Yes? No?
No.
edit: if only for poor support and the amount of work this will generate
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I think there's enough community pressure with sgtools giveaways and such that there's no need to add more punishment.
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Not broken? When low level users win one of those AAA games with 14000 entries they almost never activate the game. Just sell it for easy 40$, wait 5 days for the suspension to be over and continue entering giveaways like nothing ever happened. I personally have seen 3-4 of those cases.
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Even if someone got to the user report in less than 6-12 months (somewhat doubtful), they still would have had the opportunity to continue benefiting during that entire time. And even if they were permabanned after 3 said transgressions, it still sounds likes they made out like a bandit in the end, so even if they lose they still win. Great system.
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Right, because nothing is ever given away here other than super cheap bundle games (as if that makes it okay anyway), nor is it possible to game the system by registering an account with basically nothing on it during any free weekend/weekday promo.
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it doesn't make it ok, but it does make it less bad. same goes for real life. if you steal 5$, you will not get the same punishment as for 500.000$. and yes, most - not all, but most - games given away for level 0/1 are super cheap bundle games. :)
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I don't like this phrase, or any variations of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
This phrase just assume that something that aren't inherently broken, it should not be improved upon.
Suggestion threads aren't about fixing broken things. It is about improving the site to make it better.
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i don't see how this will improve the system.
adding more variables will only result in more people wondering why they had some rights revoked (less points, banned from entering). so in the end this will only create chaos and even more tickets and useless threads complaining "why i have no points???".
right now the suspension is very simple, 3 strikes and you are out with the possibility of getting perma-suspended earlier with 1-2 strikes if offenses are stacked, like not activating 5 games at once > getting suspended for 25 days straight > and getting caught again.
this system you propose only makes people enjoy seeing rule-breakers get destroyed. it serves no other purpose.
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"this system you propose only makes people enjoy seeing rule-breakers get destroyed. it serves no other purpose."
Exactly ! Why are some people here so full of hate, spending their time thinking of way to punish people, while there is already a system ?
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There's a precedent for this in the driving licence with points. Be irresponsible, break rules and you loose your points.
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i hate the points system.
and no, never got any points, it is a stupid system
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That's your prerogative but there are other people that think it's a good system including me.
Also for those that not know this, in some countries this system works with loosing (demeritting) points while in other countries it works by adding penalty points.
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i hate it cause it doesn't work.
it work on the casual people like you and me. who missed a sign once. or whatever.
the big offenders just get away with cause bla bla bla. really, sadly it doesn't work here, but it abuses the casuals...
also, if you have a company car, you can either confess and get points, or pay a lrage fine, cause who in the company should get the points?
anyway, don't like it :)
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I don't even know why points would be needed.
Three strikes (and forget the points) seems fair to me.
The points just seem to overcomplicate things imho.
EDIT: reading propo's comment below then re-reading the OP, I realized perhaps you want an automated system of punishment, and I am against that. I still believe all suspensions, etc should go through a support member before being served. :X
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No, the punishment will still be going thru support.
But instead of (1) Support review reports, and add suspension to rule breaker; it will be (2) Support review reports, add suspension + reduce max point caps to user. Obviously it will involve cg to implement this kind of feature into the support system.
I get that SG forums are usually very heavily against ANY feature suggestion that involve cg. So negative result like this is kinda expected.
Often times, feature suggestions that are already done by unofficial sources (like sgtools or browser scripts) are dismissed almost immediately by elitists here. I'm quite disappointed by this kind of community mindset, which in a way, prevented SG to improve officially.
However, historically speaking, region-locked gifts used to be a taboo too, elitist used to dismiss all the requests to add region-locked gifts into the site as an official feature. Heck, even bundled games used to be forbidden as well during SGv1. But seeing how SG have evolved from then to now, I will still try to throw in suggestions now and then, and hope that some of them would inspire cg, or inspire other members to come up with good or innovative improvement that might some day be implemented.
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Sounds fun :) Or maybe cut 50p for every not activated gift on account...
But... Suspension/other punishment should be served by support member. Any automatic system will lead to mistakes and will hurt good users. False positives will flood support as steam not always cooperate as it should.
So I'm against (even if it sounds fun!).
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What's rally needed is a way for support /. The site to catch these more efficiently, instead if relying on user reports/ reroll requests.
Getting suspended quicker should help, and I believe 3rd offense is permanent suspension anyway...
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Why would we even need a support member for these infractions as re-gifts and non activated gifts are pretty straightforward major SG rules breaking. A strike is a strike. I'm for automating this because otherwise the time between that the infraction happens and the time that SG support reacts is the time that the rule breakers can break again more rules and roam rampant on SG. With automation the infraction would be directly seen as a strike and SG support would have time to look at other support tickets than these non activations and re-gifts. Bye bye on the third strike.
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Frankly I think the site should be focusing on whittling down the 30K+ user report clog they already have before deciding on implementing any new rulebreaking policies, but that's just me.
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I had a 10-copy level 5 giveaway, where 8 out of 12 (including successful rerolls) had an established history of multi-wins/non-activations.
While the ratio of rulebreakers to non-rulebreakers does diminish quite a bit by [level 4 public, level 2 forum], there is always going to be a sizable number floating around, even at higher levels.
Don't really expect them to be in a rare minority until about level 6 for public giveaways- that seems to be where I notice them drop off to the point that I don't have a sizable minority of rulebreakers for each set of giveaways. (eg, typically 2 out of 5 winners for 5-copy level 5 giveaways have a history of rulebreaking).
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Not that SGTools shows, and that's all that matters :P
Besides, with rulebreaking typically being easy to clear up, it's more an issue of how badly it reflects on the rulebreakers.. who overwhelmingly also have poor (even outright leechy) ratios, as well as often having rulebreaks that are clearly intentional [I'm sorry, you don't win the same unbundled AAA game 2 years later and then just happen to not activate it for a second time, with no other rulebreaks in-between. -.-].
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i never saw a regifter at lvl 4 myself but i did encounter one who activate the game on a different account and refused to give feedback
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I don't like to associate level-cap with rule breakers.
The original intend of the level-cap was to "reward generous giveaway creators". In my opinion, it should not be used as a filter for rule breaker.
The reason I like to create level 0 giveaways. It is because I don't want to limit my gifts to only richer people who can afford to give. It feels like a semi-discrimination towards poorer gamers or newcomers who just want some freebies that aren't gleam.io-ed. It defeats the purpose of "feeling generous".
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Grey markets are great. Good prices. Buy COD Ghosts for 4.50 euro and create a gib about it and you will receive 60$ real CV. Also watch HB first tier. The last bundle was very good for 1$ you will get 12$ real CV. I bought some 20$ bundle game for 0.50 euro each. You will get 3$ real CV. Just thing like this.
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Not gonna agree with that. I used to be a rulebreaker and reedeemed myself buying all the games which I've won. Seeing how good the community is in the forum and start dedicating games to make a giveaways and partcipating in community events. I would so much if I received perma ban the first time.
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they should have at least one chance to redeem themselves but after that a permaban could solve the problem
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So they can still enter the same amount of giveaways but have to do it in smaller bursts and if they might use a bot, it won't matter at all ...
Or do you also want limit the speed their points come back to them?
I think it's just something that will happen.
Be aware that there will always be ways to game the system and errors and exceptions will arise.
Complex rules birth more and more bureaucracy. There is a lot of it here already.
Besides once earning $40 with a 0 or low level account might be worth more than any sort of punishment you can think of anyway.
So the real thing will be to find the most efficient and simple way to prevent this and motivate users not to do this.
I think an important part of it is that the giveaway creator can decide the amount of space they leave for abuse.
With things like using SG-tools checks and not offering expensive gifts at level 0 or 1 if you want to limit the risk,
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There is no perfect solution.
This kind of added punishment is just to make the rule-breaker felt the actual punishment.
Just like how LostSoulVL mentioned above,
If someone got a speeding ticket, and the law was just a simple fine without some sort of points penalty, repeat-offender won't really feel the pain and they will just pay the fine and move on. But if there are some sort of point deduction, where you will lose your driving license if you are caught speeding for too many times, each punishment will make them even more cautious the next time they are driving.
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Hmm... What would be more of a long-lasting deterrent - docking points, entering GA suspension, or stripping a certain amount of CV experience (or one CV level altogether?)? Unfortunately DLC non-activations are harder to detect, even prove, so implementing such a punishment system could be negligible no matter how you cut it.
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In my opinion, the bigger problem is with cross-site regifting. From my experience as a moderator (and, later, the de facto head moderator) of SteamCompanion for over a year, cross-site regifting is a significant problem. Worse still, cg and the SteamGifts staff seemed completely unwilling to address the issue and showed zero interest in cooperating with SteamCompanion so that we can both shut down cross-site regifting between our sites, at least when I was still there. Even when I had submitted detailed tickets as a SteamGifts user, explaining the issue, reporting regifters, and pointing out that I'm a moderator at SteamCompanion who is both willing and authorized to cooperate with SteamGifts to address cross-site regifting, I was met with complete silence from the SteamGifts Support. As far as I'm aware, not a single one of the users I reported received any penalties for their cross-site regifting activities, either.
Per the policy that roadrunner (the SteamCompanion administrator) had set, we regularly penalized users who attempted to regift gifts won on SteamCompanion over at SteamGifts. I had also advocated that we penalize users for regifting gifts won on SteamGifts over at SteamCompanion, especially after SteamGifts users began complaining of the issue and contacting SteamCompanion support, but roadrunner declined because he had no interest in upholding SteamGift's rules on SteamCompanion if SteamGifts refused to reciprocate the favor and continued to show no interest in cooperating with us to address the issue of cross-site regifting.
If we want to consider regifting to be a problem and address it as one, we must first address the issue of cross-site regifting, since that's a glaring flaw in SteamGifts administrative practice. SteamGifts staff's failure to actively prevent it by cooperating with other giveaway websites only provides an outlet whereby users often get away with regifting. Continuing that failure only ensures that any attempt at minimizing regifting is futile because it will be negated by a completely ignored part of the issue which regularly allows regifting to siphon gifts off the site entirely, thus both diverting traffic from the site and evading penalization by the regifters.
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sadly this seems to be an ever growing issue, that spreads on many other sites.
To give you a quick example: we used to have many contest and promotions on WGN (this includes both contests and general giveaways) and while we have a policy of "no regifting, trading", many of those games tend to appear on SG almost in the same momentt. Coincidence? I think not.
This becomes especially aggravating when we are talking about contest winners trying to flip their games, which is very much unfair toward the other people who would have gladly accepted said game. Luckily we do have the option to deal with said people (since its not impossible to retrace said keys) but a better solution would be most certainly welcome
With that said I cant really talk on behalf of the head of WGN, being just a moderator myself but yeah, thats my personal 2 cents about this. Im aware that cg probably already has his hands full of other things as is, but would be indeed nice to have a working cooperation between said sites, to mutually avoid unnecessary headaches and making sure rule breakers cant get away with it.
Disclaimer: this is just my personal opinion which doesnt constitute a general statement on behalf of said community as a whole.
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I recall that when I had asked cg if it was okay if I could promote SteamCompanion in the Group Recruitment section of the forum by creating a thread for its Steam group, cg had advised against it (and I wasn't going to spoil relations by defying cg) because we were a "competing giveaway site". That indicated to me ever since that cg views sites like SteamCompanion as competitors rather than merely different sites providing similar services (a perspective that's unfortunately natural in capitalism), and that means that cg is probably not particularly interested in cooperating with SteamGifts' competitors unless absolutely necessary. I won't speak for cg, though, especially when cg isn't available to respond.
As far as I'm concerned, the chances of cooperation between giveaway sites—or at least cooperation including SteamGifts—are pretty low. We're "competitors", after all, and you can thank capitalism for that.
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I see what you mean and its quite a shame. tbh.
at least I refuse to believe multiple giveaway sites cannot coexist in harmony. Its not like the existence of sg would kill down playblink or gameminer to give a few examples
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Just to clarify: we had never contacted cg about the issue, so it's possible that cg was open to cooperation. I can only speculate from my experiences at the time. In retrospect, there was more I could have done to contact SteamGifts Support, so I wouldn't really consider it a fault on their end. For example, both jatan11t and SleepyCat pointed out that I could have submitted a report in the Other category and was more likely to receive a response. I had decided against doing so at the time, so it's more my fault that there was not discussion of the issue.
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Even when I had submitted detailed tickets as a SteamGifts user, explaining the issue, reporting regifters, and pointing out that I'm a moderator at SteamCompanion who is both willing and authorized to cooperate with SteamGifts to address cross-site regifting, I was met with complete silence from the SteamGifts Support.
I'm curious where you posted this, as I certainly can't find it.
Edit: To me, "complete silence" means no one actually saw your ticket and therefore could not have responded, as I assume that you posted it in User Reports.
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Yes, the reports were through User Reports. I considered it the most appropriate category, since I was reporting users, not necessarily trying to contact SteamGifts Support to open up dialogue. I decided against the latter, since I considered it a misuse of the report system. I suppose it was my mistake for not sending an "Other" ticket. I wasn't aware that the category could be used as a general-purpose method of contacting support; I was under the impression that it was the category for any specific report that failed to fit under any of the other categories.
As for the tickets themselves, they were submitted over a year ago, back when I was still trying to ensure SteamGifts Support was notified of cross-site regifting incidents. After a handful of reports, I had decided against submitting anymore, since they appeared to have been going nowhere and roadrunner advised me to not bother. Apparently, SleepyCat got to them about 4 hours ago and closed them now. If you'd like, I can provide links to the particular tickets in question. They weren't exhaustive, but they did detail certain specific activities by the user that I had noticed at the time, hence my description of the tickets as "detailed".
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If you believe there is something important to consider, please file it under "other" in the future. The user report queue is over 30,000 tickets in depth and there are only 4 active members of staff who have access to that queue. When I say "access" I mean that only those 4 can view any of the tickets - even if you linked the particular tickets to me, it would redirect me to the steamgifts home page.
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Alright, thanks. I wasn't confident about the purpose of the Other category, hence my hesitation back then. I don't work at SteamCompanion anymore, but I'll be sure to remember that for future reference.
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cg and the SteamGifts staff seemed completely unwilling to address the issue and showed zero interest in cooperating with SteamCompanion
I just saw one user report from you mentioning this issue, but if you want to suggest a significant change to the site rules like that, you need to create a ticket under the Other category, describing your suggestion.
As per our current set of rules, we suspend users who do not activate their wins. This includes users who regift those wins on other giveaway websites. If you want us to suspend users who did not violate any SG rules, but violated SC rules - this would require rewriting the current terms of service, and only cg can make a serious decision like that and come up with a replacement system to report these violations and apply such suspensions.
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My mistake for not submitting any tickets about that issue under the Other category. Like I explained above, I was concerned that doing so would be a misuse of the report system. I didn't want to bother SteamGifts Support with such appeals outside the context of specific user reports, since I thought it would have appeared unwarranted for me to have submitted a ticket without any evidence proving the matter was worthy of consideration and if I did submit evidence, it would have been a user report anyway, so I decided User Report was the appropriate category.
I understand that failure to activate wins is a violation of SteamGifts policy, but cross-site regifting seemed to have been mildly successful at evading detection—at least, it was for us. Since users could regift on another site, there was no giveaway for it created on SteamGifts, so I'd assume it was much less likely to be reported. When I worked as a moderator for SteamCompanion, some instances of regifting went unnoticed for weeks or months because nobody reported the user for failure to activate their giveaway and we didn't have any detection system alerting us of such instances at the time. I can only assume it was similarly as infrequently reported on SteamGifts, not to mention less likely to be addressed due to the much larger volume of reports that SteamGifts probably receives on a regular basis.
Given that cg viewed SteamCompanion as a "competing giveaway site", we weren't very optimistic about cooperating on cross-site regifting, either to enforce each other's site rules on our respective sites or to at least inform each other of instances of cross-site regifting so that appropriate actions could be taken. We hadn't contacted cg about the issue, so perhaps cg is (or was) open to the idea and it was a failure on our part. Since the frequency of cross-site regifting appeared to have momentarily subsided at the time, however, there was no impetus for contacting cg right then and there were far more pressing issues to address. Perhaps frequency has increased since then, but I was inactive on SteamCompanion shortly thereafter.
Regardless, this is old news. Perhaps roadrunner and cg have already discussed this issue, or cross-site regifting has subsided and been addressed (I doubt it), or it has been addressed some other way. I'm not in the loop, anymore, so I don't know. Given that SteamCompanion has been down for a while now due the hosting provider's hard drive crashing and failing to recover, however, SteamCompanion might be dead for good.
Thanks for your response and apologies if you all felt like you were being called out. That wasn't my intention; I was just reporting on my experiences. In retrospect, there was a lot more that I could have done to reach out to SteamGifts Support, so it's probably more a failure on my part than anything else.
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I talked to roadrunner some time ago when we were investigating a couple issues with SG users who used SC as well and violated the rules of both sites. I think there's always room for cooperation on a case by case basis, but without significant changes to the site's policies, the overhaul of the support and suspension systems, and without increasing the amount of support members on both sides, there can be no joint effort of this sort on a large scale. We have 30k+ user reports - I simply cannot imagine the result of merging SG and SC report databases, and I'm not sure if the effect will be worth the effort.
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Such integration wasn't really what I was thinking, though that might have been an interesting idea to pursue if we really needed it. In my opinion, though, merging our report databases would have probably been disastrous as well as not very useful for either of us. If we were to integrate our report systems, we might as well consider merging support teams, as well, which means it would basically be two giveaway sites being run by a joint administration. At that point, we might as well shut down one of the sites and consolidate into a single entity, and it would almost certainly be SteamCompanion who would be axed and have its features brought over to SteamGifts in that scenario.
I was simply thinking of opening up regular communication channels to inform each other of cross-site regifting incidents so that we could either enforce our respective site rules (we both require won gift activation and prohibit regifting) or, if desired, declare our partnership in the rules and to penalize users on both sites whenever they regift from one to the other. The latter method would have been more effective, as well, since anyone regifting from SteamGifts to SteamCompanion or contrariwise would risk having their accounts on both sites be either suspended or banned. That might have pushed cross-site regifters to using GameMiner or PlayBlink, though, at which point communication channels would need to be opened with them, as well.
Anyway, I doubt such arrangements would come to fruition anytime soon. SteamCompanion is offline until the host provider recovers their hard drive. If SteamCompanion comes back into operation, perhaps roadrunner would be interested in such arrangements again, especially if cross-site regifting continues to be a significant problem. You all will have to talk with him about it, though. I'm not a part of SteamCompanion anymore, since I can't afford to do volunteer work at this time.
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When I worked as a moderator for SteamCompanion, some instances of regifting went unnoticed for weeks or months because nobody reported the user for failure to activate their giveaway and we didn't have any detection system alerting us of such instances at the time.
Yes, but this is a general problem with a failure to activate won gifts, and isn't specific to cross-site regifting. The lack of an automated system to check, as well as dependence on user reports, means this will always be an issue. There's no incentive for SG to make an extra effort to deal with cross-site regifting, when all regifting and failures to activate are already against the rules. We just need everyone to check every single winner with SGtools, every single time, which a lot of folks do not do. That is the fundamental issue, how to enforce the rules without burdening a ridiculously and insanely small volunteer support staff, and without having the server capacity to automate the process? This is a forever problem that I don't think will ever go away.
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Just so you know, use the > symbol to quote text. You can read more about comment formatting on SteamGifts here.
Of course regifting is always an issue, but it's more of an issue than usual with cross-site regifting occurring because cross-site regifters aren't giving away on the same site, which would provide clear and easily noticeable evidence of regifting. Although there are of course some more astute regifters who regift or trade off-site, the bulk of regifters simply throw the gift back up onto the same giveaway site under their own account—or, less frequently, on a sockpuppet account on the same site. Once this happens, users generally notice pretty quickly (especially the original giveaway creator) and report it. In the case of sockpuppets, a simple administrative check for matching connection data can reveal such multiple accounts.
When the gift is regifted on another giveaway site, however, this oftentimes goes unnoticed for an extended period of time, perhaps indefinitely if it's a DLC or some other gift item that doesn't usually show up on a user's public Steam library. This is because there is no clear record of regifting and it's generally much harder to detect—in some circumstances, it's practically undetectable when using the right evasion methods. Since the majority of users engaging in internal regifting (regifting on the same site that they won the gift), the chances of cross-site regifting are improbable and thus most users (including moderators) don't regularly check based on that improbability. Usually, such instances of cross-site regifting are only detected by chance during moderation, or by a particularly investigative user or a suspicious giveaway creator who went the extra step (and only if they bother to report it).
The incentive for why the SteamGifts administration should specifically target cross-site regifting is that such violations are generally more difficult to detect and thus require more resources. Additionally, such violations not only allow users to illegitimately inflate their contributor value (CV, SteamCompanion) or contributor level (Level, SteamGifts) or such comparable metric, but it can also indicate both a willingness and a likelihood of past, present, or future misconduct. If SteamGifts Support is serious about addressing the issue of rule violations (which I suspect they very much are), then they I think that they need to make cross-site regifting a priority separate from internal regifting, since it poses separate problems which need additional resources and measures to address.
Sure, it would be useful if giveaway creators checked their winners for whether they activated their gifts upon winning them, but there is no incentive for giveaway creators to do so outside of perhaps some vague desire to ensure the gift they gave was used as intended (and that's usually an insufficient incentive). It is the responsibility of the SteamGifts administration to address these issues, since it is their giveaway site, or to at least be cognizant of these problems and the requirements for ameliorating them so that they can address them once resources become available to do so. Simply treating cross-site regifting as a problem with general regifting that is not meaningfully different in the problem it poses from internal regifting is not only counterproductive, but it effectively guarantees that cross-site regifting will remain unaddressed because the understanding and approach for addressing the issue is inadequate.
If we really want to be penetrative in our analysis of this issue, then we need to broaden the scope of the critique to the underlying economic and social conditions producing this phenomena, which are produced outside of SteamGifts and originate from the socioeconomic system within which we all live. That's far beyond the purview of this specific discussion, however, so I'll omit such analysis.
The goal of addressing such issues, as with all issues, is to minimize their occurrence where elimination is not possible. The problem of cross-site regifting might never be eliminated, but it can be minimized through measures that address its causes and increase the chances of detection.
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A lot of your points about regifters being able to evade detection seems very much a pre-SGtools observation where manual checking of accounts was always a necessity. With SGtools, except for some very specific instances of DLC or whatnot, you can't get away with not activating something you won on your account, the only thing that is required is that someone actually check, but once again, there's not enough staff for that, period, and so the onus falls on the user base. The process needs to be automated, but it's been indicated that the stress that would be placed on the servers to check all winners would be problematic, hence, leaving it up to the spot checking and user checking via SGtools. You're very much railing against things which at the moment, don't have an immediate solution.
I do get what you're saying though, that we need to try and profile cross-site regifters almost like doing police work, because they are greater criminals than the petty thief. Problem is we need more detectives to do that work. :-)
And yeah, I'm a materialist, so I get all the higher level stuff you're trying to imply, but that's outside the scope of this very practical situation.
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I understand the utility of SGtools, and I'm glad that it exists, but—at least, to my knowledge—the vast majority of users don't use it, at least not on any regular and consistent basis. The bulk of giveaways are created without any use of the SGtools, which seems more used within the forum for giveaways that are already invite-only or some other such restriction. In part because of that, users generally don't use SGtools at all, including to check whether the winners of their giveaways activated the gifts they won. Lacking an automatic detection system, or the integration of SGtools features within the main site, SGtools is at best an intriguing and esoteric peculiarity of this site that more advanced users use under special circumstances or when they remember to do so.
The best solution I can think of would be to implement a feature next to users' giveaways which allows them to check the winner if they activated the gift in much the same way SGtools does now, except perhaps in the form of a button beside each entry. This would provide users with an easy and streamlined means of checking their winners and would significantly increase user detection and reporting, which the SteamGifts staff can then address as normal, since they will see the buttons every time they check their created giveaways list. Once it is checked, a positive result could gray out the button so that it's no longer usable and a negative result can only be checked once every 24 hours (or whatever timeframe the staff decides to set), thereby preventing abuse. It would take time and effort to code it, of course, but it would probably go far in solving the problem of detecting regifting on SteamGifts in general, if not solve it entirely, while still placing the responsibility on the users to detect instances of regifting or failed gift activation.
The only effective alternative of which I know would be to implement an automatic detection system, an option the staff may find personally preferable. The automatic detection system would report instances of failed gift activation and perhaps even internal regifting directly to the staff, which they can then review in their reporting system. I'm personally fine with either, but I suspect the stress on the servers (and the potentially greater amount of coding necessary) would probably dissuade the staff from developing any such system.
The userbase can serve that "detective" role so long as they are provided the tools to do so. If SGtools—or, at least, its activated wins checker feature—were integrated into the main site, that may be all they need while also providing them with a whole range of new features that would drastically change how giveaways work on SteamGifts (if SGtools itself is integrated into the main site). There are problems with fully integrating SGtools which I can already foresee, but at least implementing an activated wins checker feature like the one I described above should suffice while avoiding such problems.
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I suspect the additional work for support would make it a no-no although I find the idea quite good. A few day suspension is just a temporary setback. The regifters probably don't give a shit about stuff like that. One week later they're back.
Apart from that, do you really thing they would implement something like this? I don't. I still have tickets open about regifters/non-activators/fake GA creators from 10-12 months ago and nothing happened. So I don't expect any changes here.
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I agree that site changes usually will take a very very long time. But that doesn't mean we cannot contribute suggestions. It is just a suggestion, implemented or not is not up to us. It may be ignored, or frowned upon. But still, we could, and should, still throw in ideas if it meant well for the site or the community.
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The punishment is already severe enough. I won a giveaway by someone who didn't speak English, they wanted to send me the key by e-mail or something, spammed my Steam account with PLZ ACCEPT GIFT / CHECK UR EMAIL / PLZ ACCEPT GIFT EMAIL PLZ and didn't understand what I was talking about when i told them I never received this supposed e-mail and so finally I just said, fuck it, this isn't worth all this effort and then I got suspended for two weeks.
:(
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I don't want to be rude, but that "not received" button is there for a reason :\
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Sounds good.
1 year good behavior - free copy of Bad Rats.
2 - Fortix
3 - Skyrim
6 - Barbie
7 - Dinner with cg
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No thanks, without thinking about the rules. I messed up and regifting once when Steam first started doing their region locking games trying to be nice for the guy instead of marked it as received since I did get it, but just couldn't redeem it.
It my cap dropped by 100 for it permanently, I would probably not be here anymore, I had already ate an (I think) 7 day ban over it and probably had a few people blacklist me for even seeing it on my profile.
I can see a huge offense for repeat offenders, but first time offenders are a no-go for me, mistake happen.
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Aaaaaaand some says 100P or even 200P deduction isn't effective at all since they can simply enter giveaways in small bursts before they are capped, or using a bot.
Of course, this thread is just an idea/suggestion. Implementation of new rules should be discussed among admins and mods to find the optimal balance. If they want to be more harsh to repeated offenders but allow forgiveness to first-time mistakes, the first offend can be set to deduct 0 points if they wan to.
Oh, don't sweat the blacklist. I got blacklisted by a few just by creating this thread. lol
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You know, I've been seeing a lots of complaints and suggestions on the forum regarding users suspension during my years on SG. And for 90% of these issues, the solution would be "have a larger support team".
I mean, seriously now, SG has a total of 936,063 registered users. Active or not, that's almost a million users. We currently have 1 bundler, 6 support, 4 moderators, 1 super mod, and 1 admin (cg). The bundler doesn't really count as a support member, so we have a total of 12 users with the ability to respond to tickets, some of which are currently away/inactive. That's roughly 78,000 users for 1 support volunteer.
I hate to rant about how things are run on SG, it's really none of my business, but I can't understand cg's logic behind this. Our current support/moderator volunteers are flooded with work, for obvious reasons, and nothing is being done to help. :(
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+1
Keeping your baby dragons in check will help too :P
Props to jatan and the nameless mod who just helped me snipe someone though. Hunter-killer team high-five!
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I totally get that. But isn't it harder to manage a website in general with such a small support team anyways?
cg should trust his support members to suggest users - and suggestions for new support members should be a thing, if it isn't already (if it is, then perhaps it's time to pick a few from the list).
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So, how do businesses hire people? There are a lot of professional support people who might have extra time to help, who's trustworthiness could be verified. We might be anonymous via these avatars and nicknames, but we're not randos in real life.
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Well, as you said, professional supports are hired. They are given a fixed set of instructions, and given some sort of training. If a support staff screwed up in their job, they could get penalized, or fired. They get scolded in front of their face. Termination due to incompetency means losing jobs, and possibly a black mark in their resume.
But for online volunteers, not so much.
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interesting idea (which doesn't mean i want this to happen, but at least i haven't thought about this possibility yet), but i absolutely disagree with one thing: if someone buys his unactivated game and redeems himself, why should he only get half the points back? that doesn't seem fair.
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One could have won a AAA game at launch, sell it away for a hefty profit, wait for a year, and then buy one during a huge Steam sale to "redeem himself". But if SG management team thinks one should be able to fully redeem 100% of what he got punished for, then so be it.
Just an idea. It's open for debate.
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i think preventing the users from fully redeeming themselves can't be good.
also, most of the non-bundled giveaways here are bought on sale anyway. there are only very, very few exceptions to that. so if the user buys it on the next sale in order to activate it, i don't think that's really unfair. there's also the other option - that he pays more than the GA creator paid, because he realizes his mistake soon after the GA and buys it shortly after sale for full price. how would it be fair for him, if he didn't even get all his points back? :)
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The simplest solution is allowing for rerolls AFTER one month of grace period since infraction suspension. That way everyone can judge by themselves whether or not ask for reroll on a case by case basis. The only change needed is a checkbox on reroll ticket creation page saying "I want it rerolled even if user was suspended"
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I remember posting this idea as a comment in another thread, but I can't seem to find it.
The idea is this, instead of just suspension/ban for rule breakers, put a hard limit on the maximum points for entering giveaway.
Everyone here have a limit of 300P that replenish overtime.
1st offense will impose a cap of 200P;
2nd offense will be left with 100P;
3 strikes and they will not be able to enter any giveaway at all.
However, people who re-gifted or not-activated their winnings can buy the game and redeem themselves, then appeal for maybe 50P of their max points back. This should severely hinder the amount of giveaways they can enter, but still allow them to participate in the site by giving away or whining in the forums.
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