* Imitating student's voice *
BUT IT IS REALLY EASY! YOU DON'T NEED TO BRUTEFORCE ANYTHING, YOU HAVE THE SOLUTION IN PLAIN SIGHT ALREADY! I'M SURE YOU CAN SOLVE IT IN NO MORE THAN 5 MINUTES, WITHOUT ANY BRUTEFORCING!

* Back to perro's voice *
I had to use bruteforce to solve it T_T But combining it with some guessing, or it would be too many combinations. I feel so alone...

Actually, 41% of all giveaway codes (52^5 out of 62^5) contain only letters ... that's not so rare. And as I said, since there is no upper/lowercase for numbers, I read that from mecorx's hint. Clarified: I read from mecorx's hint that there are no numbers, since he gave case for all chars and there is no upper/lowercase for numbers.

But anyway, all this is just number wanking. Solving this requires a different approach, and you are right, I wouldn't exclude numbers completely. I just like to think they are less probable, because I still have faith that mecorx did not lie.

I was using the term loosely, but yeah, I was already dropping sets of 50 into an online tool I found and just looking for 302s instead of 301s...of course I didn't find any in my test set or I wouldn't still be talking about this, but I did throw a few known GA codes in to verify the concept. True parsing would purely be interesting to distill things down further into active/ended/pending and locked/accessible, and then you'd want to grab the name of the game, the number of entries, time remaining, whether or not you've already entered....and at some point you realize you've written a passive bot, which is risky territory and not playing fairly.

End of the day, I'll probably just stick with Excel to generate the permutations and the 50 at a time online tool to help manage a little bit of brute forcing. If anything beyond that, it would just be a simple tool to take a set of 5 limited character sets as parameters to iterate through and just check the return codes.

But but, wikipedia says its Q :P