I want to say that entering more giveaways than the average user would mean you have even higher odds of winning. If the average user enters 40 and you have entered 80 you are not just having 40 more shots at a 1 in 20 chance, you are reducing your odds to a 1 in 10 chance of winning.
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probability stays the same, its the same math you'd use for predicting item drops. If you have a 0.001% chance to get a mount off a mob in World of Warcraft, every kill will still have a 0.001% chance. It is not accumulative. Whether it is 100 kills or 1000 kills. If it was accumulative then you'd be able to reach 100% probability. Which let me tell you, its pretty difficult to support.
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You do realize that only a handful of people have been winning multiple prizes right? Most of us here have not even won a single one. But the same group of people keep winning.
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People like OP who have entered around 100 giveaways and won 3.
Odds are fair and good? I hardly think so.
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If people were not winning multiple times, that would be a statistical anomaly. It annoys me to no end that this is a common misconception with the general population especially those who don't major in mathematics.
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That is why the overall odds approach a 1 in 5 versus a raw 1 in 4. 1000ish people have won something 3000+ have not. A 1 in 4 chance guarantees most do not win by nature of being a 1 in 4 chance. However, this is much less bleak than a 1 in 200 chance.
Edit in response to above:
True randomness guarantees that some people will be drawn multiple times. When iTunes first introduced shuffle, sometimes people would get songs twice in a row because it was random. They actually had to program it to not be random so that songs would not repeat.
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If they use a decent random generation method then everyone has equal chance winning and just because someone wins once doesn't mean their odds don't decrease of winning again. It's statistically unlikely for someone to win twice or more but it's entirely reasonable to think that they can. Random is as random does.
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Odds to win a single game depends on the entrants to that giveaway. The winner is picked randomly. You cannot calculate the odds globally because it depends A LOT on the giveaway you are entering to. It's pure luck. :)
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Close estimate, here's the breakdown from the database.
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Irregardless, I still think this is not a good site to try to win games. The odds are screwd IMO. Come on, why the hell are the same, small, elite group of people winning MULTIPLE games?
Actually I wanted to do a give away here the other day. But when I think about my gift will VERY VERY likely go to someone who have already won, I scrapped the idea immediately. I'll rather do it elsewhere. At least it will probably go to someone who have not won anything before.
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What elite group? I'll post all the stats, just let me know what you're looking to see. Random doesn't mean every person wins, it means every entry is treated equally without past results being taken into account. Considering 1 in 5.75 users who have entered a giveaway have won, you have a 17% chance it'll go to a previous winner.
I'm always open to ideas, so post any suggestions. Do you want a checkbox when creating a giveaway, saying only people that haven't previously won can enter? People that haven't won this month? Run it by the community, if they agree, I'll set it up.
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I do not think implementing a way to discriminate people is the way to go. It can be very daunting to new users to win as they have limited supply of points compared to early users before the point system. Poeple that were greedy and signed for everything before point system could have unsigned and instantly hit the 300p limit. Thing is that if you have decent amount of games and you have high points chances are you will have hard time to spend those points as more of your games will repeat or not interested at all. Another factor is what games you sign for, if you got for 50p game and somebody else goes for 5x10p games, this gives the second user much higher chance of striking a win. So you see, it up to people where they invest their points, they need to be smart about it not greedy. Also, consider that somebody might have won 1 giveaway, but won the valve complete pack, which could potentially make him a bigger winner than someone who has one 6 games. Consider that some of the giveaways are DLCs, not games.
Finally, limiting who giveways could potentially alienate people. Personally, I am against such a option, I prefer the free fair chance environment for everybody. There will be always somebody with more luck.
p.s. Could you give us a break down of giveways created by users?
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Sure, what type of information are you looking for? The highest number of giveaways created by a user? If so, the top 3 are below. I'll try to get a member page up soon to search all this information.
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/offtopic: more people need to thanks GLaPOS for being so awesome
Now that I think of it, It would be more accurate to show how many games are given. I recall a giveway of 20 copies. Could you do ((number of copies) - (number of users)) but with copies instead of number of giveaways?
edit: just an idea - all time hall of fame.
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Yep.
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Still, it seems like an awful lot of multiple game winners......
And some of these have not even taken part in that many contests.
Don't get me wrong. I am not whining and neither am I hard up for free stuffs. I just find it very strange.
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It would be strange if there weren't multiples, that's a common misconception with randomness. True randomness creates clusters, if everything was spread out that would be a indicator of impropriety.
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Gonna go ahead and math it up in here.
"basically if you and 199 other people enter into 10 gifts there is now a 10 in 1999 chance of winning 10 prizes. This is a 1 to 199 chance of winning one of the 10 prizes, or a 1 in 19.9 chance of winning a single one."
First off, if it's you and 199 other people, that's a 1 in 200 chance, not 1 in 199. Much nicer fraction to work with. As for probability, you have to figure in the binomial coefficient, so that's 10(1/200)(199/200)^9 which comes out to a 4.975% chance of winning one game. Chances for multiple games are of course much smaller: 0.108% for 2, 0.00145% chance for 3, and so on.
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If you enter a single giveaway with 200 entrants you have 1/200 probability of winning, 0.5%. If you enter in two giveaways, the probability of winning a single game becomes the addition of the probabilities. For example, 1/200 + 1/50 = 5/200 (1/40 or 2.5%). To get the probability of winning both giveaways instead we multiply the two probabilities. In the example this results is 0.02% chance. Now if we two people that have entered the same amount of giveaways does not mean they have equal chance of winning, unless they have entered the exact same giveaways. For example, person A has entered two giveaways, 1/50 + 1/50 = 2/50 (1/25 or 4%), and person B, 1/200 + 1/50 = 2.5%. One person can get into a giveaway with not many entries and have higher chance of winning a game than a person who has entered two giveaways with bunch more entries. So, if you want to optimize the chances of winning spend points on giveaways with less entries. This does not necessary mean you will win as your faith lays in the psuedo-random algorithm used to decide the winner. Before I forget, if you have a giveaway with more that one, say 4 copies, you will have 4/200 chance or 2%. You can say every additional copy doubles your probability of winning and you only spend points once. :)
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I was one of the first people invited to Steamgifts, and it didn't really do anything. I guess like a week later or something like that CG made the public invite code and I think only about 2 giveaways ended at that time.
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<Majoring in Quantum Mechanics, was going to major in math.
Zo is incorrect.
Zo said: "If you enter a single giveaway with 200 entrants you have 1/200 probability of winning, 0.5%. If you enter in two giveaways, the probability of winning a single game becomes the addition of the probabilities. For example, 1/200 + 1/50 = 5/200 (1/40 or 2.5%)."
What if I entered 200 giveaways, and in each giveaway I had a 1/200 chance of winning? I wouldn't have a 100% chance of winning; I would only have about a 63.3% chance of winning.
An easier way to look at this is dice rolling. Let's say I roll a die 10 times, and I want to know my probability of rolling at least one six (kind of like winning at least one prize.) You can't simply add your 1/6 chance 10 times to get your probability; there is definitely still a chance you won't roll a six at all. If you just added it all, you would get a 166.6% chance of rolling a 6. That's nonsensical. To look at what your chances of actually rolling a six are, it's easier to look at what your chances of not rolling a six are. You have a 5/6 chance of not rolling a 6. To not roll at least one six, you would have to not roll a six 10 times. You can calculate the probability of that easily. (5/6)^10 ~= .161505 or 16.1505% chance of not rolling a six. To figure your odds of rolling a six, simply subtract that answer from 1. So, 1-((5/6)^10) = about a 83.84944% chance of rolling at least one six.
So, let's say the average giveaway I enter has 200 entrants, and I've entered 50 giveaways. My chances of winning at least one prize would be 1-((199/200)^50), which is about a 22.17% chance.
So, in conclusion, if you know the number of entrants in all the giveaways you've entered or plan to enter, multiply all the chances that you didn't win a prize and subtract that probability from 1 to find the probability that you'll win something.
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I know seeing a sub with 200 entries is daunting, but I don't think the odds are actually that bad. There are 4188 members and have been 1049 gifts. That is a 1-4 ratio of gifts to users. Since most people only win once, basically 1 in 4 people have won a prize. It may be closer to 1 in 5 if there are duplicate wins.
If 200 other people have entered with you on 1 prize and you and them have also entered other prizes, there is overlap with other prizes. 200 in this one, 200 in that one. basically if you and 199 other people enter into 10 gifts there is now a 10 in 1999 chance of winning 10 prizes. This is a 1 to 199 chance of winning one of the 10 prizes, or a 1 in 19.9 chance of winning a single one. A 1 in 20 chance is a lot better than a 1 in 200 chance.
The only thing that breaks these odds is when a person wins more than once.
Disclaimer: fishpen0 likes to pretend he knows how to do math. Can some math major get something more concrete in here?
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