I saved a link once where someone just said to remember the giveaway, but I didn't know what to do with it. I checked it a few times, but never noticed anything, so I decided to return after a year and when I did there was still nothing. I asked and was informed that I missed something, I still have no idea what happened, was probably trolled :)
On your thread, I forgot about it for a long time and was about to go to bed around 3AM when I decided to check the file where I have dates saved and noticed it was the exact day I was supposed to return for the giveaway. I saw the comment that you would post the giveaway at the time the thread was created. Then I forgot about the thread, even though I left myself a new note and by the time I saw it, the 1 hour giveaways were over, but I didn't mind because I already owned the giveaways I would have wanted to enter.
I left myself another note for the new thread, but who knows if I will remember. I think the conclusion I have come to is that I need to use one of those fancy reminder apps to remember this stuff for me, but for some reason I am not going to and I don't know why. I guess it's just more fun this way.
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I must have missed that thread. Oh well. I saw the 5 year one mentioned in the comment above. Reminder set. lol.
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The last three sections describe what I did wrong as well as what I would have done differently - It's mostly about the giveaways selection, duration, and maybe it would have been better to clarify the duration of the giveaways in the thread before putting up the giveaways.
Off the top of my head, these are the top three things I would have preferred:
- More opportunities to all participants to enter good giveaways, regardless of being a bit late or time zone difference
- More opportunities to get additional stats
- Overall better planning and hosting of the giveaways
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Good on you for keping your promise!
I made a bookmark for this, but lost it in a computer crash in December. 😞
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Add a stat: self-reporting of how people remembered the thread! (I noticed that for most, it was setting a reminder on their phone, or just having it bookmarked (do you people really check your bookmarks that often?!))...
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My task scheduler has failed me, maybe miss some setting X_X
That was great to be able to keep your promise after a year, maybe do it again, for science XD
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I just added it to my google calendar with a reminder to be sent 1 hour in advance, and I also bookmarked the giveaway so every time I've typed "steamgifts" in my URL bar for the past year I've seen that thread... My calendar is on the home screen on my phone so I saw the reminder for it several days before it happened, too.
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I actually didn't even set a reminder, I just kept the tab open in my browser on my phone (yes, for the whole year), so every time I googled something, I would be reminded :D
Idk, just a little random fact to bump the thread ~
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Surprised considering Sir, you being hunted was given free enmass, you still got 7 entries.
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Was an interesting experiment. I had seen the reminder about a week before, promptly forgot about it until a day after, haha. So much for checking my calendar while I was away.
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Last year, I made an experiment involving a 1 year promise. The concept was simple - A thread was made, promising a giveaway in 1 year.
The time has come; the giveaways were created, and have now ended. A few people have suggested some kind of a thread would be created in order to inspect the experiment and share a few fun statistics, etc.
So, here it is.
January 17, 2017, at 7:08pm AST
The original thread was created.
January 23, 2017, at 2:46pm AST
The thread was closed, with 215 comments including mine.
January 10, 2018, at unknown time
One week before the deadline - Update was posted to confirm that I was aware, and that I was not planning on backing down on my promise.
January 15, 2018, at unknown time
Another update - Confirmed that the giveaways would be hosted at the date and time of the creation of the thread.
January 17, 2018, at 7:08pm AST
The giveaways were created - Exactly 1 year after the thread's creation.
The result for the giveaways were the following:
Although the games being given away were not exceptionally sought after (as far as I know, in any case), there were more than a few users who arrived too late to the 1 hour giveaways, especially due to time zones, and were quite disappointed.
As the giveaways posted were all different, it's a bit hard to get any actual stats from them. Ideally, I would have liked to create more than one of the same giveaway, but have a different running time to see how many entries each one would gather. Unfortunately, due to key misplacement, I could not create two Megadimension giveaways. Bummers.
What would I have done differently, if anything?
Well, for one thing, perhaps I should have made the "good" giveaways last longer than an hour. I hadn't taken time zones into account due to my procrastinating making me plan and setup the giveaways just a couple of days before going live. 2017 me did not anticipate 2018 me's laziness and stupidity. Pfft, silly 2017 jbond.
And as I've mentioned before, I would have loved to make multiple giveaways for the same games but with different duration for the sake of stats and "fairness" for lack of better words.
Would I do it again?
Well, it was kind of fun, but I don't know if I'd risk it. Nobody knows what the future holds for us. As I'm a very stubborn person when it comes to promises, having myself force the future me into a project I may or may not be that interested in undertaking was pretty risky. Not only that, but by the time a year has passed, I could have not predicted many details such as the sudden changes by Valve regarding gift inventories, as well as the gradually worsening issues with region restrictions. Anything else could have happened which made it impossible for me to properly deliver on my promise. But hey, the idea of doing this again is not completely out of question - I may be tempted to give it another go eventually.
If not, another SG user mentioned they wanted to do the same experiment, but take it a step (or five) further. You may have noticed the thread around the forum. I won't be involved though, so how they handle it is up to them.
Final thoughts
This was a very interesting experiment, but I was dissatisfied with the end results, mostly due to miscalculations and poor planning from my part. I could excuse it since it was a first for me, and perhaps a first in the history of Steamgifts (correct me if I'm wrong - pretty sure that was an original idea though). However, that doesn't really make it any right unless I plan to redo the experiment eventually. Will I? Who knows... ;)
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