Should I Raise the Minimum Level, or What Else?

you could raise it to lv10 and you will still find idlers, leeches, and users that act like autojoin bots.

the best course of action for me is to ignore who wins my giveaways (after i filter some unwanted people with blacklists).
i have no time to get frustrated because user#457346 won my 10 cent trash bundle and it took them 4 days to activate it.

You should make all giveaways whatever the level I happen to be is, of course.

Make them level 11 or higher. I am pretty sure no bots will enter those.

You can create invite only giveaways with sgtools. This will allow you to limit who can enter based on a lot of different factors.

You can use simple rules that just require a certain ratio of sent to won real CV or you can go more in depth and add a lot more rules if you want to get specific.

I don't know too much about how to create giveaways with sgtools since I only used it a couple times a few years ago, but if you want to try it and need some help, I'm sure there are some people here that can help. It was a very commonly used tool on SG in the past.

Edit: If you want to see an example of a very complicated set of rules to see what you can do with the tool, there is currently a giveaway in this thread for the game PictoQuest. If you click on the link for the giveaway, it will bring you to an sgtools gate that will only provide the invite only link to the giveaway if you can pass the set of rules shown on the page. You obviously don't need to create rules that in depth though. Most users that want to limit who can enter will just require a certain sent to won real CV ratio.

Why you bother with people ratio at all? Any public GA would be infested with Bots or people who not giving back. It is what it is. If you want to escape situation like this create WL giveaway or join some groups with ratio system. I am personally stopped caring about that stuff long time ago.

If you're concerned about entrants having a bad ratio, you can create GA's with a custom rule on SGTools and post the link on the forums. Invite only / forum giveaway winners also tend to activate their wins more quickly in my experience but there's no guarantees.

I agree with eldar4k.
Personally, I don't like entering giveaways with hundreds/thousands of entries, and almost no chance of winning.
I prefer to enter WL/group giveaway with a decent chance to win, subsequently, I try to create my giveaways with a limited number of WL/groups so people entering them have a decent chance of winning.

Group and whitelist giveaways are where the games I think are the best (subjectively of course) end up going, the rest of the giveaways I just do public usually level 4 or 5 and I don't worry about who wins because life is just too short. I do check my winners to make sure they aren't rule breakers though as support can't be expected to police the site without user help.

Hey,
GA with sgtools should work for that =)
But the best way to avoid bot => WL (i do that for some games)

Solution: stop concerning yourself with ratio and level. It's a never-ending spiral.

As others have said, you can avoid this via whitelist-only giveaways, invite-only giveaways, or by doing giveaways for ratio-based groups.

I've never gifted anything over level 0. If I gift to groups, it's mainly to the likes of Unlucky-7 and Playing Appreciated. (Though I'm not gifting these days.)

I dislike the circle-jerk aspect of SG, or, as I often refer to it, random trading, where it's assumed that people who gift are the ones who should win more.

I'd say: If you feel that the games you're gifting publicly are kind of garbage, why do you care who gets them? And why do you care if they thank you?

Whitelist, group and sgtool giveaways are useful if you want that.

If you want to give to newbies/unlucky people, the group unlucky 7 is pretty neat for that.

I think from level 5 everything gets better :P

You've gotten good advice already, but the only way to avoid entrants with bad ratio is to give away stuff in ratio-based groups. Pretty simple.

I don't pay much attention to ratio, but I do care that they follow the site's rules by checking SGTools on the winners. When I did level 2 public giveaways, it felt like I ran into bullshit with every other giveaway. At level 3 though, things are going much more smoothly. So there's that.

I gave up thinking too much about user stats (besides religiously check for unactivated / duplicate wins) and it works pretty well. If they have bad ratio, oh well, not that surprising, it's easier to move on. But if they have great one, then it's a good day for both of us!
Also... someone having a good ratio doesn't mean they will ever play your game. We had people with 10+ sent/won ratio with literally nothing played, and I also have multiple year old unplayed wins that somehow always gets postponed. (For some reason I literally keep the best games for the last which makes no sense. Trying to get over it)

At the end of the day, you should not care about your given away game after creating a public giveaway, because you have no control over it. Make it for Playing Matters, or Playing Appreciated that requires to be played if you really want it to be played .

There's no definite solution to the issue, as bots and script users are everywhere, even at high levels. ESPECIALLY at high levels.

At low levels you have "leechers" who treat the site as if it was a surrogate of gleam, i.e. just a source of freebies, but easier to use, and where they sometimes can win actually good games if they're lucky, at most just doing a few giveaways to have more stuff to leech (by virtue of having more giveaways to enter at level 1).

They use bots or scripts to do the hard work, because they don't have time to waste doing it themselves (too busy making profits off the farmed cards, or trading, or whatever), and that's why you always see them online but unresponsive: it's not them, it's their bot, which they keep online to enter everything they can.
They then check the account once per week to collect the loot and sync, since it's mandatory to enter giveaways.

Bot users or not, at lower levels you're much more likely to find troublemakers, if not just for the sheer volume of users: not activating won games (and/or regifting them), multiple wins for the same game, multiple accounts, being unresponsive for extended periods of time, rejecting all contact attempts, difficult communication because they don't speak English, demanding to receive a game the moment they win it (and quite rudely)... and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

However, there're also genuine users who are new to the site (well, everybody has to start from there), and/or just cannot afford to give much (not everybody is from a well-off family from a first world country with a strong currency, after all).

At higher levels, on the other hand, you're bound to find "generous gifters" who mostly farmed CV by spamming bundles with a high return of investment, while effectively trading more valuable gifts between themselves in closed ratio-based groups, so that they can win even more.
Most of them are also collectors, traders, farmers, or any mix of them; and you can sometimes find them bragging about their "generosity", especially against perceived "leechers" (i.e. anybody with a lower level and/or ratio), or complaining about trading related things (because they're all about profits, nevermind that it's offtopic), or "lost CV" (because they totally deserve full unbundled CV for random shovelware they got for a few cents from some shady reseller).

However, you're just as likely -more likely, I'd hope- to find users who really like to gift games (often good games) to random strangers, rather than giving "whatever is good for CV, regardless of quality".
As you can deduce, levels, and even ratio, are not a good measure of how "good" or "bad" a user is. They're just numbers.

You have to use whatever tools are at your disposal, be it level restrictions, forum giveaways, SGTools, groups, whitelist, in any combination:

1. public giveaways are quite iffy, as even raising the level requirement isn't a sure way to avoid undesirable winners, as it's just as likely to prevent legit users from joining instead,
   • in particular, they're practically guaranteed to have the highest rates of problematic users, due to their open nature;
2. you can help cull the majority of "undesirables" with invite-only giveaways, as only the most passionate of them would even know about the existence of a forum,
   • however, they can, and will, get leaked on some shady forum by unscrupulous users, especially if valuable/interesting games are involved;
3. SGTools lets you spot invalid entries (something you cannot do with normal invite-only giveaweays), and also lets you use a variety of filters to restrict access,
   • however, even the most restrictive of filters won't guarantee that a recently released $60 AAA game won't end up collecting virtual dust in a collector's library;
4. groups, at least private ones, try their best at screening potential members (or kicking bad actors if they slip through), and at least you're (mostly) guaranteed to find actual users,
   • however, requirements to join them aside, they usually have activity requirements, so they're not exactly best suited for casual gifting;
5. you have absolute control over your personal whitelist, as you're the one who decides who gets in and who doesn't.

Ultimately, it depends on what your end goal is. Want to increase CV? Then you shouldn't care what happens to those games. Especially the cheapest ones.

And if you're doing it for the reward, you're in the wrong place. If you want better chances to win in general, join groups.
If you just want to win specific games, you're better off trading for them, so that you know exactly WHAT you're getting, and WHEN.

Want to give games to users who would appreciate them? Then, guess what? You're also in the wrong place.
Yes, I'm serious. You should just personally gift games to friends who you know want them, rather than trust random strangers.

Just want to give stuff? You can make do with the aforementioned tools.
Just stop caring about ratio, levels, CV, and anything else, and you'll get used to it in no time.

And you can always ask in this forum if there's something that's not clear enough.
As long as it's not about blacklists. We don't talk about blacklists. And I'm totally gonna get blacklisted for this (if not for all the snarky commentary above).

Yeah, that is a frustrating problem that's hard to avoid completely when making giveaways. Puzzles combined with invite only are pretty good at preventing bots, as is--as others mentioned- SGtools.

To your concern about putting cheap bundled games behind puzzles, I don't think there is anything wrong with that, especially if it is a train of them. In the first place, you are giving away something for free so no one really has grounds to complain (I mean, unless you are lying and claiming there is some AAA title behind a hugely difficult puzzle just to waste people's time and be mean). I don't even think you necessarily have to say what games are included although it is nice if you give some idea (i.e. old humble keys). I can only speak to my own experience, but I have never resented a puzzle-locked train even if I ended up not entering a single giveaway. Although, to be fair, I really enjoy puzzles.

I read your post and because i wrote direct before in a other thread something i copy it here inside because it fits very well.
But first i need to say that a lot of people already gave you very good advices (sgtools and so on). If you need help to set sgtools up with more as the "clickable" stuff then write me, i done in the longer gone past different checks with it (as example trade bans including)

My big BL is very well known (and not really liked -but that is not from interest for me-).
I don't like the extreme leechers with 10 gifted, 200 wins, last GA 2 years+ ago OR the people that make 20 Accounts to get free games where you "only" get 1 game per account (each one that use multiaccounts don't limit themself only to do that at one site, it's a character mark/sign, a behavior -and i would say a very bad one-) OR the ones with many red marks at sgtools OR the people that don't have the basic manners to say thanks after a win.
All such ones move directly to my BL IF they are level 3 or higher, because i don't have space for the lower levels (1k is max. at the BL). And that force me to make my GA's for lvl 3+. Not how i want it but thats the possible options that i have.<<

From that text you can feel how good i am able to understand your frustration.
To give you a extreme example, i was forced to run behind 3 winners, from 15 made GA's, that they please please please take the wins (partly ~20 days...).
I don't like to waste my time for such people, i don't like to waste my games for such people -if i got them for free or bought them make only a little difference for me- and i don't like to get a bad mood back from gifting something.
It was very clear that this guys (at least 2 of them) use autojoiners and at least 10% of my winners are from the sort of guys that have scripts/bots run and activate their wins 1-2x week but are "always online" (at steam too).
And as you say, i don't have a problem if someone needs (7) days -or longer if he/she wrote me something at the begin/before- to activate the win because of their reallife but it is frustrating to run behind people that they please please please take your money (in the end is it money -partly bought with time-) and proof all that to the support too.

For me it is the reason why i lowered my GA's drastical. Special the public ones.
Each second or third public GA needs work (over the normal sgtools checks and sending the win) after the winner is choosen. And that make me a bad mood. Because i don't want to have a bad mood i avoid that situations and make much more Whitelist and Group GA's then i think it's good for the site in the end.
Second think is i give to friends and have my own discord. Use Ga's to promote my Curation -with nearly no success because only 10% read GA descriptions (test it with a other GA code or a direct link... not much will enter the second one -that is, sadly, no joke-)-

But as long as the support aren't able and/or aren't willing (which one fits depends on the support member -but in general you can say that their hands are bound-) to kick the "bad apples" there are hordes and not only a few... and that is the real problem! the given advices are your only hope of getting good feelings/mood as the feedback to your GA's.

When i read or hear "it is how it is, deal with it" then i want to jump out of my skin because when you always accept that something is bad then nothing will change.
But it is a small way between the stuff that you are able to change and the stuff that you aren't able to change.
So look close for what you invest your lifetime because you don't get it back and it isn't endless. Best wishes and a Whitelist from me for you :o)

make it level 6, level 4 it's pretty easy to get with a few bundles games.