We all know what I did this Saturday, but what have YOU done today?
I think it is ridiculous that one set of programs has spawned so many topics, and that people think less of some giveaways. I mean a lot of the giveaways on this site are generated from the same concept.
Then looking at the "analysis", I suspect it doesn't take into many factors, and simply looking at Chance of winning over a period of time over CV req, seems wrong. CV is a one time investment (although it decays irregularly due to price drops, bundling etc), but winning probability stays the same (actually more complicated but let's assume) so it is bound to pay off in terms of expected value over time at least in the lower levels especially if we consider that there is a resource constraint (points-> can't enter everything). Also, I am highly doubtful of how the winning chance is calculated.
Also, everybody no doubt get's less bang for the buck than lv0s because as long as lv0 wins one thing, their bang for the buck is undefined.
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Hmmmm.... well, nonetheless, I agree with your thought that thinking people are "cheating" is quite absurd. Not because of bang for buck, but because in principle I feel it is absurd. If someone thinks everyone on this site should be altruistic and think that this community would function as is... I mean currently incentives do somewhat align (except lvl 0), although we could argue it could be done better, so that selfish motivations also drive to promote the community good. Of course there could be other exploits, and maybe we should do something about real exploits, but I don't understand why people think this particular giveaway is an exploit.
Who decides what arbitrary threshold of cv per dollar is an exploit and other not?
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Thank you so much for actually reading my previous comments. I can assure you many didn't. The level and cv system are a way of gamification that fosters participation. In that sense it's great. Naturally, every system is susceptible to improve, but the current one is pretty well set (+5 copies limitation, higher reward for non bundled, etc).
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Yay, more topics about Clickteam Fusion Bundle. That is exactly what people need.
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Sorry. My initial intention was to stem the proliferation of said topics by showing that complaining about it was absurd... But it only got me criticism some kunais in the back. And some fun too.
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Are you trying to calculate win chances in a randomized lottery . . . . . . . by introducing time and CL level in the equation? you forget that most GA's are made for lvl 0 and lvl1, so, more GA's to enter, more chance to win.
Your calculation is only valid if all lvl's give the same amount of GA's. But that is just not true.
How is making a GA cheating the system? Bundled games are limited by default.
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No. You don't get it. Tomorrow I'll upload the spreadsheet and explain it thoroughly. That way we avoid further misunderstandings.
Dat gom jabbar, doe
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Aaaah OK, clearly I am missing something.~
It is pointing at your MF HAMSTER :D
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First, I want to address the most basic of points which I believe you're trying to make. You posted this in a reply earlier in the thread:
"This is because The chances of winning a game per dollar spent on games you give away (the number of games you will earn divided by how much the games you gave away costed you) is maximum at Level 0."
I think this is trivially obvious to prove, and can safely just be assumed. In economic terms we call this return on investment. If someone never creates a giveaway and stays level 0 forever, even if they only ever win one game they have essentially an infinite return on investment. You can't divide by zero, but you can probably see where that's going. The limit as the divisor goes to zero is infinity. No matter how often someone wins giveaways at level 1, 2 or whatever, their return on investment is going to be inferior. This is a fact. When you don't make any investment, any benefit you gain is pure profit. So a true min-maxer is going to stay at level 0, if their goal is to maximize return on investment (more on this later).
That said, I think there are some issues with the way you have framed the problem. I also believe you have misunderstood why some, and perhaps many, choose to go to higher levels.
Your original post is really short on details as to how you arrived at your numbers, so I'm making some assumptions. One is that I believe you factor in all users at a given level as well as all giveaways. By this I mean your model has all users at level 1 having entered all level 1 giveaways. In reality, this is not possible (I believe this was pointed out in an earlier reply as well). Nobody has sufficient points to enter all giveaways for which they are eligible. In order to approximate what percentage of eligible people enter the average giveaway you'd have to mine the archive of past giveaways and take a sufficient sample size to extrapolate the percentage. However, this leads into my next point.
Not all giveaways are created equal. The most basic difference is duration. Giveaway duration can go from one hour to weeks, and anything in between. It is much more common for level 0 giveaways to have short durations than it is for higher level giveaways. Then there are private giveaways of various types - whitelist, group, simple private ones that could be protected by SGTools or behind a puzzle of some sort. Any meaningful analysis would have to break giveaways down by type and duration, as the number of public giveaways is disproportionately level 0 and of short duration compared to the other types.
Another shortfall of your model is that it does not account for higher level users winning lower level giveaways. This leads into my final point, which is what my goal of going up in levels is (besides the altruistic aspect, I love to pay it forward). The higher up someone goes, the more options they have in terms of giveaways to enter. Sometimes it can be more advantageous to enter a one hour level 0 public giveaway than a week long higher level giveaway for the same game because there are fewer entrants on the short public giveaway. The less commonly given and un-bundled games tend to be higher level giveaways. Maximizing your overall chance to win with each point spent is very different than maximizing return on investment. There are two resources in play, and your analysis only factors in one of them.
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+1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
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Lots of variables not taken into account from a scientific stand point. However the point remains valid! Give for the giving, not for the chance of taking!
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Exactly! I wish everyone got it like you did. I'm going to rewrite OP, upload the spreadsheet and so on. I spent more time answering comments and eating shuriken from BL ninjas than I spent with the calculations themselves.
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Well updated. Now I'm off to iron my shirts and try to be generally productive and all that stuff. Cheers!
45 people shot a man in Reno yesterday, yet it has not been reported. My hypothesis is that all 45 of them shot the same guy.
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it's absurd to treat giveaways as an investment
The entire point of the level system is to encourage more giveaways by letting people who give more win more. That in itself changes the nature of the site to be not altruistic. Trying to spin stats to 'mellow' that isn't really useful, IMO.
Perhaps after a certain level it does get meaningless to go up in levels, but for lower/mid levels it does give you both a higher chance to win and a better choice of games. In the long run, if your measure of investment is how much you got over what you put in, then over time it's obvious that someone who invested more in CV can win significantly more. The only question is how long this 'long term' is, but your stats have no meaning without this figure.
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You're right. As I said, there are so many factors outside of the scope of the analysis that's not that revealing, but I tried to support my intuition with data analysis. I just hope that my message got through and it stymied a bit the bad blood about the new HB.
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Did somebody said DIE?
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/UDv8w/runestone-keeper
May the RNG have mercy upon your souls.
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There are leeches everywhere, nothing we can do about it.
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too bad you get blacklists for a thread like this. You harm noone, no inappropriate behaviour. You're ratio is not stunning, but nothing to be ashamed of either. You approached a topic from an interesting angle and did some work on it as well. The community should applaud this rather than punish you for it.
just my two cents
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Thanks! To me it matters more your comment than 12 anonymous blacklisting.
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The spreadsheet
First and foremost, for those too quick to jump into conclusions, I'll put this at the top.
I do not advocate min-maxing to obtain as many games as possible and giving the least.
Some people have mistakenly thought this. There's a different between reporting something and endorsing it. I believe this should be obvious, as we all know that the strategy to follow in that case is to remain Level 0 forever and ever. Which is not my case. My intention is to give and take, staying as close to 1:1 ratio as possible. However, as wins are randomised and gibs are reliant on other variables (if there's a bundle I really like to buy, how many of those games are not appealing to me or my close friends, if they already own those, their mean response time, etc) there's a gap.
I will address that gap in the following week.
However I want to clarify something.
I have never entered a GA of a game I did not intend to play.
i.e. I have never entered a GA with the intention of idling a game for the cards, or to get +1 to my steam account or whatever other reason. I only enter GAs of games I actually want to , and will, play. I thought that would be the case with everyone else.
Why did you write this?
I didn't want to stir the pot more than it is. I just saw this discussion and https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/X5teN/treat-clickteam-fusion-as-a-free-game and piqued my interest.
As many have pointed out, it's absurd to treat giveaways as an investment. That's why I was confused when I saw all the drama over people cheating by making GAs.
My intention was to mellow the discussion about trying to maximise something that, due to its very nature, is an altruistic act.
I also had to iron shirts but I didn't want to. Pending household chores are a hell of a fuel.
How many blacklists you got for posting this?
6 times more than whitelists. So I guess that the right thing to do is not to post ever again. Or at least until I fix my ratio. Or maybe some of them hate math or dislike that I didn't take into account all variables, which I don't think I can do anyway (See below). Oh, well. At least I had some fun, which is what counts in the end.
And now with the actual mathcraft.
The Analysis
Simplifying Hypotheses
Given the data obtained from the site, it is assumed that everyone starts with their September 2016 level and enters all the GAs their level allows them during the whole period T for which there is data available.
You may argue that it's an abstraction and too coarse to return any accurate data, and you would be right. Many variables are not taken into account, as many have pointed out in the comments. However, it allows us to compare data from one level against each others.
Many effects have been left out, like the points limitation, the fact that people would actually own some of the given away games, and so on. The reason they were not included in the analysis is because I wanted a quick estimation to get some data to validate what we all intuitively know and because I didn't think in a way to implement said variables. If you come up with a way to add them to the calculations, I would be most pleased to see it, so ring me, please.
One of the most glaring inaccuracies I incurred in is taking into account so many Level 0 users, as most of time are allegedly inactive. This is thankfully minimised by the fact that the number of Level 0 users don't influence the data in the tiers beyond 0, so the muddling effect is contained.
The CV requirement for level 0 users is 0, but it I used a near zero value instead, to avoid dividing by zero, which is the root of all evil.
How things were calculated (see spreadsheet as well).
e.g.
WC0 = (GAs available to users with Level 0) / (Users with level 0 or more) = (Level 0 GAs) / (All SG users) = 1222674 / 946092 = 129.23%
What does that mean in layman's terms? If you started as a Level 0 user in the beginning of SG and joined every GA available to your level, and everybody else also did, by now you should have won a game. This doesn't tell us much of use, but we use this Win Chance as a base, so we can compare better the other WCi by turning them into WC / WCLv0. There lies its true usefulness.
For the rest of WCi it goes like this:
WC1 = WC0 +((Level 1 GAs)/(All SG users except Level 0))
WC2 = WC1 +((Level 2 GAs)/(All SG users except Level 0 and Level 1))
...
And so on.
This way only the users that can actually enter a GA given their level relative to the GA restriction are taken into account.
The CVreq has been extracted from Kiru's post [2]. It does not take into account actual money spent, but the CV value that is associated to a GA. Somebody could add a column making a correspondence between "Site CV" and "Real World Dollars", but it wasn't my initial intention and it might have muddied the results even more.
I love spreadsheets! Mind if I pick up your model and improve it?
You are most welcome to do so. As it has been mentioned, there's plenty of room for improvement. I will drop the ball now as I really need to get stuff done before Sunday's over.
OP before the last edit
I've done some math and "exploiting" the system that way doesn't make any sense.
The chance of winning over a given period divided by the CV required to reach the level you're at diminishes as you get a higher level. i.e. You get a smaller reward per CV. Yes, if you can get cheap CV with a bundle like the Click Fusion thingy more power to you, but that doesn't change this fact, as (WCi)nd / Cvreq,i has been "non dimensionalised" with CVreq,i.
To sum it up: People trying to be smart and cheat the system are just actually getting less bang for the buck than the regular Level 0 leecher or are just after brownie points.
See this table.
I spent way too much time on this, so I thought I might as well share it with the community so we can collectively get a better bang for my spent time. : )
Edit: Reduced the number of decimals from eleven thousand to just 3.
I used a non-zero value for CVreq,0 to avoid dividing by zero.
Sources:
[1] https://www.steamgifts.com/stats/community/giveaways
[2] https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/XaCbA/list-of-all-cv-levels-and-their-corresponding-real-cv post, by Kiru.
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