I honestly don't think it's that critical of a feature, to be honest. I mean, I wade in a surplus of points all day every day, but if you feel like you would better use them somewhere else you can always exit manually.
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You are right :-) There is so many bundles and there is no easy way to remember all games on SG. Because of unused points I just enter almost all games. Then later there is no easy way how to remove all entries from games I bought. No sort, no display all entries of 1 game, no batch remove, anything. So recheck and remove is the simplest way do give a chance to win to others.
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Actually, I do this the other way round: When I win a game, I redeem, mark redeemed, write a thank-you-note, and check my entered GAs list to remove duplicates of this game. The last step takes about 10 seconds.
And I guess you don't win like 100 games per day... :)
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No, I don't need points back, I just don't want be part of giveaways for games I own ;-) And not periodically, just when sync is done. SG is NOT syncing profile automatically, if I remember. So it checks games only when manual sync is triggered. Checking entered giveaways costs lost energy then download user games list. So no extra performance.
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It would still require to crosscheck all your games with all your entries. Or at least all your recent additions to your library with all your entries, which would make it necessary to save two lists to filter.
Also further down in the thread you say this system would also prevent two wins for the same game.... so which is is now? Automated by the server or just on sync?
Edit: Also, whatever the case, this could not effect DLC or Packages that include DLC, since this is an issue due to the way Steam itself handles DLCs. (That's why people are always able to enter GAs for already owned DLCs or Game of the year editions and such)
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You know how it works today, right? Enter giveaway for any game, then buy it and resync. This game is marked as owned an doesn't appear on giveaway list or it tells you, you own it. This is nothing new. But it cancels existing entered giveaways, even if SG knows, that you own this game :-) So it is simple check entered giveaways and comparing with owned list. Piece of cake. Simple join on SQL backend ;-)
Edit:
And about other post - I said it is another scenarion. It has nothing to do with my suggestion.
And about DLCs - DLCs detection is complete broken on SG. I have to manually check every DLC if I own it or not. So it is another problem. I'm not telling that it is SG problem. I don't know.
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Yes, this is why people hold of syncing at weekends otherwise they'd be unable to enter those giveaways. It's also how people who don't meet the $100 non-bundle games requirement are able to register for the site.
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it's not SG bug, it's Steam bug and nothing SG can do with it. Steam API reports any game from free weekend as owned. SG is using Steam API to determine your list of games. Thus SG cannot tell if a game reported by API is in your library or is it just a free weekend game. There are many other bugs in API (like not reporting some games and almost all DLCs) which break SG system as well, but it doesn't mean there is a bug with SG, rather it means that because of Steam API bug there is no way to make other better system.
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Not reporting DLC is not a bug,it's a way of avoiding clutter, and it seems like developers can chose if a piece of DLC is going to be reported or not. DLC that gets reported are also visible to anyone checking your games owned list on steam, and imagine just how annoying it would be if every piece of cosmetic DLC from Europa Universalis IV was show. This is why it's not uncommon for larger DLC to be visible, while small DLC tends to almost never be visible.
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it is a flaw nonetheless. DLCs could be reported by API just with different parameter. For example games having parameter GAME and everything else having parameter DLC. Then you could decide - if you want to just list your game you list only things with parameter GAME, if you want list of everything you list all parameters.
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The API also doesn't report bundles unfortunately, only app & sub. So there are games that have a deluxe edition or something similar that only exists as a bundle, but there is no way to add them to the giveaway list.
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So SG can create temporary blacklist for weekend free games and ignore them as bundled games for creating new giveaways, right? It is just question if some dev want to implement this or no. Nothing is problem. There is always a way how to make it better :-)
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Codewise this would require someone manually inputting which games are weekend free games etc for this to work. How else can it automatically differentiate if it's a weekend-free game. Apart from parsing text scraped from a page. That would be a terrible solution.
Plus like Zelghadis points out: unable to tell if you happen to own the game that is weekend-free. That can not even be fixed manually in a normal way unless you implement caching which would solve it partially but not entirely still.
The best way to make it better would be a Steam API that gives proper results.
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Afraid not.
Because: there is no way to see if someone legitimately owns the game or if it is because of the free weekend. Even manually this can not be fixed beause SG support can not know this difference.
Really: the Steam API is the problem here and there is no good work-around that would not be a waste. (Trust me: Youre not the first with this idea and not the first trying to figure out workarounds).
And even if support could magically figure out if someone already owned the game or if it's shown as owned cause of the free weekend -> using a manual workaround for a blatant steam-api-bug would be wrong.
Considering the limited resources SG has they are better used to fix potential bugs with SG first.
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But in the delay between the free weekend starts and the time it would be added to that list, anyone that syncs get screwed. It could be 1 hour, or it could be a day before it's added. And it's also a problem because of people that actually own the game.
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As zelghadis said, the fault is with Steam. Though reporting "ownership" of games during free weekends might be useful for other reasons, so it's questionable if Valve considers it an issue. It is an issue for SG, but many other services use the steam API.
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Why would the bug be on SG's part if it is clearly Steam reporting ownership of a game wrongly?
Honestly: there is nothing SG can do when the Steam API gives the same results for two different situations (a game that is owned or a game that is free to play that weekend).
The Steam API could use a lot of fixing, but that is outside of SG's control.
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No. It happens only if you sync your account during that time and it's temporary. At worst I think it lasts a pair of weeks, then steam realizes you don't own it anymore.
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then it becomes sort of pointless, because if you're marking as received, you're clearly online and on site anywway so you're here to remove your entries manually anyway in a few seconds. only moment when it's potentially useful is when you win 2 games ewhile being offline and come to website just to see 2 keys for the same game. But again - one of GAs may be fake, so autoremoval on win is njot an option either.
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That would be ideal, but I think the reason stated for not doing that was because people are terrible at marking things as received when they should. One could argue that this is self-inflicted, but I guess CG think it's more of an issue that people get all their entries removed due to marking something as received too early rather than the odd double win and people having to remove their entries manually.
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Btw, if this feature wont be implemented solely because of free weekends, maybe code it so it is disabled while "weekends" are active on steam?
Yeah, when you sync during weekend it would work as now, but all you would have to do is sync again on monday/tuesday depending on timezone
Idea been mentioned so many times and i didn't think of that yet lol
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I don't see any hate, people are just discussing your suggestion. Not agreeing with it isn't hate.
Yes, there are ways, but these ways introduce new issues. There is no sense in introducing issues to automate something that can already be done manually and isn't very hard to do.
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Discussion is the way how problems are solved. You are right. But telling "it can't be done" is not discussion. It is just way how to tell "I don't care, go to hell". :-)
And still I don't think there is any new issue related to my suggestion. All pointed problems already on SG are. So nothing new. Only problem is with free weekend. Ok, I agree.
Autoremove feature should be opt-in (to prevent any unexpected looses) and should be disabled when free weekend is introduced, as suggested before. I don't see any other problem here. That's all.
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I know that sometimes even when the free weekend ended, the API will still report that you own the game for a certain time, so the feature would probably be disabled more often than enabled.
It's unlikely to be implemented because it's not really needed, and looks like a lot of trouble for not much. It would be so low priority that cg would always have something more important to work on.
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Well so again, If someone creates giveaway for game that is in free weekend, SG thinks that I own that game and doesnt allow me to enter, right? This is how it works now, right?After Steam API tells SG that free weekend is over, I will be able to enter giveaway. Right? So where is the problem? Yes, If giveaway was created before, SG should remove me from giveaway. Thats only "problem". Right?
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Yes, you would be removed any giveaways from that game you entered, and would not be able to enter them again.
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The issue is that someone needs to add it to the exceptions manually when the free weekend starts. If there's a delay, then the issues mentioned in other places in this thread will still arise. Steam does not actually report free weekends as free weekends, it just says that you own the game.
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Simple case of:
"I don't want to check my entries in giveaways when I'm activating keys in steam.
I insist the site to do it for me."
So much entitlement in this thread it's embarassing (if not surprising)
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How is SG meant to check if Steam doesnt provide the information?
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The steam API only reports some DLC. No way for SG to know about the ones not getting reported. And it's not a bug, it's a feature from steam's side. If DLC gets reported or not seems to be up to the devs, and this is why larger DLC more often gets reported (and shown in your games owned list) while smaller DLC rarely gets reported (or shown in your owned games list).
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Well, using ASF I didn't understood this way, appeared for me that the access to our library was bigger than looking at our public profile when I provided my Steam API key into it! But I'm not certain about this, never programmed or tried anything using the steam API, so if you know it deeply, you're right and it's really impossible. Thanks for the clarification!
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I've wanted to suggest this for a little while, to have a method of checking whether you have entered any giveaways for games any games you now own on a resync and automatically remove them. I don't mind the points loss, but I'd rather not cause a hassle with accidentally winning a game I've already added to my account because I absentmindedly forgot to remove an entry. However, after reading the replies, I can see all the ways this is not such a good idea.
My new suggestion would be this: Have a way to check all of your entered games against your library and provide you with the option to manually remove them. This could be done by the site or a userscript, though it would probably take less server resources per use if done by the site, as a userscript would likely need to call many pages.
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it could be useful to at least get some notification about those, for example I just won the same game i won a day earlier, so I had to notify the creator to reroll, now I am waiting for support it would seem.
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Many times I entered giveaway for game I didn't own, then later bought bundle with some of games.
SG should auto recheck owned games and remove all my entries from these giveaways after steam sync.
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