One month on SteamGifts.

So, tomorrow (March 6th) I've been a member of Steamgifts for one month (ok, a short month as it was February but February counts too!) and here's some of my thoughts about it.

My first day started at 7:19 am on February 6th. It couldn't have started much better. It took me a whole 11 hours to win my first giveaway, the 34th giveaway I entered (King's Bounty: Dark Side, 1193 entries ended Feb 6th at 6:00 pm). Being a fan of Karma that kind of luck shamed me into creating my own giveaways almost right away.

Still less than 24 hours old as a SG member, at 12:59 am on February 7th, I started my own very first giveaway for the game Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny that ended at 07:00 am on Febrary 7th.

Not a bad first day, was it? 1 won giveaway, 3 created giveaways. And on the second day as the winners had started to collect their keys...Ding! Level 1!

The following 20 days or so weren't quite as exciting as my first day, I won a cpl more giveaways and created another 14 of my own slowly edging my way up towards Level 2. I soon started looking around for groups to join but being new and only level 1 I don't yet qualify for most groups except for public and more or less unlimited ones (which sort of defeats the purpose of groups IMO) but I did find Unlucky-7 and as soon as I my 7th giveaway was registered as completed I applied to join under rule 1b (7 or more completed giveaways).

Then I found another group with no formal requirements to join (other than having an account in good standing) but with specific rules for being a member, Playing Appreciated, where the only requirement is that you actually play the games you win (which fits me perfectly given that I rarely join giveaways for games I'm not in some way interested in playing to begin with).

Unlucky-7

If you have less than 8 wins, this group is for you. The community is quite cool with a lot of very generous members and with the exception of a few bad apples, the vast majority of them play by the rules. If you have more than 7 wins, or win your 8th as a regular member, you can still apply to join/stay as a gifter but gifters can only join giveaways that are specifically marked as open for gifters (which seems to be most of them though).

Playing Appreciated

The only rule is that you're expected to make a fair effort to play the games you win within a month after winning. What constitutes playing a game varies with the game. As with U-7, this group also has a very cool and generous community and again the vast majority play by the rules.

Then came the last week....after 20 days I had managed to reach level 1.95 and was settling in for a very long and slow journey but then things got crazy. Jump forward another 6 days to yesterday and I was no longer Level 1, nor was I level 2..or 3..I was Level 4!? Turns out that I had unknowingly created a few giveaways for unbundled games, one was Black Death (I got it from a GMG mystery box thing) that is valued at $20 which shot me straight from 1.95 to 2.84, then a few more GAs took me over 3 and up to 3.12 and then Lego SW: The Force Awakens (picked up from BundleStars when they ran a deal of the day thing for a pack of 3 Lego games including SW: TFA, Marvel Avengers and Jurassic World for 10€, I only wanted Jurassic World as I already own the other two but it still felt like a fair price plus I'd get two really good games for giveaways as a bonus) pushed me all the way to level 4 as it's apparently valued at $40(!). I'm enjoying it while it lasts because I fully expect to drop back down to level 3 again due to the Lego game, it's listed at 29,99€ in the Steam store and aren't US$ prices usually about the same so $40 should be the deluxe edition, not the base game?

Finally I want to say thank you for a pretty decent first month to the community as a whole, there are a lot of very cool people here and no way near as much drama as I expected. I'm not a very social person and rarely interacts with people unless there's a point to it but the interaction I have had here so far has pretty much been all positive, which has made it not only FUN to do giveaways but I've also felt encouraged to try to find games of a higher quality and not only cheap bundled crap, especially for the groups I'm in. The Lego games were really fun to do for Playing Appreciated as they got way more attention than I had expected, in fact and unless I've missed something, the Lego Star Wars giveaway was the second most popular group exclusive giveaway in the groups history (with 169 entries out of 480 users), the only one I could find with more entries was a giveaway for Witcher III.

TL:DR Blah blah 1 month blah blah. Get to the giveaways already!

Both runs until 07:19 am on March 6th which marks the time when my account turns 1 month old. Only restriction is that you have to be at least Level 1. If you're stuck at Level 0 because you really can't find a way to do a proper giveaway for whatever reasons, take a look at this thread created by one of SteamGifts many awesome users, Yirg. Oh and I guess not being on my blacklist helps but this would only be an issue for a single user (a user who blatantly broke the rules of Unlucky-7).

Still Life Level 1
Still Life 2 Level 1

Here's hoping I didn't screw something up....