users are South Americans.
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I'm from south america, please don't generalize like that...
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I know you are from SA, but I also have this data:
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/EWTuj/so-about-this-whole-reading-descriptions-thing-another-experiment#NpbKEqw
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You also have a friend on your Steam friends who is in the AutoJoin Steam group.
I'll make it easy for you -- https://steamcommunity.com/groups/autojoin
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Not one, five. Was three around the start of the year. Also should still have at least one with a VAC ban.
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Great news, now users can safely gift games from the Steam store again :)
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Well, you still can't purchase any gifts beforehand. So it's still risky in case there's a store discount, if something happens (e.g. rerolls, winner not being available for a week) ... you might be forced to buy the game at full price.
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I heard support are accepting delete GA requests based on "unable to contact winner" in case if winner failed to accept contact and gift b4 sale ended. for short sales - like 24h discounts I would ofc still say it's too risky, but weeklong sales or special longer sales like Winter/Summer/etc should be much safer to make now. make 24h long GA so people from all timezones are able to enter and still have few days to send the gift.
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Rumors.... People should continue trying to avoid re-rolls when possible, and making a giveaway for a game that is only on sale for a short time is always risky.
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but we are not discussing short sales here, but long ones, like Summer/Winter sale. As carlica said "winner not being available for a week" for example. If winner was not responding for a week (aka the time according to SG rules he had to accept his win) doesn't it become a valid reason? He had 7 days according to rules and I was able to provide him Steam gift during these 7 days. But if he contacts me after 2 weeks when Sale is already over it's not really my fault - it was him who didn't follow SG rules in the first place and didnt get to get the game because of that (and because sale already ended ;p)
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I misread your post. You were talking about deletions, not re-rolls. What I said remains true, but it doesn't address what you wrote. If your winner failed to accept the gift you gave by the time the grace period expired, and the sale ended after the grace period, deleting the giveaway seems reasonable. I don't want people to forget, however, that Mods utilize their good judgement when dealing with situations which don't fit the rules.
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Количество раздач для ру кластера сократится знатно)
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С другой сторны, не надо будет кучу раз рероллить из-за того, что победитель из Украины и ты просто не можешь выслать ему гифт.
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С чего ты так решил? Я тут без недели 6 лет и что бы не меняли, раздачи как были, так и продолжаются. Твинков-личеров из ближайших стран , которые нам не друзья, будет проще отсеивать. Опять же, для накрутчиков contributior level в маленьких группках, где по кругу приватно раздают, ничего не изменится.
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Ну пендосы не очень сильно нас любят и могут просто убирать Россию со списка.
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I wonder if there should also be a reduction in CV for region restricted giveaways in order to discourage folks from adding region restrictions even on ROW keys, just because they can.
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People have been doing that since region restriction was first implemented in the site. This just lets you fine-tune which countries you want to exclude. But I don't think it's fair to punish the folks who legitimately need to make region-restricted giveaways. IMO.
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Yes, there has been region restrictions before and they've been "misused" before. But if I understand the change correctly, you can now specifically select to opt out on country XY (because you don't like people from that country, or because you had problems with someone from that country before) ... which opens up a whole bunch of new possibilities for "exploits".
I agree, reducing CV for region locked giveaways wouldn't be completely fair. But then again, CV itself isn't completely fair. I'm not saying that it needs to be a lot less CV, but maybe just a little, to make people think twice about setting unnecessary region restrictions. Yes, it would hurt those people who cannot make unrestricted giveaways, but often those games given away are also region locked because they're a lot cheaper in the region where they've been bought. Not always, but often. Again, it's hard make everything 100% fair.
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Yes, it's now possible to exclude individual countries if you don't like people from that country. I'm not sure it's an "exploit" -- it's just an alternative (and not very nice) way to use the region restricted system. But just like setting a CV requirement on your giveaway, or using an SGTools rule, it's something that gives GA creators ways to customize their GA for a target audience...for better or for worse.
Agreed that it's difficult to make everything 100% fair to everybody! :)
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but often those games given away are also region locked because they're a lot cheaper in the region where they've been boughtin old days it may have been true, but not anymore. You wouldn't say US games are "a lot cheaper" right? Yet due to USD-EUR exchange rate US people can njo longer send Steam Gifts to Europeans.
As for your main point - I see no reason, because it is basically impossible to tell case-to-case differences. One region restricted GA will be coming from cheap country, other will be bought for the very same as everyone else in Humble Bundle, just publisher will decide to implement region locks on all purchases despite of them costing the same money. Same goes for all other GAs - why do you want to restrict region CV but not whitelist/group/invite GAs? And again - how will you tell the difference between private GA shared among few friends and private GA publicly posted on forums, just behing SGT gate? And why should 2nd option have CV reduced?
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People been doing it even before region restrictions got first implemented ;p In SGv1 times there was separate group for basically every country which had more SG users, exactly for this reason. The way I see it is just adding easy and obvious tools for something that cannot be fought and what has been happening since dawn of SG anyway..
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Some users set region-restriction checks on their SGT filters, so in a sense there's already some degree of encouragement to post non-restricted where possible. As trent noted, otherwise it theoretically won't affect much- in fact, it may actually open up some giveaways; I know that some number of users post NA giveaways just to exclude RU/CIS [due to perceived higher rate of issues with users from the regions], for example. Likewise, perhaps people posted NA just to avoid their needing to worry about the exclusions created by German/Australian/etc censor locks. This should avoid such situations, as well. People who've been posting restricted just to avoid certain regions (for whatever basis) may now actually open up to be more inclusive to certain other regions.
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Thanks for the support! I'm being waiting for this for a long time!
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What about search parameters?
I mean a giveaway created with a country restrictions will be displayed in this request (https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaways/search?region_restricted=true ) or not?
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you can use these restrictions as you see fit.
Let's hope people will not simply use this feature to block countries/regions they don't like.
Overall, It's definitely something needed (and welcomed) after the last steam update, but I feel for the smaller countries, as they are going to suffer the most, because let's be honest most people will just be lazy and click only in their own countries when creating a region-restricted GA, even though their keys/gifts could probably be activated in other nearby countries. Would be nice if after you click a country, the site could suggest some nearby countries to include as well.
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I'm pretty sure they will :)
At least i know i will block one country for almost sure and not even going to hide that fact.
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Yeah, I guess we all know your particular xenophobic vector by now. But I still hope such attitude will remain in a minority.
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No more "this key is restricted to.." in giveaway description 😜
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Would be great to add to the title of the giveaway a direct link to the Steamdb page for that game. Below anyone can see the prices for regions and giveaway creator can just unselect the countries that couldn't get the gift.
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Thanks for continuing to improve the site cg!
Appreciate ya!
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Select all -> exclude Germany -> profit
It's obviously a joke, but do any of you know why there are so many keys/games that cannot be redeemed in Germany?
[EDIT] Come on guys, I know German history and I know what's the current attitude they have towards swastikas :P
But still there are quite a lot of games which don't use this kind of symbols and still can get region locked to not be available in Germany. I'm more interested in censoring "gore" which MaduRUDE and MSKOTOR mentioned.
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Swastikas mostly. And "gore" [flashback to HL having robots instead of marines].
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That's something I fear, mostly because GA creator aren't sure if the game can be activated here or not.
For example sometimes gifts can be activated here without a problem but not keys.
Also the warnings given by Bundlestars and such aren't always correct; before this change we could point that out to the GA creator and enter their GA, now I won't even get that chance since won't be able to see the GA in question.
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The Germans were involved in a global war before you were born, and their government was taken over by people who preached the ideology of a master "race" while murdering millions of Jewish people who weren't soldiers, and now, because they are paranoid about their history and what happened, this is one result. Lots of things that are related to any kind of violence or the symbolism that is associated with that master race narrative, called Nazism, are censored or banned. Yes, sometimes they might go overboard, but then, their history is so extreme that it's to be expected. I'm surprised they didn't teach you about this in school.
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spałeś na lekcjach historii czy to zwykła ignorancja?
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Bo mają bardzo restrykcyjne prawo dotyczące przemocy i propagowania nazizmu w grach. Dlatego w TF2 zamiast krwii mają konfetti, a w Wolfenstein trzeba było pousuwać swastyki z mundurów.
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By and large it is NOT about Swastikas. The problem is that violent games while being LEGAL in Deutschland are restricted to adults. Their laws require shops to obtain proof of the buyer's age. Steam can't really do that effectively, so games with extreme violence and gore can't be sold in Germany. Don't get me started on Ultima Online removing the blood from the game once upon a time...
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Ok, that's actually a nice explanation of the situation. Thank you :)
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O my, another bone for the resident trolls to chew one and cause artificially induced drama and noise...
Thank you for the continued updates Cg! ^^
However, you can use these restrictions as you see fit.
That's already done for a very long time on SG as I have seen a lot of, for example IndieGala bundled giveaways that have diddly squat of regional restrictions been given away as regional restricted giveaways especially in certain regions. So people that don't like this have now the chance; if they want to; to return this favor and so exclude the countries that have been abusing the regional restrictions for a very long time on Sg. The thumb of rule on SG is still, concerning giveaways: " your giveaways your rules, my giveaways my rules!" ^^
It's certainly not against the SG rules, guidelines and tos. :3
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Your comments are always so fucking melodramatic, it's both hilarious and ironic at the same time.
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I think most don't notice such abuse (at least I don't) and don't plan any revenge-region-locking. I think (hope) the vast majority will use this feature as intended, though personally I do plan to do create some mid-east GAs limited to countries of this region. I may also use such a GA as a "gate" for new members of mid-east GAs.
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you don't see this abuse because you are not in country that used it ;) I know that over 90% Polish locked GAs I've seen on SG were not region locked, as they were from recent or current region free bundles. You can also see many Russian profiles that have 9X% or even 100% locked GAs created despite most of them coming from bundles as well. Still I won't exclude russia ofc ;p I find it silly. Are there russian/poles/S americans/N americans that were abusing the system? Sure. It doesn't change the fact that I met a lot of great ppl on SG that are from Russia for example and it wouldn't be fair banning them all simply because there are sme bad apples. Same goes for me - for example unfamous konrads6 is from Poland - same as I am. It wouldn't be the best for me if all ppl who had konrad BLed decided to exclude PL because of him ;p
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Yes, being a ROW-er I was out of the loop, but not anymore! ;-)
My first region region locked GA, and yes, it's with a key that isn't region locked: https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/3GGAV/guacamelee-gold-edition/region-restrictions
I don't plan to do this too often, but I always like to experiment with new features.
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LOL! I didn't realize he still came to the site even though he's permabanned.
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he stills adds ppl every now and then promising that he will give them GTA V if they write to support on his behalf and get him unbanned ;p
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I'll use this (probably) mostly for those EU locked Humble bundle keys. I recently had to ask for a re-roll because there was someone that thought that Romania was still part of the USSR and joined a very clearly indicated EU only giveaway.
This new feature can be used in anyway at ones own leisure because it's up to the individual giveaway creator to make his or her giveaways like he or she wants to. :O
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Hi SG,
There is a new update to the site today regarding region restrictions. Previously, you were able to select entire regions for your giveaways, such as North America, SE Asia, RU + CIS, and more. However, with recent changes to Steam the system needed to be more flexible. As of today, you are now able to select individual countries for your giveaways.
To start, visit the page to create a giveaway. Select "Yes" for "Region Restricted". You'll see a list of countries appear, which you can then customize for your giveaway. The previous regions are in the "Preset regions..." dropdown. If you choose a preset region, it will automatically select the corresponding countries in the list to save you time. However, you can check or uncheck countries after choosing a preset region if further customization is needed. If you would like to create a giveaway for all countries except for a small number, you can use the "Select All" button and then uncheck the ones you would like to exclude. A search box is included to help you quickly sort through the list.
By setting these restrictions, only users from the selected countries will be able to enter your giveaway. Ideally, you are using this feature because your gift or key is region restricted. However, you can use these restrictions as you see fit.
You'll also notice when creating a giveaway, you can now search your Steam groups. Hopefully this will be beneficial to users that have a large number of groups associated with their account.
Lastly, all previous region restricted giveaways have been updated to the new system. If you click the globe icon beside a region restricted giveaway, you'll see a list of the applied region restricted countries.
Hope you enjoy the changes!
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