Update 2017-09-29 0608 AM
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/ZIVso/autojoin-scripts
The truth: This effort to squash poor people is just another effort to kiss blubbery trader/whale ass. Everything about that place is bait to lure in mobs of poor so that rich players can fleece them in an orderly fashion like sheep being sheered in a factory farm. The rich get the good games right off the top. The rest are crumbs, and now they don’t even want plebs sweeping the crumbs into neat little piles for sifting out hair and rocks. They want them to tongue them directly off the floor and say thank you master between slurps.
Very few with an anti authority mindset are left on that site and very few of those will speak up. They rightly fear a ban for daring to oppose glorious leader(s).
Add this to the other openly classist greed delusion policies:
- No re-gifting to friends or family. (Proving compassion and generosity are literally unknown quantities in the mind of the ruling class here.)
- Discrimination against bundle games. (Proving it’s about money not quality, or even scarcity.)
- Blatant defense of botnets. (Which will NOT be affected by this for more than 30 days, rest assured, no doubt because kickbacks.)
- The whole rank and dollar value approach itself. (The only proof needed really.)
- And now drug war level pettiness attacking the most powerless and poor segment of the community. (Final straw.)
Why don’t they just demand proof of wealth as a condition of signing up and dole out rank accordingly? That’s what ends up happening anyway and we all know it. And clearly these suits and meatbots would cheer for it.
Speaking of cheering, I’m reminded of Solzhenitsyn and the never ending applause for Stalin. Five+ pages of ass kissing as of this update. The cringe is real.
Fact: Poor/sane players and non traders need scripts to EVER win a game they might actually play thanks to the classist ranking system. (Save fairy tales about the one poor rank 10 they heard of that one time like racists crowing about their one black “friend.” Even if occasionally true, it’s totally meaningless thanks to the survivorship bias.)
The only games poor players actually have a chance of winning by hand are asset flip trash, and they only ever enter those just for the cards, pure key hoarding, or the sheer desire to win something, anything, for once. As opposed to pampered rank tens that get their ass kissed for being rich and “generous” for what amounts to buying stock for greater capital gains.
It has always been deeply pathetic that the gaming community openly worships what amounts to a wise investment of gaming dollars as if it’s an act of charity. (Free to play models get the same treatment.)
Step 1. Buy publicity for something and rank by gifting something expensive and popular.
Step 2. Use the rank or the profits from the publicity you just bought to win/buy a copy of what you want.
Step 3. Get treated like Jesus as if steps 1 and 2 were about helping anyone other than yourself.
Not to mention the fact that they have zero problem with bot ACCOUNTS that will always be carefully managed by the human owner of the bot net to avoid any automated detection. I got robbed by one of them and watched support 100% protect them with ever more absurd demands for “proof.” (See below.)
All this new policy does is punish poverty. And that’s what all these pampered yuppie larvae and game key versions of slimy suit wearing wallstreet type A greed machine daytraders are really cheering for. They are the types that would set homeless people on fire for giggles.
But you know what? Good. I hope they drive off as many poor players as possible. Poor players only get fleeced there by the wealthy/technocrats anyway. Bleaching the dumpsters only reveals them for the psychopaths they are.
The only people with money there are the greedy elite (or wannabes of same.) The rest is just bait. All of this is culturally tolerated because of the attitude that games are a trivial luxury and that justice therefore has no place here because slaves don’t deserve to have fun. This kind of greed and grifting only exists as a consequence of intellectual property law anyway and worshiping publishers and profit over art. Let’s hope culture grows up one day and sheds this patent the vowels ideology like the bloated tick that it is.
I for one am not gonna manually click enter on 46,000 losing contests like some sort of CIA psychology experiment to see how many times I’ll shock my own testicles to gamble on evading starvation for the week. Why click a button thousands of times on the off chance of getting a 1$ game that I’ll actually play twice a year?
But good riddance to me right? The only poor they want on the site are the naive new ones with the occasional key to give away. My daring to scold greed and its servants has already earned me copious hate for calling out this scam of a site.
The very fact that I’m not clapping till I bleed at their every word is enough for them to want to see me subjected to the community equivalent (or worse) of being lined up and shot.
SG is owned by greedy traders fleecing the poorest of the poor and now cracking down on what amounts mp3 sharing like some sleazy RIAA lawyer suing grandmas and disabled war vets.
And now I’m gone because I’m honest. Obviously I could just stay, and stay silent, or fake cheer, and modify the script to mimic human behavior, but being that I am poor and have honor, clearly I have no place in that psychopathic sycophantic monied community.
Enjoy your continued grift. If they had brains more advanced than carp they’d be ashamed of themselves. But then if that were the case that place wouldn’t look or function anything like it does.
Update: 2017-04-01 1218 PM
I was kindly asked two questions on SG and my answers became substantive enough to warrant an update:
The questions:
q1: I noticed the bot in question ended up marking as “not received” the game, how come?
q2: Has your opinion changed since then? And if so what made it change?
a1: Possibly because of the massive delay between win and reception. The key might have been expired or something before I ever even got it. The nature of keys make them untestable because dev/publisher greed. Or it could be simple spite. Perhaps he sold or traded the key and then just marked it unreceived? Maybe it’s just scripted behavior. I honestly have no way of knowing.
a2. Not substantively as far as I can tell. What’s changed is what I expect and my level of participation. For example I find it deeply telling and ironic that account creation here is incredibly difficult for unmonied humans but cake for wealthy bots and traders. The hatred./discrimination of bundle games baked into site policy given what humble bundle is really tells you all you need to know. These people love themselves and “the market” and hate charity and all that it represents.
I participate here in my limited way as a service to myself and actual humans looking to upcycle or pay forward keys they know they’ll never use. If I could do that in bulk with my leftover keys I would as well. But not here. This place is a huge example of vendor lock in and several other atrocious consequences of intellectual property law being elevated to a Malthusian/libertarian fiscal religion.
I know the haters will parse that as self serving because when you’re a hammer brain all you can think is nails, but living across the street from a former recycling center I know for a fact that I consider it a favor when people enjoy taking things from me that I no longer want. I mentally thank them for it and such is what I hope is the case with the keys I win.
I only use SG as selfishly as I can which is what is required of me by the avatars of greed that designed, define, and run it. If they lack that compassion and desire to upcycle then I am simply being the greedy thing they demand everyone to be. Win/win. They get their precious points and I get a game. All hail the glorious “free” market! Praise contracts! Praise profit!
Put simply I only enter contests for games I’ll personally play and I otherwise pretend I’m a psychopath with no regard for my “loved” ones so the system they’ve invented will parse me as one of their own.
The whole reason I started hating this place in the first place is because it won’t let me win games for my gf or mom. I mean read the comments on this post. The greed-think is staggering.
My fam aren’t rich or tech savy enough to make their own accounts. The mental gymnastics people go through to somehow turn my desire to get games for my family into greed to justify their own greed are impressive in a terrifying cultish way.
So no, I guess my opinion hasn’t changed. And it can’t possibly unless SG policy changes. Thanks for asking 🙂
Update: My girlfriend can’t even create an account because she hasn’t spent 100$ on NON BUNBLED games.
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/8cXZk/about-the-minimum-value-required-to-create-a-steam-gifts-account
Elitist pyramid scam confirmed, again.
Update: I got suspended for 10 days or something because I didn’t activate keys after I commented in a thread that this ban on regifting was selfish.
Update 2016-04-17 1023 PM: Errors below struck through. I was misinformed somehow about part of the bundle policy. Yay for accuracy improvements!
Steamgifts on it’s surface is an awesome concept and system. It seems like a great way to dispose of excess game keys while rewarding generous people or being generous yourself and getting a chance to win a few extra games you might actually play in the meantime. But if you read the fine print things get a lot more shady.
Firstly, the usual way that most people end up with spare keys to give away is by buying bundles for a specific game or two and having little interest in the others. Steamgifts on it’s surface looks like an excellent solution to that problem. Giveaway the games you don’t want, to rise in rank and eventually win the games you do want, but actually that won’t ever happen because they don’t actually reward you for bundle games.
I gave away like 7 games before I realized my rank wasn’t going to move. That’s completely exploitative. It should give you a click box warning when you choose a so called bundle game for your giveaway.
Further, you can’t use your winnings (if any) to improve that situation.
So I can only enter giveaways for games I want to play myself. Let this sink in… I am obligated to be completely selfish on a site predicated on altruism.
So the only people that reliably profit from steamgifts are hardcore trader types that get non bundle keys from other sources. Or people who ignore the rules.
And it gets even better.
There’s a botnet on steam gifts. A network of scripts that enters giveaways and claims gifts and does nothing else. No doubt to sell the valid keys they acquire in this way. And I strongly suspect that the moderators are given a cut of these sales.
I chanced upon one of these bots in my second ever giveaway. And look at how the moderators react.
And so my time on steamgifts as a place to recycle keys has ended. So disappointing.
Update: See comments below. I actually still use the page in the totally selfish way proscribed by the (apparently all important) rules.
yeah this site is a scam, pls people don’t enter! (so we have more chances of winning)
You’re trying to be funny but you’re proving my point.
Steam “gifts” isn’t about “gifting” any more than eBay is.
It’s like everything else in the pampered western luxury economy. It’s about rich people giving stuff to other rich people while a mob of poor people fight over the crumbs.
You and your ilk should be ashamed of yourselves.
You didn’t activate two of your wins, and complain that your bundle games aren’t worth a lot.
The FAQ makes a lot of things obvious, and here you are complaining about them after getting suspended for breaking site rules.
SteamGifts isn’t the problem in this scenario.
The point is why am I required to activate my keys if they are supposed to be MINE? It’s not a gift if I don’t own it. Once the keys are mine I should be allowed to do as I please with them.
The FAQ buries the gifting prohibition, that’s why I circled it in the screen cap. And it should because the domain is named steam GIFTS! Am I seriously expected to read the fine print to determine if gifts are ok to be a thing on a page called steam gifts?
Seriously, WTF is wrong with you?
So I’m the problem eh? Explain to me what is wrong with wanting to gift my winnings? What possible rational opposition could there be to regifting generally? (Especially regifting outside of steam gifts.)
On the first part, there are a few problems with it.
First is the moral problem. If you bought someone a gift, and they were “**** you, it sucks, I only wanted it so I could profit from it”, well that’s a bit of a **** move. That is why you are expected to enter for games you want.
Second is to prevent cheating. Regifting being allowed would mean that support would be unable to confirm giveaways were real, so any ****wit could make fake giveaways for every new game under the sun for their friends, and when it comes to confirming they actually happened, no proof either way. Right now, such users do exist, but when they enter a high level giveaway, the scam they were pulling is quickly discovered and they tend to get a permanent ban for all involved users.
I’d go into more detail on the problems, but I have to leave for work shortly. Still, I’m sure you must be able to at least understand why we have this rule in place.
Before I leave though, since you claim that I have a problem, let me point out you are the one *****ing about a site being a scam where you break site rules. Do you honestly see nothing wrong with your own actions here?
“I only wanted it so I could profit from it”, well that’s a bit of a **** move. That is why you are expected to enter for games you want.”
Then why can’t I enter one contest multiple times? Why don’t my unused points roll over? They DON’T want us to limit our entries, they want us to keep coming to the site multiple times a day to enter everything or else feel like we wasted an opportunity. It’s an Ad scam. Not a gifting platform.
“Second is to prevent cheating”
That’s an industry problem first of all: it should be possible to confirm a key without redeeming it. Secondly, there are a billion better ways to do that then to criminalize generosity. A dead key is a risk I as the regifter am willing to take. And can be easily solved with a user rating system. It would be trivially easy to remove fake key gifters if “gifted” were a key receipt option.
Besides if I was permitted to just sit on keys, I could wait until the final destination (actual account redemption) clears, and then the resulting confirmations would domino back to the source.
“Right now, such users do exist, but when they enter a high level giveaway, the scam they were pulling is quickly discovered and they tend to get a permanent ban for all involved users.”
I already proved you also have a whole CSGO key farming bot net that you don’t care about. Yet I get an instant suspension for calling out your greedy bullshit. You didn’t care about my unredeemed keys yesterday, but I comment on a regift thread and in 2 minutes I’m suspended? Please. Your intentions are crystal clear.
“Still, I’m sure you must be able to at least understand why we have this rule in place.”
Oh I understand Completely. The Obvious point of the page and thus the rule is ad revenue and to fleece generous newbs and reward monied traders.
You might as well pose as a salvation army ringer and spend the change you get on hookers just because in tiny print on the bucket you said spending was at your discretion.
“let me point out you are the one *****ing about a site being a scam where you break site rules. Do you honestly see nothing wrong with your own actions here?”
News flash bootlicker, rules can have a moral gradient. Breaking a rule isn’t intrinsically bad if the rule is bullshit.
Your piece of shit scam fest is fleecing generous newbs. You intentionally bury the lead even within the FAQ about the regifting ban. And you BAN GIFTING on a GIFT site in the fucking first place! Hell no I don’t see anything wrong with my actions.
In fact I didn’t regift the keys expressly BECAUSE I was playing by your bullshit rules. You punished me for it ANYWAY because you wanted to censor me and punish me for disagree with you and calling out your bullshit. Now, I did trade my costume quest key before I knew regifting was banned, because why the fuck would it be? And because you buried the lead like I said. I actually did skim the FAQ. But it Initially read like common sense stuff.
Fuck me for trusting you right?
No, I absolutely have the moral high ground here. You’re running a classist scam. Tricking low income gamers out of bundle keys to attract other low income gamers lather rinse repeat all so a clique of monied OCD traders and yuppie larvae can gift eachother games and have their pick of free bundle games on the side. You’re essentially making it cheaper to be rich. Like everything else in this piece of shit market.
Look at what I want to be able to do, and tell me at what point it’s immoral.
I want to be able to give away assets I won and therefor own. The End.
Unless you can make an ethical argument for how giving away stuff is intrinsically wrong, which would by definition also apply to steam gifts, you don’t have any game to bring to this table.
You give me NO OTHER WAY to prove my generosity or trustworthiness in the context of the gifts system. I may ONLY buy it, or trade for it which is the same thing. You give me NO OTHER WAY to consistently spend my points on the games I’ll actually play. You give me NO OTHER WAY to make use of my bundle keys. I am FORCED to sit on them because I’m not a trader shithead.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
And back from work. Must say, finding this drivel in my inbox wasn’t fun.
Apparently, because I believe a site’s rules should be followed, and that taking gifts only to profit from them is bad, _I_ should be ashamed of myself? You are a real piece of work.
I won’t bother responding to the rest of your comment, as it only shows you have problems that aren’t fixed by something like logic. You want to believe that you are a victim of some evil site, while not realising you are the ****ing problem in all of this.
Before we begin… You realize this is my blog right? I don’t need to let you talk. In fact I can edit what you’ve already said. But I don’t feel the need to either censor you, or manipulate you. That should REALLY tell you something, but of course it doesn’t.
“this drivel”
Anyway… Yeah, drivel. Sure thing 🙂 Being held to some kind of moral standard is drivel.
“I believe a site’s rules should be followed”
Get over yourself. And screw your self serving exploitative rules.
I play by a set of rules that matter.
http://underlore.com/the-apex/ (You wouldn’t understand.)
“taking gifts only to profit from them is bad”
What amazing mental gymnastics you must be capable of.
Tell me, is keeping a game not profiting from it?
So I own a game I win enough to own it as a library entry, but not enough to own as a number, or as a gift?
And giving something away… profits me more than keeping it?
O.o
XD Wow you must think yourself very selfless indeed I bet you’ve kept everything you could get your little mitts on and you’re like “Look how selfless I am I’m keeping everything!”
Meanwhile back in reality, a person who receives a gift profits if it’s a worthwhile gift. And people who care even give gift receipts so exchanges can be made. How sad your life must be to not even know that.
Many of the contests I enter are for other people. And you know what? I’ll keep entering them when my suspension is up because I care more about them. Being forced into the bottom echelon means I won’t be winning very much anyway, so a week or two between gifts to friends is totally worth it to me. I’ll keep doing that until you parasites make it even more obvious that the point of your page isn’t about anything even in the same galaxy as generosity by banning me, if you haven’t already because I dared speak truth to an insider. Or until my friend’s want lists run dry. Whichever happens first 🙂
“I won’t bother responding to the rest of your comment, as it only shows you have problems that aren’t fixed by something like logic. ”
Says the guy who white knights for a site called steam GIFTS that expressly prohibits GIFTING XD (lol4r no joke, you make me laugh at my computer, thank you.) And I’m the one with broken logic?
I literally can’t even satirize that it’s so on-the-nose with it’s absurdity. Guy defending a gift ban at xgifts.com, questions *my* logic. Nope, that’s the ground floor of contradiction. Well done.
Responses… From evil people… XD I’m well away of how pandemic fact and logic immunity are, especially among the hopelessly corrupt. (So ironic that you’d even use the word to me.) http://underlore.com/avoid-my-mistakes/
I’ve known for a fact, for years, that I can’t talk sense into you ethical defectives.
If it’s anything me-related, I’m mad at myself for taking that worthless site on face value.
You’re right, I should have been a cynical hateful fuck and read every line of the FAQ combing for bullshit, but I got carried away. I thought “Woah! Something good and kind and useful, from fucking coders no less.” I was EAGER to be wrong. And I let that desire blind me.
If ever the phrase had utility it’s right now: I should have fucking known.
So fuck off back to your pampered baited little newb fleecing hole and trader circle jerk. You have children to exploit and kindness to punish and holidays to ruin.
“you are the ****ing problem in all of this.”
Yeah, the guy that wants to give something back rather than stuff it in his personal vault to never be played just because he can… That guy is the problem. Sure thing pal.
See, if I’m a problem, because gifting… On steam gifts… is the problem, then steamgift.com is a scam, and oh hey look, that’s my Entire Point.
As far as I can tell because you chumps ban and silence all who agree with me, I’m the only one without “a problem” in all of this. That shady exploitative if not fraudulent context is the problem.
Bottom line is this. I am an honest generous person. Not even my enemies deny this. (They accuse me of other flaws.) If you’re suspending me, if my actions are forbidden, then the rules are broken or evil.
You have codified greed and criminalized generosity. You lumps are so selfish, that you have to actively Forbid kindness, generosity, sharing because your evil is so concentrated that such things are an actual threat in your mind.
Simply amazing. You should buy stock in Monsanto.
“You want to believe that you are a victim of some evil site”
I’m not the real victim here you moron. I don’t give a shit about my 7 games. You think all this rage comes from 7 games I would never have played? I went there to give them away genius! XD
I’m Angry on behalf of the hordes of kids right now giving away their games wondering why their rank isn’t going up. Trying to be good and decent, people, joining contests for games for their friends and family because hello not everyone has money and hello it’s like a week from Christmas you walking shit… And it’s even worse if they win because they’ll be so happy when they win, and then you’ll suspend them or punish them somehow and fucking Ruin it.
You’ll literally ruin Christmas for kids trying to be nice. Drink that in. Let that soak through your lizard scales, maybe deep down it’ll cause a tingle, something to remind you that in point of fact you were born a mammal. Jesus, you’re like literally the Grinch, and you think you have moral authority to scold me!? XD
On top of ruining xmas for some kids, you’ll even blame it on them, and kids being what they are might even fucking believe you and feel stupid. It’s literally hard to imagine deeper evil this side of criminal activity or resorting to abstract multipliers.
I imagine you absolving yourself with the same shit lawyers do. “You didn’t read the FAQ, fuck you kid.” Maybe even priding yourself on making them bitter, like it’s a life lesson. That’s where my rage comes from you ethically bankrupt waste of carbon.
I didn’t expect nor desire a meaningful response from you. This post is about warning other fucking people. Getting to tell one of you fucks what fucks you are in this comment is just a bonus from the gods for me.
So yes… Shame is absolutely what you would be feeling if you weren’t completely defective. And that is absolutely what you should feel.
I’m sure you’ll have a merry xmas. Monsters always seem to.
I just stumbled on this page somehow and after reading through your comments I have to say you are very wrong about the site.
I have been a member for about 1 1/2 years, I have only ever given away bundled games that were leftovers that I didn’t want and yet I have won 29 games. 6 of my wins are unbundled games including The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Legendary Edition, Saints Row IV: Game of the Century Edition, Killing Floor 2, and Fallout: New Vegas.
The site is clearly not an “Ad scam” as you called it considering they only have 1 spot on the site for an ad and most people use an ad blocker. If it was an ad scam they would have a lot more ads.
You do get rewarded for giving away bundled games. You get 15% of the full price on Steam. I have given away just over 50 bundle leftovers and my contributor value is level 4.
There are still ways for people to try and cheat the system to gain levels and get better odds at winning games, but the rules that are in place now are very good at preventing cheating and each rule is there for a good reason. If you search the discussion forums on steamgifts, you will see threads where people ask about not activating wins and regifting. There are lengthy discussions and explinations for why these rules exist and I agree with them.
Those are just the points I wanted to make off the top of my head after reading through your posts. I know there was a lot of other things I disagreed with, but I don’t feel like reading through it again.
Fifty games gifted, and only level 4. I rest my case. You’ve been had. It took you nearly two years to trade 50 games for 30.
You’re misunderstanding the type of scam they run. I know games are changing hands, that’s not the point.
15% is theft. There is zero reason to scale the value at all. You should either be a member in good standing or not. It’s a pyramid scheme to fleece people at the bottom for the benefit of the people at the top.
“There are lengthy discussions and explinations for why these rules exist and I agree with them.”
That’s because you’re either hateful and greedy, or ignorant:
http://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/RDSUK/can-we-stop-the-regifting/search?page=2#4WAz0Yx
Sir I’ll be honest, after going through your post and comments I’m not sure if you are a troll or just plain stup!d.
Each and every rule has a great amount of thought put into it to avoid abusing the system and while they might not be perfect they are good enough.
I just can’t understand how you can actually believe that being able to re-gift your games is something one should be allowed to do when that can easily be abused. And the fact that you won’t comprehend that makes believe that you might have a mental illness, I’m not even joking, you might wanna get checked.
“I’m not sure if you are a troll or just plain stup!d.”
We both know that’s a lie. You do not think I’m stupid. You know I believe what I am saying. And I don’t think you think I’m crazy either.
The interesting side question is why you would say something you don’t believe. I’ll tell you. Because some part of you sees my point and this disturbs you. It reminds you that by your own estimation at some level you are the greedy fop my assertions and your position together imply you to be.
“…they might not be perfect they are good enough.”
Good enough to keep a pyramid scam going? Clearly. Ask yourself, why can’t I set an upper limit on my gifts? Why can’t I cut the fops shitting on the rest of us out of my giveaways? Why do the mods have no problem at all with bot accounts? Why are bundle games devalued if cash isn’t changing hands and the ostensible goal is just finding games people will actually play? Look more closely while stepping back.
This place is a pyramid scam and an ad farm lure for bot farmers and traders.
“how you can actually believe that being able to re-gift your games is something one should be allowed to do”
Bullshit. So you’d have me believe that both the concepts of property rights, and having friends or family that can’t be dragged here to do it themselves, are so foreign to you as to genuinely believe I am mentally ill for failing to be equally ignorant?
Well. Here, allow me to explain. I believe that a gift given at random belongs to the person who received it. That’s the nature of transfer of ownership. Ownership. Transferring.
How do we define ownership? Obviously by the right to do as we please with an asset. Including. Obviously. The right to give away keys to whomever I see fit, like friends or family (you know, those people around you that you apparently don’t have or don’t care about) including random people. Unless you are saying that giveaways themselves are immoral…
Lets say you see a contest with a sweater your sister might want as a prize. You enter the contest and win the sweater. Did you steal the sweater if you give it to your sister? Are you a bad person for giving a sweater you don’t want to your sister? Are you a bad person for entering a context purely to help someone else?
And lets talk about “abuse” of the system.
What does that even mean? Are you saying the contests are rigged? You have to be. Because if the contests are fair and square then it shouldn’t matter what a person does with their winnings. Especially when we’re already allowed to limit our gifting to specific groups. Whats so bad about people regifting their way into a higher rating? Clearly that’s what you’re afraid of. But why?
How is regifting this massive abuse but gifting itself isn’t? That’s the core lunacy of your camp’s position. Gifting for profit in the form of games is this grand selfless gesture, but regifting a game won fair and square to join the ranks of the traders and monied at the top is this ethically repugnant abomination.
Classist much?
Steamgifts.com is a pyramid scheme and the people at the top have a vested interest in keeping the great mass of participants at the bottom. That’s the entire point of the scam. And like some shitheel ferengi, you don’t want a fair system, you want a system, that’s unfair that benefits you.
I’ll only get 15% credit on my gifts while traders get 100%. And on top of that like 80% of my gifts will go to the upper echelons, and the percentage is only low because they are already so bloated with games that they don’t even want what I’m giving away. Another fat percentage will go to bots. Because seriously, did you really think all those people saying thank you and entering within a millisecond were actual humans? Accounts with 50 wins and zero comments and zero giveaways? But they aren’t the problem to you people because they only fleece the bottom layer, just like you. They would only be a threat if they rose to the top. But they can’t can they, because you’ve made sure NO ONE can without money or trade assets.
This place isn’t about gifting. It’s about exploiting people to make games even cheaper for OCD traders and rich assholes, when it isn’t providing an overt cash and key sale income to said traders.
The only legitimate behavior on that fucking webpage is the most selfish possible course of action. I firmly believe you already knew that.
As I explained in the locked thread your lazy ass clearly didn’t read: If you don’t see the problem with gifting being banned on a site with “gift” in the domain name, you’re a greedy deadmind.
Get back to your nest. Either you have children to grift or you you have boots to lick.
This is “Anonymous” from Jan 2nd post.
Yes, I gave away 50 games and only won 30. I am happy with this and plan to give away pleanty more no matter how many more I win. Also, I didn’t trade 50 games for 30, these are not trades, they are gifts. I do trade games on the site as well and I have traded around 100 games, useually 1 for 1 bundle games.
I am not giving these games away expecting something in return for them. They are gifts because I have no intention of playing them or it is a duplicate game that I already own and I would like to give them to someone that may get some enjoyment out of it. I don’t add any games to my Steam account unless I want to play the game, I don’t care about the number of games I own on Steam.
I think 15% of retail value is a fair ammount for bundled games considering that they useually don’t even cost half that much. If anything it is probably too much.
Also, there is no “pyramid scheme to fleece people at the bottom for the benefit of the people at the top”. It is called rewarding the people at the top because they spent there own hard earned money to buy games for people like me and they deserve to have a higher chance of winning. If you look at these people’s accounts that are high levels, they do not do it so they can win more games, they do it because they like giving games away to the community. There are people with around 600 to 1200 games given yet they only have won around 50 or 100 games. Also, once you get to level 10, there is no benefit to giving away any more games yet these people continue giving away games. Clearly they are not doing it to get an advantage.
There is no scam and you claiming that I am either hateful and greedy, or ignorant for giving away games makes no sense. It baffles me that you could think the way you do and I can’t believe that you are serious, I feel like I am being trolled.
“I think 15% of retail value is a fair ammount for bundled games considering that they useually don’t even cost half that much.”
So then you’re cool with the steamgifts rank system being about money, and not trustworthiness or generosity. Why am I not shocked?
There is no other reason for a cash based rating system and certainly no reason to punish the poorer players. Games should be valued equally. If it’s really about generosity then they can prove it by choosing to gift higher demand games knowing the reward will be the same as when gifting bundle games.
You can’t simultaneously make it about the cash value of the game and then say it’s all about generosity (and not about money) without totally butchering your position.
The rating system should be about good standing and keeping your word. But if we started ranking people there by integrity, suddenly all the rank 10s would be rank 2s.
“It is called rewarding the people at the top because they spent there own hard earned money…”
Oh please. Save that 1%er worshiping shit for the fox news comment threads. Being rich is not a fucking virtue, it’s an advantage. (Virtually always acquired malevolently I might add.) But hey at least you’re not actually refuting me. You’re simply saying the apex of the fleece pyramid deserve to be there.
Clearly because you expect to be among them one day. Fucking Ferengi logic. /smh
“If you look at these people’s accounts that are high levels, they do not do it so they can win more games, they do it because they like giving games away to the community.”
The vast majority of those accounts are hardcore traders gifting assets simply because it’s more prudent or easier to do so via SG than to try and sell or trade them the traditional way. It’s like when a corporation gifts for the tax break. The goal is working their way up to rank 10 for reasons completely divorced from helping anyone.
The point of being rank 10 is easily trading games you’ve traded for already for games you’ll actually play, or games you want for status, or even games that will make you money via twitch streams or the like. With the side benefit of having your ass kissed by legions of boot licking drones like you, which is completely intoxicating to the kind of pampered monied pawn shop mentality types that rises to that position.
You’re a peasant to them and they are happy to take your games and use them as bait and fuel.
None of this even addresses the core point. Which is that it’s completely stupid and contradictory to say that gifting games through the system semi-randomly is this grand charitable gesture but gifting games personally to friends and family is parasitic unthinkable greed.
Banning people from sharing with their loved ones to protect the upper ranks from an influx of filthy unwashed peasants is completely repugnant and literal psychopath logic.
You people are fucking delusional cultists. You’re like the moron that votes republican and then blames the mexicans for the thrashed economy and your ever worsening treatment as a worker.
Enjoy your next trump rally where in tell each other how morally wonderful you all are for wanting the whole rest of the planet as slaves.
Wow, if you really believe what you say, you have some serious issues. I’m not even going to bother responding anymore. I’ll leave now and let you troll the next person that comes along.
And since you brought it up, yes, I will be voting for Trump and can’t wait for him to deport the illegals, get rid of Obamacare, and reverse a lot of the unconstitutional laws that our current dictator and tyranical government is forcing on everyone.
Thank you for your in effect, total capitulation. You really have just confirmed all of my assertions because you’ve made it clear the deeper mindset from which you construct your world view.
You clearly are exactly the kind of person with the kind of logic I stated or implied.
Thank you for your time and your comments, I consider this exchange to have been extremely supportive of my position.
I have an issue with accusing the mods of profiting from skimmed keys. First, winners are expected to activate gifts, which can get them banned permanently if they consistently do not do (and which can be checked by giveaway creators who view their winners’ profiles), meaning that non-activation is actually against the rules. Second, there is no proof that the mods actually take part in this practice; it’s baseless accusation without any solid evidence (you can quote them defending their decision all day long, but unless they come out and say “Oh, yeah, we resold those keys” it’s not sufficient proof to base your claim on. Even if some users do use bots (a concern for quite a few people, including me) there is a burden of proof on accusations, and suspicious behavior is unfortunately insufficient to prove any accusations. Finally, bundled games do give CV (15% of base price, but still CV) and there is a list publicly accessible listing what games qualify as such. The majority of my own CV comes from bundled games, because they’re affordable and I often have leftovers after bundles. This doesn’t mean that SG is trying to fleece you out of bundle games.
I have 160 wins and I haven’t given a single one to the admins to make money off of and have activated them all. I have sent 533 games, and as far as I know the vast majority of my winners have activated their games and not given them to mods. I have received CV for all of them according to the site’s systems, with no exploitation or manipulation. I participate in many groups, and none of them are secret cabals of users gaming the system or skimming profits. Quite frankly, it’s difficult to agree when my experience (and the experience of many others) doesn’t resemble in the slightest your arguments.
If you’re truly concerned about the site, do what tons of people do; lurk for a few months, win a few games, and see that the system (usually) works, without leveling baseless accusations at the community, the mods, and random users without any concrete evidence.
“I have an issue with accusing the mods of profiting from skimmed keys.”
Activating a key is profiting from it. You greed brains are so logically bankrupt. You actually think getting a game for free is generous while gifting one is selfish. /smh
“Even if some users do use bots (a concern for quite a few people, including me) there is a burden of proof on accusations, and suspicious behavior is unfortunately insufficient to prove any accusations.”
Convenient that you and they demand hard evidence to act against bots but when it comes to locking threads and setting the rules in the first place it’s all moderator discretion. Don’t think you’re fooling anyone with your finger on the scale like that.
My evidence of that 3 year old account being a bot is like a guide for how to get away with botting. At the very least you must admit it would be trivially easy to run a bot account on steam gifts and get away because of this unreasonable demand for “concrete” proof. (Gotta love the over use of solidity metaphors in a context built from abstractions.)
“This doesn’t mean that SG is trying to fleece you out of bundle games.”
Yes it does. There is ZERO reason in the context of the steam gifts system to CV games AT ALL.
The value of the games should only matter for the points system. Rank should not have anything to do with the cost of a game. Ebay doesn’t rate people based on the dollar value of their sales. Reputation that can be bought isn’t reputation at all. That’s why we don’t just sell degrees and certifications and ratings outright.
“I have 160 wins… I have sent 533 games…”
Which means you’d probably rather die than realize how badly you’ve been fleeced. Psychology 101.
“I have received CV for all of them according to the site’s systems, with no exploitation or manipulation.”
At 15% of their value. /smh
You are proving my point. The entire rating system is exploitative garbage designed to profit rich kids and traders who are effectively rich kids in this context because the keys are currency.
“Quite frankly, it’s difficult to agree when my experience (and the experience of many others) doesn’t resemble in the slightest your arguments.”
Your experience is exactly what I’ve described. 533 out, 160 in. Sounds like exploitation to me.
An expensive game isn’t by definition a fun game. A rating system based on hours played of gifted games, or metacritic rating of gifted games would be much more fair.
You’ve internalized their logic to avoid feeling like a rube. I’m happy for you actually, I don’t want anyone to suffer.
“lurk for a few months, win a few games, and see that the system (usually) works”
I’ve won games. I’ve gifted games. I intend to use the system for selfish reasons as required by site law. I just resent the wholesale fleecing of newbs and the fact that I’m called greedy for wanting to win games for my mom and gf and dad who won’t create accounts here.
Fuck you people.
Woah woah woah, no need for the ad hominem, man. Let’s go through in order.
Activating keys as profit? What is the logic of this argument? We’re either talking about two different things, or I need to see a better explanation. Remember, users do activate keys (profit, I guess?) but admins get nothing from the activation; the site is ad supported and the admins don’t get access to the keys. There is no vast scam here. Activation is a rule of the site because many people, including myself, are not looking to just churn keys around into many different owners’ hands. I want to give keys to someone who then activates the keys. It’s not selfish, it’s the legitimate use of a key. Regifting that key for CV on the site (an unfortunately common practice) is selfishness because you profit from it, and selling it for money is also offensive because, honestly, I could sell the key myself but I choose to give it freely.
Bots are an issue. This is not a fundamental flaw of the moderators or admins but rather people who fail to follow the rules. The threshold of evidence is to prevent false accusations. I posted, like, three times in the first year I was a member. People could have called me a bot, but I was protected by the rules. Sure, some people exploit it, but honestly, leeches and cheaters are just going to happen. If you get upset over it, fine, but don’t expect support to move the earth and moon to find proof; if the user confirms, then that’s fine, but whatever.
Moderator discretion runs both ways; should you be able to lock threads on your own site? I see the about page has comments locked; there’s no problem with that, I’m just saying its unfair to deny them the right to moderate the way they see fit while doing the same.
Contributor Value (CV) is only a metric of how much you’ve given away. It’s a tool for the community to determine how much people have given. People create giveaways with CV thresholds to give back to the community (and, in some cases, to prevent abuse by botters/leeches)
I don’t think I’ve been exploited. I give away games never expecting to win as many as I give. I just hope that the keys find a good home… which I know some don’t, but whatever. Bundled game value is both well known and honestly an improvement in the old system. Previously, bundle games just flooded the site, and so they were banned entirely. Partial CV prevents people from just flooding the site with bundle giveaways to hit high CV ranks and get access to higher CV giveaways.
Your criticisms about expensive games or hours played are legitimate. However, there are a ton of circumstances that impact that and tons of systems that could be used. While honestly there are improvements that could be made, the current system fundamentally functions and stability is important in keeping the community thriving as it is.
There are people who have given away thousands of games with no wins. They just don’t enter. Remember, not everyone is using the site to win. I have a few games I enter for, and the rest of the time I don’t really enter much. It’s just the way I use the site. My ratio that “Sounds like exploitation” is not because I voluntarily take part in the system. I get more back by giving than I get by winning anyway, and I don’t appreciate the baseless ad hominem arguments. Things aren’t monolithic, and I give for the catharsis of it and to be part of a vibrant, thriving community as much as to get stuff back.
Finally, I respect that you want to give games to your family. That’s cool, but that’s not the design of the site. I want my brother to be able to play games too, but I accomplish that through Steam Family Sharing and not through regifting things given by people with the expectation that I will activate the games. It’s not selfish, it’s part of the community that Steamgifts tries to create.
If you don’t want to be a part of it, that’s fine, but there’s no need to attack people who do, calling them fleeced, exploited, or scammed. There are other legitimate reasons for wanting to give (and the rules that exist) other than viciously attacking people who try to provide their perspectives.
I think there are bots on Steamgifts too. Users with lots of wins but no comments, so I’m with you there. One question for you though – if there wasn’t a rule that every user should activate the games they win, do you think there would be a difference in the amount of bots on the site?
My thought – if there was no rule on what you could do with the games, we would see a lot of Russian bot owners who enter all the giveaways with their multiple bots, and then sell the keys they win.
Having to activate the games on your bot account isn’t as interesting as being able to do whatever you want with the keys (selling). Of course giving games to friends and family would be a nice thing, but every bot owner would then claim to do exactly that.
Then the site would definitively help the shady people fleecing others of their spare game keys.
“admins get nothing from the activation”
They are apex of the pyramid. Lvl 10s and tons of power, which means tons of special consideration for everybody. Up to an including a small force of people to go to outside blogs and defend them 🙂
And of course whatever profits from the ad revenue and donations trade profits.
“There is no vast scam here. “
Your definition of scam is so narrow you should probably consider a career in finance or insurance.
“I want to give keys to someone who then activates the keys.”
So you’re a control freak. It’s not about being kind, it’s about being in charge. How very libertarian of you.
“It’s not selfish, it’s the legitimate use of a key.”
Legitimate as defined by exploiters. Funny how giving a game to my own mother is illegitimate in your shitty little world. Hence, fuck you people.
“Regifting that key for CV on the site (an unfortunately common practice) is selfishness because you profit from it”
Less than I profit from activating the key. By definition I get 100% of the value activating it, I only get 15% of the value regifting it. It would have to change hands 6 times before it approached a single use. Your logic is bankrupt.
“and selling it for money is also offensive because, honestly, I could sell the key myself but I choose to give it freely.”
Not “freely” obviously since you want to control how it’s disposed of. Do you normally give terms and conditions with all your “gifts?”
When I give a gift I wouldn’t mind it being regifted or being given to a family member because when I give something away I give it away. My only stipulation is that a human be involved. Honestly I can even tolerate the bots because hell someone has to be running it. And it’s not like they are cheating the draw.
“The threshold of evidence is to prevent false accusations.”
Bullshit. They can ban the bot and wait for a ban lift request which is part of the support ticket system. We’re not talking about execution by firing squad here. You’re either a liar or a moron. You either fully grasp the bias implicit in this overly strict demand for evidence or you don’t. Either way your policy position is therefore invalid logically.
“If you get upset over it, fine, but don’t expect support to move the earth and moon to find proof; if the user confirms, then that’s fine, but whatever.”
Scroll up and look at my screen shots. I proved it beyond any reasonable doubt.
“I see the about page has comments locked; there’s no problem with that, I’m just saying its unfair to deny them the right to moderate the way they see fit while doing the same.”
Firstly, send a link. I don’t have any locked threads of which I am aware. If I do they are recent because I just got rid of disqus (comment system) like three days ago in favor of jetpack. Link me and I’ll unlock it or explain what’s going on.
Secondly. This is my personal blog. No army of newb fleeced games as bait here. I don’t have any responsibility to anyone here except what basic ethics demand.
Thirdly, even if I were being a hypocrite also that doesn’t absolve them from being a hypocrite. Truth doesn’t grade on a curve. It’s possible for us both to be in the wrong. Difference is, I’m not in a position to lose a fucking empire of fleeced keys and ad money if I am. This page made like 17$ in ad money over like the last 5 years. I’m nobody. This is my living room.
“It’s a tool for the community to determine how much people have given.”
It should be measured in keys or game ratings. Not cash value. That’s obvious to anyone who thinks about it objectively. Everyone else is either an exploiter or wants to be one or is a rube.
“I don’t think I’ve been exploited.”
Like I said. At this point you’d rather die than admit the truth to yourself. And again, I’m happy about it. Since either way you’ve been exploited, and now the choice is feel it and hurt or don’t feel it.
At the very least you have to realize you’d have done more good selling the keys and donating the money somewhere. (Zidisha for example.)
“Partial CV prevents people from just flooding the site with bundle giveaways to hit high CV ranks and get access to higher CV giveaways.”
And there you have it. That’s what make it a scam. CV and ranks is about rewarding rich people, not generous people.
It’s interesting to hear they once banned bundled games entirely. That’s much more honest about being a shady den of traders and fops.
“While honestly there are improvements that could be made, the current system fundamentally functions and stability is important in keeping the community thriving as it is.”
Key phrase: “As It IS”
That’s how a pyramid scam works. Handful at the top, foundation of slaves at the bottom.
“There are people who have given away thousands of games with no wins. They just don’t enter. “
Then they are traders leveraging their prestige on SG as a lure, or they are simply monied fops who like buying the feeling of being generous for dirt cheap. Think about it. I donate 50$ to the EFF. Helpful, but no one will go patting me on the back for it. I put up a copy of fallout 4 on steam gifts and I get literally hundreds of people telling me what a great guy I am.
You’re dim if you don’t see that as profit. Might as well be buying a lap dance.
“I don’t appreciate the baseless ad hominem arguments.”
I don’t care. You’re a bad person in my view because at the end of the day you’re cool with me not being allowed to enter a gift for my own mother. Regardless of anything else you should be on my side till that gets sorted out and then we can talk about the rest. The fact that you’re making excuses for them puts you in the shithead camp. If you don’t like that, then break camp.
It may not be an objective argument but then again, I don’t care. I have made plenty of objective arguments as well. Feel free to only look at those.
“That’s cool, but that’s not the design of the site.”
Which is what makes it a scam. The fucking place has “gifts” in the domain name and somehow I’m the asshole for thinking a ban on gifting is retarded!? X)
You people are fucking delusional.
“It’s not selfish, it’s part of the community that Steamgifts tries to create.”
An exploitative pyramidal community.
“If you don’t want to be a part of it, that’s fine, but there’s no need to attack people who do, calling them fleeced, exploited, or scammed.”
No. Fuck that. If I see a scam I call it out. That’s called integrity and concern for my fellow humans. But hey, you’ve already made it clear you only care about #1. Of course you think it’s reasonable to counsel silence to make sure the level 10s stay swimming in newb games and freshly licked boots.
“One question for you though – if there wasn’t a rule that every user should activate the games they win, do you think there would be a difference in the amount of bots on the site?”
I don’t think they are fairly related. Sure it might lead to more people attempting to run bots on the site but that should also lead to a more concerted effort to deal with them.
You could bake in list joining, like auto entry for wishlisted games, and then use captchas.
It wouldn’t be easy but I think the site could be adapted to deal with bots.
I definitely think it would be worth it. I clearly should be allowed to enter contests for my family members. They can ban reselling if they want, hard to enforce, but again it’s doable in theory. The point for now is they aren’t even trying because greed.
“My thought – if there was no rule on what you could do with the games, we would see a lot of Russian bot owners who enter all the giveaways with their multiple bots, and then sell the keys they win.”
That may well be true. But there are other ways to prevent that, if we collectivelydecide we care. We already have groups and black lists and a rating system. If the rating system isn’t good for filtering out bots then it’s a shitty paid rating system anyway. A public shared blacklist, kinda like we handle adblocker filter sets. It’s doable.
Traders already use this place as a lure and make tons of money no doubt off turning trade profit into csgo keys or whatever and selling them in bulk or trading for high dollar games and selling them.
“but every bot owner would then claim to do exactly that.”
Yeah but like I said, a little diligence goes a long way. Bots are a a known problem in many contexts with many solutions. It’s unreasonable to ban the legitimate action to prevent potential illegitimacy.
My argument is that the point of the ban is not what they say the point of the ban is. It’s spin.
“Then the site would definitively help the shady people fleecing others of their spare game keys.”
I say they are there now. Sure it could be worse. But I think it would be trivially easy to make it a whole lot better if the goal was just a generosity facilitation tool.
Right now it’s basically an ad lure. It gets my attention in exchange for the chance to win games. In that sense it is a legitimate service. but the point of the place is obviously to fleece newbs and it would not be tolerated if there was anywhere a marginally better system for recycling unwanted bundle games. 15% is better than 0%
But I’ll always hate them for having the fucking balls to tell me I’m an asshole for wanting to score some cheesy puzzle games for my own damn mom.
In any case thanks for being a pleasant commenter, the first I do believe. 🙂
I’m done here. It’s clear you only respect your own position and people who sycophantically agree with you.
First, you locked the comments on the about page (http://puu.sh/msmzw/8939b737be.png), which is fine, but I’m just saying, administrative action. It’s unfair to accuse another moderating group of censorship when ignoring that you essentially belittle and harrass anyone who disagrees.
Second, demanding a burden of proof in botting does not mean getting into protracted arguments with admins. Everyone can do that. If one site has rules and an established system of proof, you can contest that but ultimately they provide a service. By using the site, you agreed to a terms of service (located at http://www.steamgifts.com/legal/terms-of-service) which clearly states that any wins must be activated on your own account. It’s one thing to say that “Oh, this rule is stupid.” It’s another to say “The admins are stupid because I disagree with their rules.” Your argumentation is that somehow your metric ought to be how the rules are enforced, but quite frankly that’s pointless because you engaged in a community with set rules.
Also, there is no elite cabal at the top winning games. Sure, Level 10s get access to giveaways other people can’t, but these are created by users and not some systemic abuse. In addition, I can guarantee almost all if not all these users (including supports, mods, and admins) give more than they win. You can call people names and be nasty to them, but it doesn’t change the fact that there is neither exploitation or abuse happening in the ways you describe without any evidence besides sweeping generalizations; while there may be bots (and that is annoying to everyone), you can’t simply say that because someone else makes a different judgement call the entire thing is rigged.
Quite frankly, calling people “assholes” for expecting you to abide by rules you agreed to, when they would call you an “asshole” for breaking these rules is puerile. You can complain about them if you want, and yes, there are some toxic people who are jerks about people who break the rules for benign reasons, but it’s impossible to tell if you give a win to your mother or if you scalp it on a grey market key retailer. The system works to protect the site from abuses, not make things convenient for everyone. If you want, Steam Family Sharing your wins with family, it’s what I do. But don’t accuse the people who use the site of being either conspirators or sheep for participating in a system which many users understand and appreciate. Failure to read and comprehend the ToS before participating does not give you the high ground.
Hello! I won’t argue with you about no regifiting rule and such if you can’t even see how it could be abused in current system.
I just want to point out few things about the user you accuse of being bot. His name is not random – it actually makes sense in polish if you substitute numbers with letters. What looks random to you is not necessarily random. Secondly, he has achievements unlocked for some games in his library (yes, in theory he could be using SAM, but his achievements mostly have different timestamps), so he doesn’t use this account enteriely for farming (I know nothing about CSGO farming, so I won’t discuss if your accusation is true in this regard). But farming itself doesn’t mean someone is using bot on steamgifts – plenty of active users are doing that and they’re not using bots. His number of entries and entiers per day are high, but I’ve seen higher and it’s not impossible to enter this many giveaways manually. Your case is not as strong as you think. I’m not saying the user mentioned is not using bot, I have no way of knowing that. And you can’t know the opposite either.
“First, you locked the comments on the about page…”
That was not me. That was a plugin issue. It’s been fixed now.
“It’s unfair to accuse another moderating group of censorship when ignoring that you essentially belittle and harrass anyone who disagrees.”
Again, truth doesn’t grade on a curve. Learn to read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
“By using the site, you agreed to a terms of service”
Oh here we go, the old it’s ethical because it’s disclaimed argument.
You know, I’m starting to realize that is the new Nuremberg defense. First it was just “following orders” and then it was “doing my job” and now it’s become “obeying the rules.”
You remind me of those awful authority experiments where you can get virtually anyone to torture the shit out of someone else just by presenting the image of authority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
“Your argumentation is that somehow your metric ought to be how the rules are enforced, but quite frankly that’s pointless because you engaged in a community with set rules.”
So the civil rights movement was intrinsically wrong because they should have just shut up and followed the rules. Thanks for clearing that up >.>
“I can guarantee almost all if not all these users (including supports, mods, and admins) give more than they win.”
Bullshit. Even if they send more keys than they receive they are constantly compensated by virtue of their status and rank. That’s the whole reason you chumps are eager to defend said ranks from being infiltrated by the unwashed rabble in the first place. I already explained this.
“but it’s impossible to tell if you give a win to your mother or if you scalp it on a grey market key retailer”
And so the solution to a total non-problem centred on your need for control and your obsequious desire to protect the status of the elites is in your right wing tiny little mind banning gifting entirely.
You know hey, that’s a great idea, let’s just ban charitable giving entirely, that way we can be 100% sure no filthy drug addicts spend disability money on a joint. >.>
“The system works to protect the site from abuses”
lol4r yeah, “abuses” as defined by giving a game to your family or daring to threaten the composition of the pampered monied elite’s little circle jerk club.
“Steam Family Sharing your wins with family, it’s what I do”
News flash, that program is hilariously crippled. I can’t play any of those games with them. Also, again I’m not a shithead control freak like you. I want them to actually own the gifts I would give to do with as they please.
“But don’t accuse the people who use the site of being either conspirators or sheep for participating in a system which many users understand and appreciate.”
I’ll speak out against greed and hateful bullshit as I please thanks. You’re free to keep your mouth shut if you don’t like my replies. As I said, I’m sure you have boots to lick polish and newbs to fleece. You may run along.
Hey, I appreciate you actually making an argument. That’s more than the shithead mods did.
You’re right that I may not be able to prove he’s a bot but the mods can force him to prove it or ban him until he replies.
Also there are policy ways around this. Like I said with a better rating system or maybe a hard limit on ratios. Like if you have 10 received games to must now give away one game before you can enter any more contests.
Even if that account isn’t a bot, my gripe still stands because he very clearly could be a bot or I could model a bot on that account’s behavior and it would be perfectly legal in the framework of the site.
Still, I’m pretty confident the account in question is a bot, and in any case, I should be allowed to demand a new winner for any key I gift, especially since I am allowed to blacklist and group give. Doubly so if you agree with the logic that gifters have the right to demand that those who receive their gifts not gift them themselves.
In any case thanks for a somewhat constructive comment.
P.S. “Seeing” doesn’t mean “agreeing.” I understand the greed logic. I just don’t agree with it. What you call “abuse” I don’t call anything. Your fears as enshrined in that definition of abuse don’t apply to me. I’m not scared of people rising in the ranks without spending cash or being a trader. And I’m not scared of people gifting, regifting, or even selling legitimate winnings from contests.
The only thing the site should care about is people cheating to win the contests. Anything that happens to the prizes after they won are not their concern ethically. The only reason this is a debate at all is because the technology gives them the power to be control freak assholes and they have taken that opportunity. And that is why I say fuck them and anyone that defends them.
Stand the fuck up for what’s right in all contexts. Simple rule for being a good person.
“Anything that happens to the prizes after they won are not their concern ethically.”
I think you’re getting yourself confused trying to make this an “ethical” issue. The rule is about practical realities. If there were no rule that required activation here are some things that would result:
~Small groups of people would pass around non-existent games (via group giveaways) until their levels maxed out. The only way to verify that a game was every really involved is to see it redeemed on Steam, so there wouldn’t need to be any actual software involved in this process.
~It would create an incentive for everyone to enter every giveaway, rather than just ones they intended to redeem. This would lower the odds of people winning games they wanted, and increase the number of dummy accounts. (As it is, the main reason dummy accounts aren’t much use is that it’s hard to get a good level on them. But if you didn’t have to redeem games then hundreds of alternate accounts regifting their junk winnings becomes a very viable strategy.)
~The same games, the ones people didn’t want, would get re-gifted over and over. Eventually somebody would probably take them, but this would mean the site would be choked with re-gifted copies of junk games.
~Some of the regifted keys would be bad. (Possibly a higher percentage than usual, as people assuming regifting would know giving out a bad key wasn’t as risky.) But it would be unclear who to blame. Could one even reconstruct the chain of refits? What if a person regifted and then, after taking credit, decided to use the unredeemed key anyhow (and then blame the person who gifted it to them)? It would be accountability-less chaos.
All this shows the good practical reasons for the current rule–whatever you may think about what’s really generous. Hopefully those examples also suggested something else: there’s nothing particularly generous or helpful about bidding on low value games you don’t want just to relist them.
Now you could counter that rank shouldn’t be tied to what you’ve given at all. I see you’ve said that. But that only seems to make the problems described above worse: it would be even easier to get dummy accounts to rise in level, there would be even less incentive to inject new or desirable software into the site, and even more to just keep relisting the same old games.
I’d be curious to hear what your alternate suggestion would be IN DETAIL. (Just saying vague things about trust and honesty is not much superior to saying nothing at all. It doesn’t provide an actual proposal, nor explain how that proposal wouldn’t result in scenarios like those discussed above.)
Also, you keep talking about greed, but recall that what level giveaways are posted at is determined by the user who posts them. Many, many users don’t want to give games to people who haven’t given anything themselves. Thus the majority of public giveaways on the site seem to go to levels 1 and 2, a low bar, but just enough to exclude new signups who have contributed nothing of value. (I’m frequently surprised that really good games are given away like that. I’d expect more stuff to require levels 5 and 6.)
Are you suggesting users shouldn’t be allowed to make this decision? I’m curious as to why. It seems like it is in the same spirit as your hatred of bots: it is a measure to prevent everything going to a vast crowd of non-contributors and fake accounts. It serves, again, to diminish the incentive to create false accounts, and to increase the incentive to make decent giveaways.
“But I’ll always hate them for having the fucking balls to tell me I’m an asshole for wanting to score some cheesy puzzle games for my own damn mom.”
Your mother can create a free Steam account and register to the site, if passes the entry requirements. As it’s super easy to create an email address, then a linked Steam account to that email, it’s basically a vague arguement that one user wants to win a game for another. And please, don’t twist the words all around. It’s not steamgfits because you can gift your wins all around like there’s no tomorrow, but because people gift games there. You made a pretty long arguement about why you haven’t even read the FAQ before taking substantial part in the site’s activity. I do hope you do better with your legal papers and such – or if not, this was a cheap but useful lesson.
“~Small groups of people would pass around non-existent games (via group giveaways) until their levels maxed out.”
Then scrap the rating system. It’s basic ethics, I you have to choose between a shitty abstraction and being kind, you be kind, every time. Why am I having to explain this?
“~It would create an incentive for everyone to enter every giveaway, rather than just ones they intended to redeem.”
Not true. The limited point system takes care of that, and it could be further improved by permitting multiple entries into single contests so you don’t feel like you’re wasting points waiting for a contest for the games you actually think you’ll play.
“Eventually somebody would probably take them, but this would mean the site would be choked with re-gifted copies of junk games.”
Again, that’s a rating system problem. And there are ways to solve it even leaving rating alone. There’s already a block list for games. A tiny bit of moderator effort or maybe a lower limit on metacritic ratings or something. The great thing about something being permitted is that it becomes something that can be regulated.
“Some of the regifted keys would be bad.”
Again that’s a rating system problem. Or a problem of the game market, that keys can’t be validated without consuming them. How you deal with the bad key problem is a rating system NOT based on money but rather based on interaction feedback. EBay and amazon have long ago solved the problem of counterfeit goods.
Simply make a setting where I don’t even see contests made by people below a giving rating, if I worry so much about dead keys. The whole problem is all this incentive to cheat the rating system, or the system over relying on key activation.
“Hopefully those examples also suggested something else: there’s nothing particularly generous or helpful about bidding on low value games you don’t want just to relist them.”
Even ignoring my previous responses the fact is still that regifting for rating and regifting for family are being lumped together and thrown out baby and bathwater style and the vast majority of these shitheads are not making the arguments you are making. The practical problem argument (yours as a set) is a much better one than the gifting is selfish argument. But even still if we’re just talking about practicality then we’re just talking about moral urgency and laziness.
The fact is that either way the devs want it to be the newb fleecing, generosity banned, bot saturated, elitist, buy your rating, pyramid scheme, that it is today. And either way, that’s a problem.
“I’d be curious to hear what your alternate suggestion would be IN DETAIL.”
I’d be happy to help hash one out. You’re the first person to even hint at interest in fixing it. 99% of these arguments are basically asserting that nothing needs fixing.
Firstly, I’d scrap the ranking system entirely. Trade forums solve most of these problems. User reporting, percentage ratings, combined with post limitations would seem to solve all the trust worthiness and bot and dummy account issues.
Hell, captchas would go a long way here. And like I said subscribing to games you want and letting you enter multiple times if you have the points for it.
“Many, many users don’t want to give games to people who haven’t given anything themselves. “
And that’s why we have black lists and groups. If they want to be super picky about it they can give games to a friend or family. Incentivizing gifting in itself is a mistake. You don’t have to reward charity to see charity happen. In fact if you incentivize it too much it stops even being charity.
SG has gotten big enough that we don’t need to do that anymore. People can see that it’s basically an automated platform for turning spare bundle games into games they’ll actually play. What we’re doing here ultimately is addressing the market problem of a lack of a true secondary market.
Also not that as I said I can’t cut the top of my giveaways either. So you say it’s fair for users to say fuck low ranking people, well, what if I wanna say fuck high ranking people as well? Clearly the whole thing is rigged to favor the top.
“Are you suggesting users shouldn’t be allowed to make this decision?”
No. They can do that if they wish in my view. Ultimately I’m angry about what I’m not permitted to do. A key once won should be mine to dispose of as I please. IF the system can’t handle that then the system needs revision. I refuse to believe it’s an impossible problem.
But before we even get there we have to admit there even is a problem, which apparently no one on SG is willing to do. It’s intellectually lazy and profoundly greedy.
“Your mother can create a free Steam account…”
And my mother can wish herself a happy birthday too. Fortunately she doesn’t have a Godzilla tier asshole for a son. I guess yours does. She because she can get the gift herself doesn’t mean I’m stripped of my desire to give her a game she might actually enjoy. WTF is wrong with you people?
“It’s not steamgfits because you can gift your wins all around like there’s no tomorrow, but because people gift games there. “
You contradiction blind people crack me up. Giving a game to my mom and giving a game to the crowd are both gifting. Gifting is either legitimate or it isn’t. Choose one.
“You made a pretty long arguement about why you haven’t even read the FAQ before taking substantial part in the site’s activity.”
Remember you said that when your bank or something fucks you because you clicked “I agree” without a law degree.
I didn’t expect lawyer fuckery here. That’s part of why I’m so upset. You’re basically scolding me for not being a cynical shit and taking people’s generosity at face value. Fuck me right?
I’d rather be a good person than whatever it is you expect me to be.
It seems like you’ve made some good points, and some less good ones. Starting with the plan to reform the site, you’re right–many of the problems I foresee are predicated on a contribution-based rating system. Get rid of that system, as you propose, and you’d remove the incentive for many of those abuses. You seem on solid ground there.
But, mixed in with my point about those abuses I made another one: dummy accounts are a problem. I take the contribution-based rank system to be the main barrier to creating rafts of fake profile to enter from. (What you say about the point system only works if points are a finite resource.) I don’t really see where you’ve addressed this problem in your suggestions.
I’m glad you mentioned private groups. Given popular sentiments on the site, it seems likely that if a contribution-based system were eliminated groups and lists would take up much of the slack. But, if I were to speculate, I suspect that would make the site offer even less to new signups. Many want to give to people who have contributed at least something to the site and are willing to part with games at level 1 or 2. Eliminate that option and I’d think they’ll offer the same things to fewer people via groups or lists, not more.
On a side note, per your comment, the trading aspect of SG is much closer to a real secondary market than the giveaway portion is. In my experience it works quite well eve if a bit laboriously. That’s been the bulk of what I use the site for.
But finally, I think you and I differ on some more basic ethical perceptions. To me, when I look at SG, I think it mostly works pretty well at what it is meant to do. I think it more-or-less tells me up-front what I can expect when I use it (I was not surprised by the bundle game thing like you were). It offers people an opportunity to give things away on certain terms and gives them a fair amount of latitude to set those terms. While I might agree that it could be set up better, it doesn’t seem to me that a moral norm is being violated.
You seem to feel it morally defective to make a site that allows the option (just the option, people needn’t use it) to restrict giveaways based on the what entrants have themselves contributed. I’d be genuinely curious to here you unpack why. To me, it seems that a person giving things away to people of CV level 3 and up is no more morally objectionable than giving them away to only close friends: in each case a non-merit-based restriction is imposed, in each case the person choosing that restriction doesn’t owe me anything, so I’ve no grounds to complain of their choice.
Clearly you see it differently. How come?
Well, I didn’t want to go into discussion about regifiting itself, but let me share with you my experience at gameminer (another giveaway site) back in the days when I’ve started using SG. Gameminer allows (or allowed, I don’t know how they are now) regifting, had percentage rating of recieved games for each user and there was also some level rating system. It had also basically pay to win giveaways (golden or something), but let’s just discuss regular ones. They had almost every problem Jake mentioned. Games were regifted commonly (you could get entry points out of number of people entering your giveaways, which in theory was supposed to be incentive for creating giveaways, but it encouraged regifting) and it was pretty easy to stumble on invalid key even when entering high percentage users giveaways. Sometimes the key provided was for different game (less valuable) than it was given away. Despite of limited number of points and smaller userbase, some giveways still had big numbers of entries. It was allowed to give away free games, so when something game became free or really cheap the site was flooded with giveaways for it. In general, it was horrible mess.
Someone pointed you to Family Sharing and you dismiss it ’cause you wouldn’t be able to play won games with your family. If regifting was allowed you still wouldn’t be – according to rules you can’t win multiple copies of the same game and you can’t enter for the game you have in your library. I’d agree that not being to able to play games at the same time could be drawback, though. I use family sharing and I don’t have any problems with that, but I don’t play anything that would require me to go online (apart from Europa Universalis IV).
Another thing I want to address is that I don’t understand why are you ok with level restrictions and blacklists, but you think no regifting rule is horrible and controlfreakish. In first case you don’t want person who hasn’t given anything win (or has not given amount of your choice) in second you don’t want person who doesn’t want the game win. Both are just prerequisites for the entrant. No regifting is official rule on site for practical reasons (once again, what Jake wrote applies), but most people want to give their games to someone who would enjoy them anyway. You are not free of it – you want to give your mother game she would enjoy instead of keeping it for yourself because you wouldn’t like it as much? It’s basically the same situation – you give something you don’t want to someone who wants it. Currently when giving away games (assuming everyone acts according to rules, which of course is not true, regifters still happen), you’d get three hypothetical winners:
– person who wants to play the game
– person who collects games and wants +1 in their library (they may or may not play it)
– person who will farm games for cards if they have them (most care for profit, but some still might play it someday)
If you had your way apart from those cases we’d get:
– regifters for level boost (or just regifting in for site), eventually someone will keep the game, but why to go through this regifting chain in the first place, when in first giveaway there were people who actually wanted the game?
– people like you who would regift to family/friends. now I have question for you: why do you think you’re more entitled to win the game you don’t want and give it to someone close to you than some random stranger who enters giveaway and actually wants the game?
– traders, selling games for profit
In general it would diminish chance to get a winner who wants the game in the first draw. You could argue that in the end most games would find a loving home, but why to go through all that circle with regifting/selling (and inflate artifically number of entries in process, because if regifting was allowed that would happen) when there are plenty of people in the original giveaway who actually want the game?
“But, mixed in with my point about those abuses I made another one: dummy accounts are a problem. “
Yeah, but it’s more steam’s problem than yours. But I realize we’d have the motivation to solve it. One possible solution specifically would be the just captcha EVERYTHING early on in an account’s lifetime. Entries, activations, logins. Over time as humans respond to the account and confirm things are going well, the frequency of those captchas are reduced sharply. I think a hard ratio system early on would be good too as a backup. That might not work for some unforeseen reason, but I’m positive it can be made to work somehow.
Dummy account have signature behaviors by being a dummy accounts. If a dummy account perfectly fakes being a real account is it really a dummy account anymore from the perspective of the system and other users?
“But, if I were to speculate, I suspect that would make the site offer even less to new signups.”
Possibly. Though frankly I don’t like groups either. That’s just another ranking system. If you want to give games away to your group, just do it on steam. But one thing at a time. Right now the problem is the ban on giving games to one’s F&F outside the system. Fixing that is my priority.
I think the experience for new users is already pretty shitty because of the rank 10s shitting on everyone else and the bots the mods permit, and the bullshit rules they burn in the EULA/TOS/FAQ/Guide/WHATEVER.
By creating a rank system you also create classist behavior. Set one group over another in any context and they will abuse the lower group. Psychological fact.
Citation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott
But again, worrying about incentivizing generosity is misplaced. Trust me when I tell you people will work to be kind just because it feels good. Just protect them from being used and abused and give them the opportunity and they’ll do the rest. I live across the street from a recycling facility. I see people all year round in any kind of weather drive recycled materials to this place and drop them off. For no gain what so ever. Indeed they are paying in time, effort, gas, and opportunity to do so. They even leave things, like doors, wheel chairs, hats, appliances, TVs, anything you can imagine that someone might not want that someone else might want. People are inherently generous I assure you. No one sets it on fire, there is no security, no on breaks stuff, or dumps trash in it, etc etc.
“Eliminate that option and I’d think they’ll offer the same things to fewer people via groups or lists, not more.”
That’s a price you should be willing to pay in the long run especially since this resource, game keys, is an infinite abstraction. I think better wins outweigh frequent wins.
“In my experience it works quite well eve if a bit laboriously. That’s been the bulk of what I use the site for.”
That system is it’s true purpose. The gifting is a lure. It’s like the free toaster to get you in the bank. Right now trading is labor intensive and the people currently most profiting from it like it that way. No entrenched interest wants to see inclusive disruptions. That’s part of why the class 10s and their minions so ferociously defend the status quo.
The SG system offers a less laborious but less reliable secondary market system. That system is by definition a threat to traders’ profit however you define it.
“I think it mostly works pretty well at what it is meant to do. I think it more-or-less tells me up-front what I can expect when I use it (I was not surprised by the bundle game thing like you were).”
Well, apparently you’re a trader primarily. I don’t think in those directions. I’m thinking about reducing waste in the form of shelved keys. I want to see a system where everyone dumps their bulk keys into a shared system and converts them into either a positive well founded emotion or a set of games they’ll actually play.
SG has the potential to be that shared passive-trade and gift system. The reason the laborious trade system persists, along with the problem of copious unredeemed keys, is because there as yet is no better alternative. SG works, but it could work orders of magnitude better and being a network good the more people you get involved the better it is for everyone, which means we should be thinking about what the class 10s want and doing the exact opposite because they are better served by a small lousy system in which they are by definition on top.
At the very least I should be allowed to cut them out of my giveaways the same way I am allowed to cut the bottom out for fear of bots or greedy people.
“While I might agree that it could be set up better, it doesn’t seem to me that a moral norm is being violated. “
There is when people respond to the idea of gifting games on either via the system or to F&F with moralistic hate, as if my genuinely generous and reasonable desire to not waste my points and give games to my friends and family is ethically repugnant. Click the link and look at how the people spoke to me in that thread, and here. Something is clearly wrong and it sure as fuck isn’t my desire for efficiency or my desire to improve my mom’s any with a product someone else is giving away anyway.
Think about it. She’s a retired nurse. they want the game to end up in good hands, possibly a game they’d never play, a game an oldish lady might genuinely enjoy. When the community prohibits that game moving from shelf to lady, something is clearly broken. And it is not the desire of this set of hands to transfer said game from shelf to lady, and yet that is exactly what the majority there believe because of the system.
All the rules and stuff are just noise obfuscating that signal.
“You seem to feel it morally defective to make a site that allows the option (just the option, people needn’t use it) to restrict giveaways based on the what entrants have themselves contributed.”
Maybe, but I think you’re conflating “have themselves contributed” with “reputation outright purchased via trade or cash.” Class 10s aren’t more generous than I am. They just have more money, or more access to keys. When they give something away they get 100% credit for it because they trade bundle keys outside the system in bulk for a much greater return than 15 cents on the dollar. Then they gift the 100% value game they traded. No doubt they also cleverly exploit group sharing to create cabals where they gain rank just by executing trade through the system. Creating these systems just creates lawyers basically.
So long as I can basically buy my rank, and there is profit to being high ranking, level 10 will never by synonymous with contributor. We’re looking at a version of trickle down here where rich people refer to themselves as job creators when in fact they are a wildly parasitic force.
“To me, it seems that a person giving things away to people of CV level 3 and up is no more morally objectionable than giving them away to only close friends:”
Which is an argument to abolish groups. And I agree. The problem is when this supposed desire to reward contributors turns into a set of excuses for being a selfish hateful shit. Which is what has happened obviously when you look at the responses I get for daring to assert that equally, I should be allowed to give a key to F&F. “CV” clearly stands for cash value, not contributor value. In the long term buying games via steam gifts is the much better choice. Just buy a new release, gift it and watch my rank and access soar. That is not contribution, it is an investment.
The system needs to permit that behavior but not worship it. Currently it clearly worships it.
Even you conflate wise investor or savvy trader in this context with generous donor which is insane because by definition donation isn’t investment.
Thanks for another rational comment. You provide me with the emotional fuel I need to deal with the next 10 shitty ones X)
Sheesh, wall of text much? Please use more carriage returns next time X) (If you have already, my apologies, I’m actually new to the jetpack commenting system.)
“let me share with you my experience at gameminer “
I’m happy to stipulate it’s possible, even most likely, to wreck a given system, by permitting regifting. But that doesn’t prove that it’s impossible to design a better system, which does allow it. And my argument is that allowing regifting is morally more urgent than protecting any class system.
“Another thing I want to address is that I don’t understand why are you ok with level restrictions and blacklists, but you think no regifting rule is horrible and controlfreakish. “
I’m actually not entirely ok with them, I’m just working from a set of priorities. First of which to me is elimination of that which stops me from giving a game to my fucking mom.
“why do you think you’re more entitled to win the game you don’t want and give it to someone close to you than some random stranger who enters giveaway and actually wants the game?”
I don’t. I think I should be equally entitled. That’s taken care of by the luck of the draw. I’m happy with the card farmer winning also. I’m only not happy with a bot person winning because a bot person likely has several accounts, and the class system everyone is defending doesn’t even solve that problem.
Basically I’m fine with anyone winning fair and square for any reason and once a key is won, the winner should fully own it at that point.
I see your point though, and I’ll be thinking about it, that being cool with any stipulation is possibly problematic when you have a problem with any other stipulation. So it does get tricky when we talk about before the contest is created. My solution is to then focus on preventing cheating in the contests themselves (bots,) and to increase freedom at the contest creation phase (cutting out the upper levels from my giveaways,) and sort out the rest as and if needed.
I’d like to say that this entire set of problems would be eliminated by destroying the cash for copies monopoly model via IPL reform, which eventually will happen. This is all temporary. Eventually I’ll be able to sell or gift my used games. In which case I won’t need SG or anything like it because the economy itself becomes the secondary market we are all here seeking ultimately.
geee, sorry about that, I was really sleepy and couldn’t condense thoughts properly D: when I posted I was like “ow, I didn’t thought I wrote this much” xD
“But that doesn’t prove that it’s impossible to design a better system, which does allow it. And my argument is that allowing regifting is morally more urgent than protecting any class system.”
The problem is you can’t introduce regifting unless the entire sg system is transformed into some other system that would manage dealing with that. Which currently seems like a lot of work and there is no significant demand for allowing regifting in the userbase.
” I’m only not happy with a bot person winning because a bot person likely has several accounts, and the class system everyone is defending doesn’t even solve that problem.”
But if you abolish class system and allow regifting at the same time number of wins by bots will increase. No level restriction for giveaways means bots will be able to enter anything they want and if regifting is allowed e.g. some traders will be eager to use bots to get games for sale for free. And alternate accounts owners will have easier job with nothing forcing them to activate their games.
“My solution is to then focus on preventing cheating in the contests themselves (bots,) and to increase freedom at the contest creation phase (cutting out the upper levels from my giveaways,) and sort out the rest as and if needed.”
If you suggest captcha for weeding out bots then users already spoke against it in some forum thread. People generally hate captchas.
Also, cutting out lower levels = not entirely ok, cutting out upper levels = ok? Although I agree that more freedom in this regard would be good, I don’t think many people would use this kind of feature. People usually want to reward contributors not punish them. Btw, maybe allowing regifitng as possible option for ga creator? But then again the person who won would still get reported a lot, so not really good idea, as mods already have too much on their plates xD
“Eventually I’ll be able to sell or gift my used games.”
I’d wish for that too, but I’m pessimistic about that happening.
“Thanks for another rational comment. You provide me with the emotional fuel I need to deal with the next 10 shitty ones X)”
Glad I could be of service. 🙂 You’ve been interesting to talk to, and haven’t given me any particular reason to get bent out of shape.
By the way, your response was long enough that I’ll respond in two parts again to better organize the content.
To your thoughts about dummy accounts I’d say two things. First, you seem to be treating all dummy accounts as bot-run accounts. I’d not been assuming that. Recall what I said about points being a finite resource only if dummy accounts aren’t tremendously easy to set up? It would be very easy to code a browser extension, for instance, that would juggle any number of dummy profiles allowing you to run them rather than a bot. Points would cease to be a finite resource for you.
But it is true that the hundreds of dummy accounts operated by single persons I’m envisioning would have to be bot run. There I’m not sure how perfect a solution CAPTCHAs are. Some people have been calling for CAPTCHAs already; I’d like to see at least a controlled trial run to get some statistics on what it does to average entry numbers. But there are these worries:
~CAPTCHAs are a tradeoff. They involve a large cost in terms of ease of use and a smaller one in terms of processing.
~It must be a CAPTCHA good enough to actually stop most bots. Software is available, or so I’ve been told, to circumvent a number of off-the-shelf CAPTCHA solutions. If it doesn’t work pretty well the tradeoff won’t be worth it.
~It needs to not create problems for a website which, historically, has had a hard time dealing with existing traffic. They’ve upgraded recently, and are finally accepting donations. (Given your low opinion of the people that run the site, it is worth noting that there are also reasons to think well of them. Their long, apparently idealistic desire to not take any money is among them.)
If these concerns can be met it would go a long way to taking care of the bot problem.
“If a dummy account perfectly fakes being a real account is it really a dummy account anymore from the perspective of the system and other users?”
Yes, I’d says so. It’s a dummy in the sense that it’s another account operated by a single person. People, as you commented yourself, want a system where they don’t feel they’re being taken advantage of. In this case, that seems to mean feeling like everybody has an equal shot at winning the GAs they enter, and if dummy accounts are too easy to set up and operate that will cease to be true.
“Possibly. Though frankly I don’t like groups either. That’s just another ranking system. If you want to give games away to your group, just do it on steam.”
I’d sort of been driving at that. I had a feeling your premises ultimately committed you to an opposition to groups as well. And here I really can’t say as I sympathize. I’ll get to your argument about ranks momentarily, but for me this gets back to what I said at the end of my last post: I can see nothing whatsoever wrong with people giving things to groups of friends, groups of acquaintances, or groups of whomever. Such action doesn’t seem schematically morally defective.
And, if it isn’t, then it also wouldn’t be wrong for a tool to be set up that would allow this to be done more easily and fairly. SG without the current rank system would essentially be such a tool. I can see no MORAL ground for objecting to its existence in that form. (Some individuals might misuse it, but that is true of practically any tool, and hardly worth remarking.)
Now, you state what you’re interested in SG being very precisely later on. I think it would be interesting, and possibly very good, for something like you envision to exist. But what I can’t see is why you’d think SG has any obligation to be that thing. One can’t argue that because a thing doesn’t live up to a telos one has come up with it is therefore morally deficient.
“I think the experience for new users is already pretty shitty because of the rank 10s shitting on everyone else and the bots the mods permit, and the bullshit rules they burn in the EULA/TOS/FAQ/Guide/WHATEVER.”
As I commented before, that wasn’t at all my experience. I felt the rules were fairly simple. I don’t love the bots—apparently almost nobody does—but at least the current system makes me think bots on dummy accounts aren’t too high a percentage of entrants (and I dislike dummies way more than mere bots—if you want to manage your entries with a bot but only have one account I hardly care). And I never felt shat on by anyone. Several high ranking people whitelisted me in short order just because they liked me. People in general were really nice (more on that later). I couldn’t enter some GAs, but I could enter lots, even more after giving away a few low value keys. What had I to complain of?
At this point I think the more interesting part of our conversation is the moral part, the question of what is and is not moral and why.
“By creating a rank system you also create classist behavior. Set one group over another in any context and they will abuse the lower group. Psychological fact.
Citation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott”
I both agree and think that you are overstating things rather dramatically. As a species, we are characterized by what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences”, we often do not need much pretext to justify our felt superiority. This is true.
But that doesn’t mean that any rank system whatever need lead to significant classism. Nor does it mean, and note that this is a different claim, that the rank system is to be blamed for classism that results.
Being more specific, I’m familiar with both of those examples, and especially with the first. Note that the SPE provided not just classes, but also rolls and a significant power differential. Also those rolls were familiar, and tapped into existing cultural prejudices (a feature shared by Jane Elliott’s exercise).
(Also note that it is an isolated finding in the social sciences which, for ethical reasons, has not been repeated. Given the social science’s recent scandal of repeatability, that alone ought probably to give one some pause when trying to draw general conclusions.)
While these bits of data are suggestive of human tendencies, I don’t think they’re sufficient to show that any ranking whatever will lead to problematic or systemic classism. You yourself seem to acknowledge this, since you have no problem with rankings generated by feedback. I take from this that you don’t really propose to abolish all hierarchical rankings.
“But again, worrying about incentivizing generosity is misplaced. Trust me when I tell you people will work to be kind just because it feels good.”
I think it’s much more complicated than that. I think that institutional structures help encourage or eliminate personal tendencies, and these tendencies come together to form things like community culture and ethos (which, in turn, tends to influence community rules).
Take your recycling example: I can’t speak to recycling specifically, but economic research has suggested that altruistic environmentalist behavior is influenced by people’s ability to signal. People are significantly more likely to engage in such behavior when they can get some kind of social pat on the back for it. What they perceive to be the norm amongst their piers also has a large impact.
Or take the way people, rightly or wrongly, tend to appeal to laws or rules for moral purposes. Communities are formed by their rules as well as forming them.
All that to say that I see no reason to discount a good incentive structure as a way of creating a community with desirable properties. Some individuals will act well no matter what and some poorly, but many will be to some degree shaped by their circumstances.
“since this resource, game keys, is an infinite abstraction.”
I think you’re applying an abstraction of your own, and one that doesn’t really work in this context. Software, being information, is infinitely replicable. But that doesn’t mean DRM-ed software licenses as held but us users of SG are infinitely replicable. For us they are a finite and valuable resource. Thus I’m not quite following you here.
“Right now trading is labor intensive and the people currently most profiting from it like it that way. […] That’s part of why the class 10s and their minions so ferociously defend the status quo.”
You completely lost me here. In my experience the people most involved in GAs and the people who profit most from trading are almost entirely different classes. Many of the high levels people don’t trade at all. Many of the traders with massive feedback numbers almost wholly ignore the GA system. The two are, in some ways, separate sub-communities with some overlap (people like me).
I don’t see how anybody benefits from trades being laborious. Anyhow, if they are, it’s primarily the fault of Steam. SG could implement features to make it easier to search for people to trade with. Actually, just in the years I’ve been using it, they have, but there’s still room for improvement. Still, given their other issues, limited staff, and lack of demand for change, I see no grounds on which to pronounce that they’re deliberately hobbling trade. Their part of the systems works reasonably well.
I also don’t see how trade benefits the group you say it does. The people who seem to gain the most from the trading section are the high-volume sellers of game from the Russian Steam store. They’re clearly making a significant monetary profit (and I think generally SG is just one of the ways they’re advertising their services). This results from a defect in the Steam pricing system, not from anything SG did or is capable of doing.
So, all in all, I’m not sure what you meant here.
“There is when people respond to the idea of gifting games on either via the system or to F&F with moralistic hate, as if my genuinely generous and reasonable desire to not waste my points and give games to my friends and family is ethically repugnant.”
A moral norm is violated by the individuals that do that. It does not follow that the site or its operators have violated a norm, or are responsible for those violations. I was talking exclusively about the norms governing the setup of the site.
Here I’d refer back to two things I’ve already brought up: the narcissism of small differences, and the tendency to invest rules with a moral significance they lack. One could see both of those in the behavior of people towards you.
But I take it you mean to introduce a premise to our discussion: something is systemically wrong with the SG community members’ attitudes as a result of its structure. This seems to be a largely empirical premise: it involves the judgment that people here not only behaved badly towards you, but that that bad behavior was worse than one would expect elsewhere. And here I simply cannot grant the empirical premise. I’ve been given a lot of occasion to think that compared to any but the smallest online communities I’ve been a part of, SG is actually an impressively polite and friendly place. All my experience of it has been thus. I’ve literally had people apologize to me after I corrected their logical errors MORE THAN ONCE. Where on the internet does that happen?
Every sufficiently large and open community has people who will be jerks. And, more than that, when somebody breaks a rule around with a strong community norm has grown up, it seems unsurprising that some will not be especially just to its breaker (especially if he insists that breaking the rule was the right thing to do, as you have loudly, angrily, and at length). This doesn’t seem to require systemic classism or something as an explanation. The explanation seems rather obvious especially given the problems with relisting that have plagued the site under its current setup: if you come to an online community, break a rule regarded as important, then admit ignorance of the rule and insist you were in the right, you should expect some people to be a jerk to you. I say this not as a normative claim but as an empirical one.
“Even you conflate wise investor or savvy trader in this context with generous donor which is insane because by definition donation isn’t investment.”
I’m not sure where I’ve done this. I looked but couldn’t find it. I don’t confuse high CV with high generosity. I simply can’t judge a person’s motives in contributing, any more than I can judge their motives in not redeeming a key. I even said that limiting GAs by CV was a non-merit based test.
Sorry, I may have let that become over-long. I’m tired, and when tired I’m less concise and focused.
At any rate, one final though. Given what you say you’d like SG to be, I think a perfect SG WOULD employ something like CV. It would use it not as a permanent rank though, but rather as a kind of currency: let people who have contributed a lot have some advantage in giveaways until they’ve won back comparable value in games they like. If you want a system that reduces “waste in the form of shelved keys” then an incentive not to shelf them seems in order, one in which “convert[ing] them into […] a set of games they’ll actually play” is actually a conversion, and not just two unrelated events creatively described. (As giving games away and winning them back would be on a system with nothing like CV.)
“there is no significant demand for allowing regifting in the userbase.”
Then why the need to ban it?
That’s like saying there’s not a lot of demand for pot just because you don’t see people walking around smoking it. 🙂
The whole reason those hateful fish brain exploded on me and made the thread in the first place is because it’s a huge “problem” to them. Regifting happens anyway. Obviously there is a ton of demand.
“But if you abolish class system and allow regifting at the same time number of wins by bots will increase. “
That’s happening anyway because the mods are cool with bots. Captchas and other measures are easily doable and basically industry practice.
“If you suggest captcha for weeding out bots then users already spoke against it in some forum thread. People generally hate captchas.”
There’s more than one way to use them. And their use can scale as the account ages. I find it amusing anyway that bots are considered such a problem but outright buying your rating isn’t.
“Although I agree that more freedom in this regard would be good, I don’t think many people would use this kind of feature. “
All the more reason to enable it.
“People usually want to reward contributors not punish them.”
People buying ratings and investing in trade are not contributors. Get that fox news job creator bullshit out of your head.
“I’d wish for that too, but I’m pessimistic about that happening.”
In part because people like you make tons of excuses for letting exploitative shit stand for all eternity.
Man, I really appreciate your taking the time to respond, especially considering it’s polite and well thought out, but the debate is just wearing really thin for me and the idea of spending 3+ hours composing a detailed reply just is intolerable. Especially considering it clearly doesn’t matter. Shitheads run that place shitheads will always run that place.
Clearly no one agrees with me, and that is sad on a whole lot of levels. Looks like the solution is just going to have to be a lot deeper and further down the line. Like systemic IPL reform. Gamers are just too eager to submit generally.
I really do want to thank you for your comments though. They mean a lot to me.
You might like this post if you’re into gaming ethics.
http://underlore.com/why-devknights-exist/
No worries, I was going to have to bow out shortly for work related reasons anyhow so things had to draw to a close sooner or later. It was good talking to you.
You too man 🙂 Good luck in all things 🙂
>steamgifts is a SCAM!
>keep using it everyday
You are a funny guy, gonna tell ya the big secret: friends group. Have a group with some friends (10 or more) and make giveaway for this group only. This way you make sure no bots are gonna win, level up (slowly) and make friends happy.
I’m aware of that loophole.
And me using steam gifts generally doesn’t make it less of a scam in the ways I’ve described. I’m simply taking advantage of what it offers which isn’t exploitative while being aware of its exploitative nature.
And yes I’m aware of the shady friend groups. But like I said, I’m not participating in the scam elements.
If I wanted to just give games to my friends directly, I will.
Thank you for proving my point though 🙂
But you are. You are a huge scammer like everyone else.
Am I a mod there?
Do I have the option of removing that completely self serving bullshit rule about passing on my completely legitimate winnings as I see fit being the new owner?
Did I miss the part where I have the personal authority to kick out bots and delete the whole concept of groups?
No.
What you just said is as mindnumbingly stupid as blaming victims of police corruption FOR police corruption just because they called 911 after being mugged.
I don’t have to boycott something to point out that it’s ethically bankrupt, especially, when there are ethical use cases. and even if I were a hypocrite that doesn’t magically make them less of a scam. Nor does it make any assertion I make wrong. Truth is truth regardless of the moral quality of the relay. Which is why medical practice to this day uses knowledge gleaned from holocaust experiments.
Wake the fuck up.
I hope you’re just really really young. This level of thoughtlessness in a matured human would be frankly a little terrifying.
In any case, to defend myself personally: My use of the service is limited to ethical pursuits.
I enter contests for games I’ll actually play and I don’t pass on won keys. Because fuck my friends right? Fuck my family. Generosity is for suckers, right? Because it’s not like I actually own my winnings right? I also don’t limit my giveaways to groups, or any other shady bullshit. And I only set the contributor level to 1 to avoid the most blatant of bots.
If I had the option ONLY level 1s and 2s would be eligible for my gifts. But surprise surprise, I don’t have that option either because the rank tens demand primae noctis with EVERYONE’S gifts. Because Steam Gifts is a cultish pyramid scheme designed to make games even cheaper for rich people and the digital merchant class.
I am not at all a party of fleecing newbs. Every game I win is legitimately acquired and used, by both my standards and the site’s (hatefully right wing) standards. The point of this post is (as you would know if you had reading comprehension in excess of a termite) that site POLICY is a scam.
The groups, the ranking system, the bots, the limits, etc. These are the problem. Not the root function or concept of giving away or receiving otherwise unused licenses.
Remember, that whole place exists because of intellectual property law bullshit that says I can simultaneously own something and not own it. No secondary market. The very existence of a license key is a logically bankrupt construct designed to enable the policing of ideas and the quasi ownership of arbitrary machine readable numbers. It’s ALL batshit greedy insanity from the ground up. A dogma purpose built to make worthless shitheads like Steve Jobs and other exploitative patent trolls, pampered and worshiped enough to have movies made about them and have fleets of private jets.
GTFO of here you boot licking drone.
If your next comment contains any sarcasm I’m going to delete it. If you want to say something to me, say it straight up like you were born with a spine.
This is the thing about Matrix, dude. Once you understand you don’t want be Neo, you want to be the bald guy. WE ARE THE BALD GUY, both of us. We don’t leave the Piramid Scam because you know what? We can win games! We don’t even play it! HUNDRED of games, we will never play. We can’t stop, its our drug.
Do not try to be magnanimous writing longer texts. The moment you are conniving with corruption from SteamGifts, you’ve already lost. But that’s the beauty and ugliness of the PC gaming. We can have it all, but do we need to have it all?
I apologize for the sarcasm before, but that’s the truth. The system is corrupt, but we took advantage of it. Do you realize that, as seems to be involved with the politics of your country. I did not disturb you anymore, see ya.
PS: I’d explain why his idea for creating more freedom actually decreases freedom, but I have a feeling your the kind of guy that will answer with “the free market will sort it out.”
XD
I’m hard to nail down politically, but no, I am not a tea party type.
http://underlore.com/an-argument-in-favor-of-the-state/
I understand the need for regulation. But that’s not the point of the rules of steam gifts. It’s designed expressly to skim games off newbs. Which is fine in the sense that they want to give away games anyway. The problem is that it funnels more games to people who need them less when the effort should be the exact opposite.
The main reason people don’t see the injustice is because they don’t think of games as a resource that can be needed to any degree. They are parsed as a luxury item and thus of zero “need” value. And yet they are fine with them having a dollar value. This is paradoxical and contradictory.
If you equate games to money then this place is taking money from people who have less of it to give to people who have more of it. And the goal should be the exact opposite.
Sidenote: I respect and admit the power of the free market, but to me it must be contained like a camp fire or else it stops being useful and starts being a disaster. The way to properly deploy the market is to bracket it with a progressive tax and an UBI. They are the stones that make the difference between a cooking fire and a forest fire. 🙂
http://underlore.com/one-possible-solution/
Greetings.
I agree with your argument because you have the right of re-rolling YOUR game. You are the one who got it in the first place, anyways. Although, unfortunately, because once you put it in their system, it’s theoretically their game now, so re-rolling is their choice. They get to choose what happens with it, not you. You just got to provide the game and the key. There were blatant points leading to that guy being a bot, but they needed actual proof to clarify. To get proof, now that would prove difficult.
What I’m trying to say is, you definitely had the right to re-roll that game because it was yours to give away. It’s not like there were 2 people who entered and you wanted to give it away to your friend instead of the suspicious stranger. I find it ridiculous how much they refused to just re-roll a game! That guy probably didn’t even deserve it, so might as well give it to someone who hasn’t won a game at all.
Regards,
Shrek
Thank you for the allied comment. You bring up an interesting point about gifting a game to someone new. That would have been a perfectly acceptable compromise to me. But it’s pretty obviously a pyramid scheme designed to make being rich even cheaper and to overly reward the gaming version of wallstreet (the professional trader community) which much like the real wallstreet draws all its profits from the actual contributors below via shell games and exploiting the ignorance of outsiders.
My personal compromise is to simply use the system for my own gains and spend any money I save on my friends and family or on charity. That way the net result is gifting my friends and family the value of the games in other ways.
The logic problem here is of course the same problem as the entire gaming market. That you can simultaneously sell something and retain ownership of it. It’s the worst of all worlds for the customers, and a zero accountability fleece fest for the publishers and devs. (Not to mention big pharma and other monopolistic and exploitative industries based on similarly broken logic.)
Stop being a fucking retard and hypocrite
“The site doesn’t work exactly like I think it should therefore it is a scam.”
Shut the fuck up. The rest of us live in the real world and understand the caveats regarding giving shit away for free and the necessary requirements in place to reduce these pratfalls (the ability to restrict giveaways so that people who have demonstrated the willingness to give may be rewarded to the exclusion of those whom intend only to receive, or requiring that the winner activate the gift to their account).
I can’t believe you’d actually say all of this and then go on to make giveaways on SG AND restrict them according to CV level…
It’s like… It’s like… It’s like everything else in the pampered western luxury economy. It’s about rich people giving stuff to other rich people while a mob of poor people fight over the crumbs.
You and your ilk should be ashamed of yourselves.
What does your recently won MadMax crumb taste like?
xD xD xD
You said above, you would like to limit your giveaways to levels 1 and 2. You can do that if you use sgtools.info.
If the site is still scam to you, use another giveaway site. There are plenty.
Lol Innomen,
Steamgifts isn’t a scam, you just broke rules and now you’re butthurt, gj.
Soooo, your whole point is, SG should allow you to regift, so after you win game from person A and he ranks, YOU can use that game to regift it and rank USING HIS MONEY.
And then, we have perfect circle of love – you find 10 people and giveaway Call-of-Duty-Whole-Package and regift it between each other forever, ranking up to the top never spending money, since you never stop regifting.
Can you see now why no-regifting-allowed rule MUST be enforced?
I only see a childish guy who wants the rules to be broken only for him and doesn’t understand the idea of “proof”.
You all are crazyyyyy
Life is a scam, we should end it 🙂
If possible I’d appreciate a bit of clarification on one point that you mentioned several times in your arguments:
You want to gift won games to friends and family.
I don’t disagree with this (though I’ve found a compromise by just asking my friends “hey someone’s giving away that game you want, want a link?”), but I am a little confused when you say that, for example, you wouldn’t ask your mother to make a steam account in order to access the site to enter these giveaways. How are you gifting games to your mother if she doesn’t have a steam account?
Thanks
So hateful, abusive, narcissistic, pricks like yourself don’t have friends and family they care enough about to gift too. Shocker. 🙂
But at least you recognize at least emotionally how defective and worthless you are, hence your outrage at running into someone who isn’t a total thorn, stabbing into everyone around them.
That’s why you’re so angry at me. You can tell that I have more love in my life. More kindness, compassion, diversity, and generosity.
My desire to give away what should be mine to give away, won fair and square, infuriates you because it shows you your own greed, your own actual isolation, your own social failure.
And so you respond like the belligerent living pathogen you’ve become. You scream hateful abuse in defence of the other parasitic narcissists and lash out at the one with real friends and family that cares about them enough to earn genuine regard.
You hate me because you’re a jealous feral child, and all you’ve ever learned to do in response to the human desire to be part of something good and kind is to tantrum and attack.
I hope this changes for you, I truly do. But the damage is likely done and can never be undone unless you somehow survive until the singularity. No doubt jabbing into and poisoning everyone around you in the way like the pathogen you are 🙁
It’s a complex question, should I risk all that damage for nothing, or should I wish you a quick death instead and cut our loses? Perhaps I’ll just imagine the opposite of what you’d wish and thereby find the less defective desire 🙂
So yes, I wish you a long life and survival into the era when your toxic hateful weakness can be cured 🙂 Even if it means extra suffering for everyone around you. Because I have to assume they are better than you, and they too would prefer to do the right thing even if it’s not the comfortable thing.
Good luck 🙂 I hope you soon find people you actually care about 🙂
@Luxy
You think you have a point. But you don’t actually 🙂
The two are not conflicted. Imagine walking in the desert with someone you care about. You come across a source of water that for whatever reason only you can drink from. (like say it’s sugar water, but they are diabetic) Your companion, being rational and kind, is not going to deny you water just because they can’t have any. Steam gifts is offering water, which I can drink. But I will still complain that I can’t share my water.
As for mad max, it tastes like the only AAA game I’ve ever won out of literally thousands of entries and it nicely makes up for the fact that many of my previous giveaways no doubt ended up in the hands of bots and merchants. A level 10 won a gift of mine one time even.
I restrict the games according to CV lvl 1 to avoid bots and merchant accounts with like 2 gifts or extreme cheapness and 90 receptions.
Notice that I am not allowed to set an upper CV limit. If it were up to me I’d give to level twos and threes and only level twos and threes, or I’d have the right to refuse to gift a game if I didn’t like the look of the winner account.
But I don’t have that right over my own give aways, and this also illustrates an important point. These gifts don’t belong to us. They belong to steam gifts. And they aren’t gifts, they are a tax we pay to have access to a community that gives gifts to it’s citizens. It’s actually a rather socialist model. 🙂 Complete with a UBI and wealth cap in the form of points chained to giveaways, with a maximum capacity.
Sgtools.info doesn’t allow me to change SG rules. Perhaps I was unclear. I want to make it so that no one ABOVE level 2 or 3 can apply for my giveaways. The site is still a scam but my usage of it is legitimate. As I’ve explained multiple times already. You seem to pretend that boycotts are all humanity needs to counter exploitation and tyranny. Reality doesn’t work like that. Yes I could leave. That would accomplish nothing. Far better to do what I’m doing if for no other reason than it draws attention like this and functions like a kind of SG community activism.
Even if you don’t agree, you’ve heard at least some of my argument now have you not? Mission accomplished.
Yes I’m “butthurt” that the rules are exploitative. That’s called having a mind of my own. And this is me making what effort I can to fix them, to fight for what’s right is the small individual way that I can.
It’s not his game the moment he put it in the give away process. It’s steamgift’s.
Prizes won still have monetary value. If I win a Ferrari, it’s still worth as much as a Ferrari even though it was free to me.
A prize should become mine when I win it fair and square. But technically it doesn’t become mine until I activate it on my account. Which is where steam gifts gets the moral authority to be a worthless cock and deny me the option of regifting my game even outside of steamgfits. Your greed is literally blind. You can’t grasp the concept of gifting a game without being paid for it in some way. We’re not gifting. We’re recycling. I gifts games that I had spare from bundles.
The circle issue is solved by removing groups entirely which I also advocate.
I fully “see” the arguments for the system. But they are wrong. Not that I expect you to ever understand 🙂
I want to give away my winnings to friends and family instead of keeping everything greedily for myself like a toddler demanding the entire toybox, and I’m the one being childish? X)
What does “proof” have to do with anything? Proof of what and how is it relevant?
More like, life is unjust and we should improve it 🙂
My mom is old and struggles with technology. It’s hard for some to understand but steamgifts itself is far more complicated than the games she’d like to play. She has a steam account that she barely has cause to use, but that would get better if I could pass her the occasional game she might actually be able to enjoy.
Put simply I’d like to do all the work for her and take the gamble out of it. Same with my GF, I don’t mind entering contests consistently and losing. I want to pass along my winnings, not mere opportunity to win.
Thanks for a rational question 🙂
As a person whose main field of work is psychology, I must advise you to think about getting professional help if you truly think all the things you’ve posted in your last comment.
I wrote my comment where I repeated exactly what you said in your first comment about people who use SG back at you (seeing as you use it no matter what you wrote about it in your blog post) and you respond in such a manner?
Can you not take a joke at your own expense when it was clearly deserved?
Even if you were responding to Awesomesauce and not me, that changes nothing.
The way you use speech, the way you address people, the things you dare to say without any grounds, the obvious need to come out looking “intelligent and superior” (when sadly you are missing the basic logical requirements in your arguments to accomplish that), the need to point out that you have friends and people who care about you while others who disagree with you, according to what you said, do not, and many other things you’ve said, not the least of all imagining that people hate you simply fror having a different opinion or daring to even think about wishing death upon someone who disagrees with you are clear signs of a much larger problem than being a troll or a web-bully.
I honestly hope you’re just trying to drum up views for your blog, that you were in a horrible mood because of a real problem when you were replying or something like that and that it’s not really what you feel or what your instinctive response really would be. If it is, just have a chat with someone who can help you get over what’s troubling you. I promise you, there’s good reason to do it, according to what you’ve been writing here.
Again, I hope this is all just a planned reaction to get something out of it. I didn’t take any of it to heart so don’t worry about it 🙂
There’s no need to react with a comment to what I’ve said since I don’t want or need to hear an explanation for why you’d do such things as I’m in no position to help you out if you really meant all of it, and feel more than free to delete this comment after reading it as it’s not an attempt to embarrass you in any way, it really is an honest well-intentioned advice.
Actually, I’ve just repeated what you’ve said in your first comment back at you 😉
You’re talking about not being able to share water with someone who’s dying of thirst with sharing games? First of all, no one ever said SG was a charity site. No one’s dying here and no one NEEDS the games. To even get in it you need a 100$ worth of non-bundled games in your account. Not to mention a computer, electricity, a roof over your head and a lot of different things that even allow you to spend time behind a computer. Also, as far as sharing games you’ve won on SG and activated on your account, you can share your library with anyone you want using family sharing option so it doesn’t even apply.
Regifting for the sake of drumming up CV and the problems that come along with it have already been explained by others and I won’t be getting into it again.
Perhaps you’d be able to win a lot more AAA games if you made an effort to be nice? Giving games means far less in the community compared to being a nice person, trust me.
Also, I have friends who are lvl 10 and I feel obliged to ssay that you grouping people who are lvl 10 into some sort of “evil-bot-exploiter” basket is an awful thing to do.
The gifts do belong to you, no one’s gonna rip them out of your inventory and you’re more than free not to send a gift to a winner you don’t like. The only thing that’ll happen is it’ll show on your profile (like in the case of the first guy you mentioned in your discussion with support). No one’s gonna come knocking at your door or do absolutely anything. You won’t even get contacted by support about it, let alone anything else.
First of all, apologies for the confusion about reply targets. I’m still learning the wordpress comment system from the admin side. Until recently I was a disqus user. 🙂 future replies should be nested to make reply targets crystal clear.
“Can you not take a joke at your own expense when it was clearly deserved?”
Firstly, I don’t have all my comments memorized. (You people really make some narcissistic assumptions about human behavior.) Secondly, even if you did paste my own words at me there’s this thing called context that changes their meaning. Thirdly, if you have to explain that you’re joking and why it’s supposed to be funny, it’s probably a lousy joke. 🙂 Fourthly, tone is lost online and the vast majority of communication is non-verbal. As a “person whose main field of work is psychology” you should have known that.
If you actually were a psychologist or psychiatrist, even in training, you’d have spotted that and so much else.
“…it really is an honest well-intentioned advice.”
No one believes that. Not even you. In fact your entire comment is a gloriously blatant example of projection. You’re angry at being scolded and you’re trying to look intelligent while hurting me at the same time. Thing is, this is not a show. This is how I think and speak every day. It doesn’t require effort on my part. I’m not trying to look smart. I simply am. I’ve heard “Why do you talk funny?” comments like yours my entire life. I had college level command of the language in 3rd grade. So you can only imagine how many times I’ve heard crap like you just said over the course of my life.
Where as you on the other hand are lying about qualifications in an attempt to do what you’ve accused me of doing. Made obvious by the fact that they don’t even matter. A trained psychologist or psychiatrist knows that an argument from authority is fallacious. They would also know that attacking my state of mind in an effort to undermine my argument is also fallacious, constituting an Ad Hominem. Further still they’d know that having an area of expertise by definition means narrow application. Put simply, even if you could see into my mind, it doesn’t mean you know anything about policy, economics, ethics, social science, game theory, or any of the other relevant contexts. A real clinician would also be interested in dialog, not merely winning with a last word.
And above all a clinician of any qualified stripe would have the decency to not literally make fun of someone they felt was mentally ill. 🙂
But since we both know you’re full of shit, I take no offense at your standard issue internet “expert” attack 🙂
As for your “joke” see my previous reply.
“You’re talking about not being able to share water with someone who’s dying of thirst with sharing games?”
Way to miss the point and build a straw man at the same time 🙂
“First of all, no one ever said SG was a charity site.”
o.O Except the domain name and everyone on the site. X)
“Not to mention a computer, electricity, a roof over your head…”
Really Ayn? That’s your argument? Because your victims aren’t Somali subsistence farmers it’s all ok? XD
“…you can share your library with anyone you want using family sharing option…”
And you could read previous comments where I’ve already covered that, but you won’t.
“I won’t be getting into it again.”
Wise, since I’ve already refuted those arguments completely 🙂
“Perhaps you’d be able to win a lot more AAA games if you made an effort to be nice? Giving games means far less in the community compared to being a nice person, trust me.”
I know lack of greed is hard for you to fathom, being essentially made out of it yourself, but my objective isn’t to amass triple A games. My objective is to acquire games I’m likely to actually play one day time permitting. I wishlist games I might actually like to play.
As for being “nice” what you mean is licking 1%er equivalent boot. No. I’m not nice to walking pathologies just so they’ll maybe scrape me off some extra crumbs.
“Also, I have friends who…”
You don’t have any friends. You just made it clear that you’re “nice” in order to “win a lot more AAA games.”
Yeah, one or 2 level 10s might be decent people. But then again there were also decent SS officers. That doesn’t make it unjustified to criticize the SS. It’s called trending. Look into it.
“The gifts do belong to you, no one’s gonna rip them out of your inventory and you’re more than free not to send a gift to a winner you don’t like.”
Not true. I am still being punished to this day for not giving that copy of 7th guest to that obvious CSGO bot. My daily limit for gifting is permanently reduced, and the red gift icon never goes away.
Try it. Make a give away and then unilaterally decide to not pay up. See what happens. They will not delete the giveaway unless you get permission from the giftee.
The entire first half of this post is all about being contacted by support.
Yeah, they aren’t going to kick down my door, but to exercise the right you say I have would be to get banned.
Typically tea party argument: I can get away with it, or the punishment isn’t so bad, therefore it’s ethical. X)
I will say I read quite a bit of the posts here and your replies afterwards, and I will admit I blacklisted you on Steamgifts as I find your conduct rather appalling, especially in the earlier discussions. You sunk to petty insults with many of the replies I read through. Another thing is that some of your claims are clearly false and/or unfounded, some of which one could consider as libelous.
I admit you brought up some very good points, such as how obscure finding the rules of the site can be and about how there is a bot problem. But for many of your other points that people brought up arguments about why it could be fine the way it is, you mostly just shrugged off and insulted the person that posted them. You have even stated that you believe that anyone that supports the site the way it is is, in your eyes, a bad person.
Now there are bad people on Steamgifts, people who are there for purely selfish reasons. I started using the site for selfish reasons in that I wanted to just get free games, but I started giving because I wanted to and I got to know the community. What you don’t seem to account for is that no one is forcing anyone to make giveaways and that the system that is currently in place is there in order to keep the site alive in that it does provide incentive for new users to make giveaways (as you can’t have a giveaway site without giveaways). There have (and I think still are) discussions about improving the system or changing it, but it takes time to implement such changes.
Also, when you say that the high level users are there to cheat the lower level users you’re over generalizing quite a bit. For example: https://www.steamgifts.com/user/KTS
Now it doesn’t look to me like he’s cheating anyone out of their games. This of course is just one example, but it proves that your sweeping statements aren’t correct, at least not that one.
Either way, you can say all you want about how evil the site is and how it’s a scam, but that doesn’t change the fact that you still actively use the site and have even made and won giveaways after making this post.
Now I’m not sure how your response to this will be as it appears it could go either with you insulting me and telling me about how I’m greedy and/or a pawn in their system, or with you acting reasonable and presenting your arguments in a way that makes me want to actually consider them as truly valid. If it’s the latter, then I’m open for a discussion. If’s the the former, well … I guess I’m feeling a little masochistic.
I somehow subscribed to the discussion and getting new notification brought me here, ’cause I wanted to address one little thing from your and Luxy’s conversation. But I can’t for some reason reply to the comment I want, so here is quote of what you wrote to Luxy:
“I know lack of greed is hard for you to fathom, being essentially made out of it yourself, but my objective isn’t to amass triple A games.”
I’m pretty sure Luxy’s comment about you trying to be nicer was caused not by her greed, but this sentence from you previous comment:
“As for mad max, it tastes like the only AAA game I’ve ever won out of literally thousands of entries and it nicely makes up for the fact that many of my previous giveaways no doubt ended up in the hands of bots and merchants”
She might’ve think that you’re complaining on not getting more AAA games, hence her comment 🙂 (I don’t agree with her solution)
I know this really doesn’t add anything to discussion, but I just don’t know why you usually jump to worst conclusions when you talk with people.
Well you’ve black listed me so your opinion is clear. No point trying to change it. I do appreciate you reading my side of it. Changes will not be implemented unless the owners decide to make the changes and even if we all agreed they need to be made that still wouldn’t assure the changes because like I said, I see this place as generally parasitic.
The primary purpose is ad money and spare harvesting via newb fleecing. Now I’m no longer a newb, so what I put in I know exactly where it’s going and what I get out of it. I’m informed now. I am no longer being scammed. But others are, and everyone arguing against me here is informed. They are profiting now. As I am. So all their arguments are biased right away.
Like Hillary saying speech fees aren’t corrupting. Well of course she’d say that. Yay for rationalization.
As for your case study of a lvl 10. I’m willing to stipulate without even looking that he’s Buddha. My objection is to the system, not the people (unless those people have authority over the system and do nothing.)
One or even a few counter examples don’t disprove a trend. Why do I keep having to explain this? Again, there were nice SS officers. Some died even trying to do the right things. That doesn’t make the SS above reproach.
Thanks for your time both reading and writing.
Why can’t you reply? If this is a comment technical error I’d like more data so I can fix it. What are you trying to do that isn’t working?
As for your defense of Luxy, I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt. The character of future replies will show the wisdom or foolishness of that 🙂 My issue is with systems and ideas, not people. It’s just that the idea of a person is so richly defined by the ideas they defend that it gets mixed up. Yay for the human condition.
As for my apparent cynicism, it may come from the fact that this is all one topic to me.
Perhaps reading these two posts will clarify a bit?
http://underlore.com/the-apex/
http://underlore.com/critical-differences-and-why-i-am-alone/
Thank you either way for your time and comment.
Yes, I generally don’t remove someone from my blacklist, but just to be clear. I blacklisted you for you conduct, not for your opinions.
And yes, ad money is important. It helps keep the site running, especially now that the user base has become so large (around 900k, though that includes bot accounts and alternates). I want to say that there haven’t always been ads on the site, but I could be mistaken.
As for the third paragraph, I’m not going to turn this into a political debate.
As for the system, it’s worked so for many people so far. And it is an improvement over the first version of Steamgifts. As I said before, there are still discussions about ways to make it even better. But that all depends on CG, he’s the owner and is, as far as I know, the only person with the ability to change the code of the site. He usually posts the changes he’s making here: https://www.steamgifts.com/discussions/announcements
Anyway, I suppose the next issue I’ll address is re-gifting. Now gifting is perfectly fine, it’s just re-gifting that isn’t. Everyone has already stated how allowing re-gifting to occur messes with the system that is currently in place, so I won’t get into that. So gifting and re-gifting are, by the contexts of the site, two very different things. Gifting is of course when you win a giveaway and the creator gives you the game/key. Re-gifting is when you take that game/key and do something with it that is against the site’s rules, more specifically when you give it to someone else or put it up for a new giveaway. So by the context of the site, re-gifting is bad in the same way that giving away a gift someone gave you and told you not to give to anyone else is bad. In the eyes of the site (and many gifters that I know) in re-gifting you are basically disrespecting the person that made the giveaway while at the same time taking the chance away from someone else to win the gift that might have actually enjoyed it themselves. Sorry if this isn’t very clear, but its the best I can do.
Another thing, not sure if this was brought up, but about you being banned for your unactivated wins. It wouldn’t have been from speaking out against the current Steamgifts system, not directly at least, but someone that disagreed with you may have tried to see if they could get you banned. There’s a really handy tool that someone made that makes it easy to check if anyone broke the rules. Here’s the link: http://www.sgtools.info/activation
It’s weird, but on some comments there is no reply button for me (I’m on Opera now, the only other browser I have here is IE, and it’s the same). All replys to this comment (and subsequent comments) lack it. The same happens after your post on December 17, 2015 at 7:55 pm.
Thank you for your links. I now understand better where you’re comming from 🙂
“I blacklisted you for you conduct, not for your opinions.”
That’s a pedantic distinction in a purely abstract medium. Typing is as much a “conduct” as anything else here. But whatever meaningless distinctions you require to sleep at night 🙂 I advise you looking into getting over yourself. Shithead though you may be I’d never blacklist you, because you’re obviously a human. But hey at least one of us has integrity. Better than nothing right?
As for the rest of your comments it seems like you were elaborating on context to make a point and then didn’t make a point. I’m aware of the various facts you brought up, and that’s really the only comment I can make.
Obviously I disagree with site policy as described above for reasons described above.
The mechanism of my ban is also obvious, the reason is equally obvious. The activation protocol breach on my part was just a handy excuse. Had that not been there they would have defaulted to one of the many arbitrary catch all prohibitions common to online community rule sets. We westerners sure do love making rules up to justify being despots and then hiding behind the rules like that absolves us of obeying them or writing them. Essentially it’s the Nuremberg defense. Morally absolved because: (following orders/doing job/obeying rules) etc.
Except morally conscious beings with integrity know that legality and social acceptance aren’t the measures by which one arrives at meaningful ethics. They are for the conscientious citizen merely the ground floor of conduct, to be risen above whenever possible. Not that anyone as self absorbed as you would ever understand.
Perhaps you should go blacklist a few more people for not kissing your ass to salve your fragile ego. 🙂
Perhaps I’m having a theme problem? All I can find is this: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/adding-a-reply-button-to-comments
Thank you for reading the linksand providing the error report equivalent 🙂 I truly appreciate both 🙂
Edit:
Now I see the problem you are describing. I’m working on it. Thank you 🙂
Edit 2:
Ok I figured it out. Apparently it has to do with nested comments: I’ve set it to allow up to 10 (the max in the drop down) that seems to have restored reply buttons.
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wp-30-comment-reply-missing
Thanks again for pointing this out.
It seems to me like you’re intentionally picking a fight where there isn’t one.
By conduct I meant how you replied to others, mainly in that you resorted to insults and overall rudeness. I understand your opinions are your opinions and I respect that. What I do not respect is how you decided to answer those that didn’t have the same viewpoint as your own. As for your integrity, that can be rather subjective and, from my viewpoint, you already threw yours out the window.
My point is that in the context of the site, re-gifting is bad and disrespectful to the creators of the giveaway that you won the gift from. What few seem to understand is that a website is not public property, it is CG’s property and he can do with it as he wishes. This includes banning those that break the rules he has set out for using his property. He is also providing a service, and the normal action I see when people dislike a service is that they stop using it, and maybe file a complaint.
As for your ban, you keep talking about it like you’re a victim. You are not the victim, you did something wrong in the context of the site (of which the rule you broke is stated in a few other places) and someone decided to inform the moderators about it, maybe they informed the mods because they didn’t like what you said, but we won’t know as either the comment was deleted, I’m searching for the wrong name (I’m assuming you commented as Innomen), or it never existed. It is also entirely possible that you said something in your post that broke the rules (i.e. calling out, overly offensive language, etc.). So unless you can clearly identify that you were banned for a reason other than your unactivated wins or that you can provide a legitimate example that such a ban has happened in the past to other users, please stop trying to build your case on false pretenses.
“Go find me some factual or logic errors, or assertions I’ve made that you feel are improperly defended, I think you realize by now I’ll respond (there, in context) with intellectual integrity if nothing else.”
So why don’t you live up to your words from The Apex and actually start following them rather than devolving into insults and your own wild speculations and false accusations.
An example (that I don’t believe has been brought up yet) of one of your improperly defended points is that of where you claim your contributor value cannot rise past a certain point unless you give away non-bundled games. That stopped being a rule long before this post was made (at least a year prior). You can get to Level 10 by only giving away bundled games if you wanted.
For a year now, there’s been a publicly available SteamGifts bot. Today it claims over 10,000 users (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autojoin-for-steamgifts/bchhlccjhoedhhegglilngpbnldfcidc/reviews?hl=en). There’s then plenty of other bots that aren’t so publicly distributed.
The person who designed that bot has over $1000 in wins, has only given away 3 games, and has only commented 10 times. Hilariously, 7 of those comments were in a thread promoting the bot (https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/TRU9K/autojoin-for-steamgifts). The most recent win was 3 days ago.
If someone like that can’t be banned for botting, then who can? With bots so easy to find, why should anyone not bot? I feel botting may have hit the boiling point where there’s now so many people doing it, that it can’t be stopped without disrupting the site in a big way.
That’s cute. White knighting as a distraction from your own self importance. Like you you actually care how I talk to other people. We all know it’ your ring that you want kissed. And hell, even if you’re being honest, that just makes you a control freak. Like how dare I not play by the rules your plainly worship. You should work in a prison. It’s perfect for your mental state. Tons of people to exploit and abuse to salve your ever-fragile ego.
You Ayn Rand my-yard my-rules types consistently amaze me with your insular hateful obliviousness. you’re exactly the kind of shithead that argues jesus doesn’t want you making cake for the gays and by gum it’s YOUR store and you can do what you like with it. Totally blind to the fact that you live in a larger culture. Like a grub of some sort spending his entire life under a rock.
Go put on your big boy pants and come back when insults don’t send you into a preening, pearl-clutching, fit. This is the Internet. We are not here to serve you.
Ad Hominem is only a fallacy when it is used as an argument. So get over being insulted. I’m not laboring here under the delusion that you’re anything approaching rational. This is entirely for my benefit. And hey you should worship that right? This is after all My blog. I’m using insult in addition to argument however because I think you’re a foul person and I like insulting foul people 🙂 I even have had people recognize their shitty behavior and broken logic as a result of it before. Funny how people work sometimes. Not that I think you’re capable of that, nor is that my goal. Simply distracting myself from the repugnance in the world you represent, by mocking your greed, is enough for me for now 🙂
Put simply it doesn’t matter how monocle popping my rudeness is to you, it doesn’t stop me from being right. Your core argument is still “thems the rules.” And that argument is completely baseless. Essentially it’s solipsistic or logically circular. You tea party types are so hilariously pathetic. Authoritarian low information rubes, the lot of you.
Is it clear yet that I have no respect for you or your kind? Because really, I don’t have any. You’re like several orders of magnitude more pathetic than a strip mall security guard on the grossest of power trips harassing children outside a toy store because you overheard them mocking fox news. That guy looks like Norman Borlaug compared to you.
You keep saying “in the context of the site” like that makes it all ok. It’s exactly like saying “Well in the context of Nazi Germany persecution of the Jews was the law.” Do you not grasp there is a higher order of ethics that transcend laws? Of course not. Wretch.
My case is already built and won above. My screen shots are my evidence and my post comments and previous replies are my logic. You think you’re entitled to a personal defense because you can’t grasp that you’re unworthy of special attention. Such is the way with worse-than-mall-cop-grade-self-importance-bloat. 🙂 I wouldn’t be shocked to learn you already worked surrounded by the disenfranchised of some sort. Such as a prison or a school or some other context where people have no choice but to kiss your ass.
I believe the bundle policy was in effect when I wrote this post. Or the rules still claimed it was. Where else would I have gotten the policy data? In any case the massive value reduction of bundle games keeps the argument alive in spirit. Clearly the place is designed to fleece bundle buyers and further enrich traders or yuppies with cash to waste on full retail games. Going from zero percent chance to 15% chance is hardly a substantive upgrade. But still, I will make an update to reflect the correction. Thanks for that 🙂
The greed of you people is still staggering. If I were as greedy as you I’d be hunting your kind for organ money.
Do the math on what it would take to get to level 10 with bundled games. You sound like some republican asshole arguing that economic oppression is irrelevant because anyone has the chance to win the lottery for 1$.
But hey it’s good to know your pedantry is consistent across your logical framework 🙂 Feel free not to reply. I’m growing bored.
The more interesting question is if botting doesn’t hurt the site, why not bake it in?
The difference in my mind between a script and a bot is that a bot is a fully automated account where as a script is a person who has automated the tedium out. I don’t have a problem with low rank people, especially given their abysmal odds of winning any individual contest, using a plugin to click for them the required 40,000 times. Doubly so when the wins can only be activated on a specific account and gain them nothing but a key that someone didn’t want anyway.
The purpose of this place is to collectively trade unused keys for keys that might get used. All the ranking stuff needs to be removed in favor of systemic improvements that apply to everyone. Special treatment is always a kludgy fix. It’s the policy equivalent of special pleading. They don’t make us click obsessively for our spending points, so why make us click obsessively to spend them? I would like to see no actual function to CV beyond pride (like no pay to win), and no groups. Just a UBI and lotteries to deal with scarcity.
Ironically we can manage this like a game economy that embraces automated grinding. The best part of this page is the UBI/wealth cap aspect of the point system. 300 for everyone, tops, and you never run out forever.
We don’t need to invent hierarchies and aristocracies online beyond the unavoidables of the larger contexts (like site ownership.)
/end rant
I have to congratulate you and say well done for your goal to get others to notice your opinion.
Now don’t take this the wrong way, but a lot of people on the Internet can take stuff personal and get all salty and rude because you don’t agree with them. This is because people act themselves on the Internet. Yes, there are many narcissistic morons in the online world. Yes, there are many narcissistic morons in the real world. Now sadly, there’s not much you can do about it. I’m sorry you had to experience such a tough time for your feedback, even though I think you slightly enjoy replying. Although, so many people experience bad feedback, many don’t understand that it’s part of life. As in, you need other opinions to see what is countering yours, so you can completely understand the argument. I put this here for everyone’s use.
Now you go and have a good day, sir.
Actually I do care how you talk to people. Insults show you have no integrity as those with integrity do not need to use them. Just because this is the Internet doesn’t mean we should just throw civility to the wind. You seem to expect and even openly ask people to question your arguments, but as soon as they do you devolve into some sort of immature child that needs to maintain that he is right and no one else is.
As for making me recognize my bad behavior, you’re right in that I won’t, I don’t see myself as acting poorly. And even if I were I would not learn from you, the way you present yourself makes you an awful role model. Especially in how personal attacks are your preferred course of action in a discussion.
Now it doesn’t seem like we’re going to get anywhere unless I state this, but I’m 19 and still in college. I’m sorry to disappoint but I’ve never worked in any sort of job as the one you described. As for my political views, I consider myself mostly liberal. Also if it were my choice I would postpone the current presidential election until we had some actually decent candidates. Though I do see Sanders as the most tolerable.
“This is the Internet. We are not here to serve you.” If this is true, doesn’t that invalidate all of your arguments against the site? If this is your stance you should have anticipated that the site wouldn’t perfectly align with your own moral code. Yet you still complained.
An argument is not won just because you say its won. All you’ve provided is flimsy or false evidence, as well as accusations, and more than a handful of your own speculation. It doesn’t matter how much you protest your intelligence to us, you cannot turn your opinions into facts.
As for the bundle policy, I can assure you it was not in effect when you made this post. They got rid of it when they upgraded the site into what is now referred to as Steamgifts Version 2, this change occurred before I joined, which was over a year ago. It’s possible that it could have still been in the FAQ or similar page when you made this post, but I would have to validate the claim. It’s also possible that it was in an unlinked page of the website at the time. Such as how the list of bundled games is.
The other explanation is that you could have planned to write a post like this a long time ago, this blog has been up for quite a while and you first registered on Steamgifts 4 years ago. It’s plausible that the first two screenshots are just old. But I have no idea what the style the original version of the website used.
Back to bundled games, how is 15% not enough? Take the current Humble Telltale Bundle for example. The lowest tier costs $1 and you receive 6 games, that makes it roughly 17 cents a game. The least expensive game is Poker Night or Puzzle Agent at $5, and the most expensive is The Walking Dead Season 1 at $25. That means you are paying 3.4% and 0.68% of the full retail price respectively. Now explain to me how 15% isn’t fair?
Now if we assumed that the value of games given away did not decrease after giving away more than 5 copies, it would take 784 of the current $1 Humble Telltale Bundles. That’s $784, a far cry from the $10,000 it would take if you only gave away non-bundled full price games. The bare minimum you would have to spend to get to Level 10 is $500. So explain to me why people of higher levels pay so much more than that to get to the point they are today?
Also relatively few people make giveaways that require any higher than level 7, so explain to me what the purpose of getting higher than that achieves? If the system is so geared towards purely benefiting the higher level users, then why do they allow a service that makes it possible to lock users out of a giveaway if their level is too high? If the entire site is a scam to get low level users to make giveaways, then why is 85% of the member base still Level 0? Why are there so many low level giveaways where everyone has a chance to win, even after excluding group and invite only giveaways? These are just a few questions you leave mostly unanswered, but I’m sure you’ll just spew more insults and nonsensical replies to each one.
Lastly, I am rather concerned with the details, it’s how you properly win debates; not by proclaiming how glorious you are and how inferior those around you are, hoping the other person will be so dumbfounded by your flashy words and massive ego that they decide your unfounded, libelous proclamations should be heeded as if spoken to them by God himself. Now please … go be bored, I’m sure that thesaurus you’re using must be getting quite tiresome.
Actually you’re wrong, the amount of points you receive is based on giveaways made. 5% (I think) of the value of a game is given to everyone as points, with every user receiving their points every 15 minutes.
Which this technically means, yes, someone is clicking and typing quite a bit to give you your points.
Another thing is that quite a few people purposefully buy games to be given away. When the site began the majority of games given away were non-bundled, the only reason so many bundled games are given away now is because bundled games have become increasingly prevalent.
Eh, “notice” is a strong word. It’s funny, the only time people comment on this blog is when I insult some cult or other. And as mad as they get they never branch out. They always stay confined to their one little thread when there’s like 500+ posts of stuff to make fun of me over and pour hate on, or maybe even agree with. Very few people stray from their filter bubbles. You have a good day too 🙂
You don’t understand the definition of integrity. It doesn’t mean kissing your ass. It means doing the right thing even when deception or evasion would be easier or more profitable. You are so obviously an “authority” figure in your own mind it’s deeply pathetic. You’re like a teacher that drones on an on about all the “respect” you aren’t getting when what you really mean is unquestioning sycophantic obedience.
Integrity is for example when I corrected my original post to reflect the inaccuracy you rightfully spotted. Had our roles been flipped I’d have whined about the way in which you told me and refused to make the edit because you were insufficiently polite or some such. I’m willing to admit I’m wrong even when it’s a worthless stain like you that shows it.
You haven’t made a single substantive challenge to my arguments. Indeed you’ve evaded them almost entirely saying things like “I won’t get into that” or “in the context of the site.” Mostly you do is whine about protocol and scold in the most empty and snide way possible like a meaner dumber C3PO. You’ve come to completely conflate scolding with debate.
You even openly admit that if valid data isn’t presented to you in a boot licking ring kissing fashion you won’t parse it. You go so far as to assert that I’m an inappropriate “role model,” like that has anything to do with anything.
You do nothing but whine and whine about what a victim you are, clutching pearls and fretting about “personal attacks.” And you think it’s an argument ender. But it isn’t. You still don’t understand why Ad Hominem is a fallacy. My insulting you is a statement of purpose different from argumentation. True, if insult is your only reply then you haven’t made an argument. But I have made arguments in addition to my insults. My insults do not cancel them in any logical way. Example: A. You’re a moron. B. 1+2=3 Did my calling you a moron just make my math wrong? No. So quit whining about being insulted like it matters. After all, if I’m wrong, then why do you care, and if I’m right why should the truth bother you? You have literally no reason to care about my insulting you.
I’m rather glad to hear you are so young. Virtually no one stays as they are when they are 19. Your current thinking will not stand the test of time. I mean come on. Liberal my hairy ass. You refer to Sanders as merely tolerable? I just don’t have the words. http://underlore.com/bernie-or-bust/ Link shared for everyone else to know how monumentally oblivious you are to the world. But hey, you’re in college, I suppose that’s the best place for someone to be completely blank. Not that it’ll do you any good if you continue to completely misunderstand the nature of persuasion. (Protip: it has exactly fuck all to do with debate. adamcurtisfilms.blogspot.com & http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html)
Your brain isn’t even done developing yet. http://mentalhealthdaily.com/2015/02/18/at-what-age-is-the-brain-fully-developed/ Especially the regions responsible for higher judgment.
As for your policy timing gripe, it must have been the unlinked page thing. Likely someone in the dog pile hate thread thread threw it at me making the typical “it’sin the rules and therefore ethical” type argument. In any case I updated the post to reflect that argument is now partially obviated. Which actually is a victory for me. The sight evolved in a more moral direction. Epic 🙂 Long way to go still. I’d like to see the prohibition on regifting keys outside of SG lifted. If I could give my winnings to my mom/gf/dad/friends/etc that would be great 🙂
Yet here you are defending a classist 15% punishment for poor people. (And Sanders is merely “tolerable” to you which really tells me everything I need to know.)
It doesn’t matter what I pay for something. It’s value is determined by what it sells for. A game’s value for purposes of steamgifts points should be the asking price on steam at the time of the giveaway creation. Period. CV shouldn’t even exist. It’s all special pleading designed to enrich the steamgifts equivalent of landed gentry. Bundles are limited time. If nothing else the 15% is grossly exploitative because games available in bundles don’t stay available at the reduced price, especially in a market with a literally non existent secondary market. I’m not even allowed to sell my steam account as a whole without steam deleting it from the buyer if they find out. This entire market is a huge distortion or monopoly bubble propped up by grotesque intellectual property law based on the sunk costs fallacy. (Not that I expect you to understand any of that.)
As for your math porn, it would all be obviated by the elimination of CV entirely which I advocate. Any site function which manipulates advantage is logically special pleading. I would like to set one set of rules that applies to everyone with no manufactured cliches, hierarchies, or aristocracies. but of course you no doubt prefer the exploitative system to stay in place so that you can one day climb to the top of the pyramid scam.
And you’re wrong by the way, it is not possible to lock out higher levels from entering your giveaways. I’d like to be wrong about that, I would give away more games if I could be assured they weren’t flowing straight to OCD wallstreet equivalents.
As for level zeros, dude, it’s called poverty, look into it. Gaming and PCs are hilariously cheap. We barge computers out of this country by the ton. It’s called ewaste, look into it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste Even the shittiest office machine will play the vast majority of games in existence. And that applies all over the world. Computers haven’t been yuppie-only toys in the main since you were like 10. And they’ve been getting exponentially easier to obtain since then. Also you can walk a quarter mile and run across a dozen open wifis. As wifi spreads, more and more poor people are able to get online and engage in hands down the most cost effective form of entertainment on earth. PC gaming. And that’s before you factor in piracy and open source or other free games.
Again, keep pretending that this isn’t how I think and speak if it’ll make you feel any better. My decade plus of public writings including comment threads across the Internet will quash that misconception for anyone willing to research it.
But thank you for the back handed compliment that implies. You’re essentially telling me I’m smart and articulate. That’s kind of you in a way.
I’m sure you’ll just dismiss all this because I called you a moron. Nothing like a good old breach of protocol to dismiss contradictory input 🙂
You yourself make note of the distance between current versions of SG and older versions. Apples and oranges to compare then and now. My point about the 300 is that it doesn’t change based on CV or groups or being blacklisted etc.
The spending money side of the SG economy is far more fair in my view than the supply side. I want both sides to be equally universal. No CV, no groups, no lists. I want the whole thing to be take it or leave it. One law for all, no exceptions. /shrugs
You seem to prefer a caste system equivalent. Fair enough.
Essentially you’re a supply side economist equivalent. (You should look into Ayn Rand, I bet you’d fall in love with “Objectivism.”)
Yes, I am appreciative of you editing your post with the new information that you brought up. But if your sense of integrity says that making those sorts of unwarranted insults is the right thing to do. It’s clear to me that you’re too far gone to understand reason.
The manner in which you speak to me and to others does not affect the facts. You are right in that aspect. But it does have a large impact on the validity of your claims as well as the willingness of myself and others to hear them. As the esteemed write that you are, this should be quite obvious.
As for my supposed evading of the points you bring up. You take when I say “I won’t get into that” out of context, I said I wasn’t going to discuss that topic is it’s already been beaten to death in all of the replies. And I do argue “in the context of the site” as that is all that matters for some of the topics we’ve discussed. I am not the only one avoiding topics, you seem to have entirely ignored what I said about your ban here: http://underlore.com/steamgifts-com-is-a-scam/#comment-21145.
“It doesn’t matter what I pay for something. It’s value is determined by what it sells for.” You seem to be missing the point that there is more than one place to buy a Steam game. As I presented in my bundle example, they are selling each game for 17 cents and you are buying each game for 17 cents. It’s pretty cut and dry. Though it may be true that they only last for a limited amount of time, it doesn’t change the fact that they are not selling it at full price and that you are not buying it at full price.
Also I am right about being able to lock out higher level members from your giveaways, using this website: http://www.sgtools.info/giveaways/manage. You can set special restrictions on your giveaways. Such as setting a max level that entrants can be, not allowing those with unactivated wins to join, or not allow those with VAC bans to join, along with many others.
The site already requires you to have 100 CV worth of games in your Steam library to even sign up. This is a necessary measure as it prevents even more bots from flooding the site. And it only takes 1 cents worth of games given away to reach Level 1.
And I wasn’t implying that you’re intelligent, I was implying that you know how to use a thesaurus. As for being articulate, you certainly aren’t during the entire length of your writing and some sentences are rather cringe-worthy the way they’re written. I suppose the last thing I’ll say is that you really should take control of that massive ego you seem so fond of. Statements such as “I’m not trying to look smart. I simply am.” and “I had college level command of the language in 3rd grade.” prove that quite nicely.
Anyway, feel free to reply to this, I won’t reply back. I can see you are quite the lost cause and I don’t feel like wasting any more of my time. You clearly need to learn some humility. Either way, good luck with your writing as some of it is genuinely interesting to read.
Had a large reply written but coder greed erased it. Ironic really.
Let’s try again.
1. More whining about protocol: Yawn. God you’re pathetic and boring. (~gasp~ I insulted you!)
2. Whining about your opinion: As if my goal relates to you at all. I don’t care about you or anyone like you in terms of opinion.
3. My ban: My ban happened within minutes of speaking truth to power. My “violation” was caring about my girlfriend and/or not feeding the bots. Proud of it.
4. Greedy right wing price whining: Someone wants to patent the vowels when they grow up. Pathetic. My argument remains refuted. CV is classist, there is no secondary market.
5. Sgtools: Third party. Arguments still stand, but I’ll stipulate you were right about it and it does help slightly. Doesn’t change #4.
6. Puff chest insecurity display about admitting my intelligence: Yes of course. It’s not possible that anyone has a better command of the language than you do, no. They all have to be sitting thumbing through reference material furiously to fake it. Unless of course they agree with you, then maybe they might be intelligent. Right? Here, I’ll help you save face. Why is it so shocking I might be a little better at this than you? I’m nearly twice your age and I’ve been at it since I was 16. Calm down. Learn to embrace admitting an opponents strengths as well as weaknesses.
7. Whining about my confidence. I’m not going to pretend I’m inferior in areas where I’m not just to coddle your infantile ego. Get used to that. I know what my strengths are.
8. Thanks for an additional backhanded compliment. I’m glad you enjoyed some of my work and I appreciate you taking the time to comment 🙂 But yeah I’d be thrilled if you kept your word and stayed gone. I’m pretty sure I’ve milked this conversation for all the content it’s worth.
This article is spot-on. Steamgifts is a major botfest. Only a small percentage of entries are real people, the rest are bots. If you pay attention, there are predictable jumps in entries. Whereas in real human contests, participation usually tapers off after the initial exposure.
Compared to GOG, where contests and give-aways are run by real humans. I and many people won/got gifted at least 1 game over there. Shows the big difference.
Forgot to add – I meant the GOG *forums*. Where contests and free giveaways are held.
Thank you for your comment and support 🙂
I’d like to note that I see a difference between a bot, and a human automating drudgery.
A bot to me is an entirely automated steam account. Where as a person using the browser plugins isn’t a bot because you can actually talk to them and they usually have many giveaways because they are working from their personal account.
Gog would be great if they’d just have prices equivalent to steam. It’s a hilariously bad plan to NEVER beat steam’s prices. Charging a premium for non-drm is foolish when everyone can get any game they want free of DRM from the pirate community. It’s like punishing people for not wanting DRM or not being pirates.
So stupid.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
I think this quote can be used to best describe Steamgifts in your opinion mixed with the “sheeple”. The people who you describe as blindly following the system without pointing out the flaws and stuff like you have.
I find this funny because of the people lashing out, when you do make some good points. Like the ranking system and the regifting policy.
I’m still learning to understand both sides of an argument and I’d actually like to thank you for making this since it helps.
I think the basis of Steamgifts was to enter a lottery and win games that are given away by the community that has been formed around it. That’s what it was in the first place. But bots would be used to enter several giveaways to make money from trading cards or the like from those games. The bots would win these games instead of other people who would enter it to play and enjoy the games. Now this is where your argument for contributor value comes in. The system is flawed. The more unbundled games people give away, the more people can win in increasingly exclusive giveaways. The admin and mods thought that it was a way to counter bots that did nothing but enter and forget. This didn’t stop when you could basically put an “investment” into Steamgifts to rise in their contributor ranks and start leeching those giveaways. Suspending people or banning people for botting or having low ratios would give Steamgifts a bad rep, so they just try to enforce it from where they can stand firmly.
It already requires a Steam account to have $100 in value in games to make an account, so the account can’t be a complete bot. Now, they could have simply put a captcha on everything, but there’s no benefit from that. People could have ignored the site entirely and just host their own giveaways. Steamgifts wants more attention, so slapping an ad per page works until everyone decides to use an ad blocker and the servers go down due to the lack of money to keep it up. The contributor system is also really sly, as you pinpointed. It rewards the ones who contribute more and that’s where people get most of their incentive to gift on that site. If I give more to the community on the site, I could get access to better giveaways and more games I want. Triple A games are given away every once in a while publicly, increasing in amount as the level requirement goes up too, but the forums sometimes have people who giveaway stuff after solving a puzzle, some with level requirements, others without.
Rewards for gifting = more ad views = more money
Now, the regifting policy is a bit weird in the way that you stated. You say that people should have the right to do what they want with the keys they get. Giving it to friends could be solved by family sharing, and to family by activating on your account and literally letting them use your computer to play it. It does limit the freedom, but the intention was to enter for games you and only you would like to win and play for enjoyment. There has always been a debate on Steamgifts about regifting and this leads back to the previous paragraph, the contributor system. Regifting on the site is just rude because of the ranking system that increases for games you give away, which is seen as only self profit. Regifting to friends is obviously what you’ve been arguing. But why can’t the friend enter it for themselves and win it like that? Why do they need other people to increase their own odds of winning when others don’t do that?
Also, saving a key in a word file, sticky note, piece of paper has no way of being tracked, and like someone said above, bots or users who use scripts could just say it was for a friend to get the staff off their backs. Simply showing proof of linking it to a friend, they could have had the game for years and just used it as an excuse to keep a key for a profit. They’d like to push their ideology of a lottery onto the community they’ve created.
Some people are like you and hate the site and I’d like to thank you for actually making a post like this addressing the issues with it (though you could tone down the insults). There are others who use it blindly, like you also said, that just want it as a platform to win games they want. But there are people who use it, fully knowing what Steamgifts is doing, and keep using it since they respect it as a service, but also almost like a business. This wouldn’t be the staff’s full-time job since it probably doesn’t make enough for all of them, but I guess a bit extra on the side still works. It’s flawed, but so are a lot of things that we still need to use since there isn’t a better way that people will immediately flock to.
Cheers and have a nice day.
Thank you for the awesome comment:)
I don’t hate the site I just think it’s exploitative. It is possible to get your time’s worth back out of it after you’ve been burned. But only if you have a degree of tech savvy and a sort of fiscal bent to your thinking.
Steamgifts after all only exists because of the IPL monopoly markets.
I’m glad you found the post useful.
Personally I stopped using steamgifts entirely. I won back enough games to feel like I hadn’t been fleeced on the games I gifted. I’m just not much of a gamer. A game I really enjoy comes along rarely.
I won madmax via SG, and hated it because the vehicle steering is atrocious. It’s like that with 99.9% of games. And with them all being closed source greedware I have no chance of fixing them. Basically I’m just burnt out on the whole community and market at this point.
This whole thing really burnt me out:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/innomen/recommended/233250
You tried to work the system, using games you didn’t pay for, not even as part of a bundle, to create more giveaways. Every time you make a giveaway and contribute to the community you gain Contributor points which raises you level and give you access to more exclusive giveaways. When you recycle games you won you are earning the same points that some users of Steamgifts have spent THOUSANDS of dollars earning. You are NOT obligated to be selfish, you are choosing selfishness on your own, or do you think that you deserve the same status on the site and people who have spent ridiculous amounts of money to make people they don’t even know happy. Those people are practicing altruism. They are the selfless ones.
People like you come along everyday and try to pull the same crap, and you think it’s the moderators that seek you out and give you a hard time? No it’s users like me. When I see regifters on the site I do two things every single time; first I add them to my Blacklist so they will never be able to win anything from me that I give away, and two, I create a report on the user to get the attention of the mods who look into the matter and see if further action is needed. I’m only level 4 and I’ve been on the site for years, and I don’t always have a lot of money to spend on gifts like I’d like to. But I certainly don’t think that I should be put on the same level as people who’ve given a heck of a lot more than me, I wouldn’t want to be if I didn’t deserve it.
It absolutely blows my mind how giving the Level 10s are. Thousands of dollars to make people they will never meet smile and smiling as a result. But I bet some of them just do it on auto-pilot, they are just that good of people on auto-pilot, they dont do it to feel better about themselves.
SG is a place that has lifted me up when I was at some of the lowest points of my life. There is a never ending thread called “You Are Not Alone” where people talk about suicide prevention and keep adding more giveaways in the comments while the originals are long since expired. SG is about love, giving, every thing that is great and wonderful in the world, everything that I started using computers for in the first place when I was a kid so I could escape the cruel everyday world and find people I could identify with and help with their isolation and loneliness while they took away some of mine.
I might be dead if it weren’t for SG. Steam wouldnt be half as good without SG. So by all means, stop by and see what you can get out of it and everytime you walk in with that mentality we are gonna do are best to send you right back out the door as quickly as possible. Come in and try to spread love and do some actual sharing instead of giving someone something that you just basically picked up off the street and wrapped up … approach it with real altruism in your heart and love and selflessness and you will find your home.
Yeah because wanting to give a game I won fair and square to my mother is somehow selfish.
You cultists are unbelievable.
SG saved your LIFE? Really? It wasn’t the building you lunatic, it was the people in it.
You could have met people like that on a thousand other forums, and would have is SG wasn’t there.
You’re even more insane for thinking the level tens actually paid cash for the games they gifted just because that’s what the site tells you.
It’s disturbing how little people understand of barter. You clearly have zero idea where profit comes from in an exchange.
And that’s even if I assume a 100% corruption free admin structure. Which I certainly don’t.
If I wanted to put the time in I could get to level 10 in a year without paying a dime.
Step 1. Buy cheap bundle with games with trading cards.
Step 2. Grind out cards.
Step 3. Trade/sell cards till I can buy another bundle.
Step 4. Gift the games that don’t have cards.
Step 5. Enter giveaways with games with cards.
And that’s not even touching the fact that some people are just good at pricing and haggling and can trade up consistently.
And that’s not even to mention the people that have done the math and realize that paying for games through steam gifts is a hell of a discount. If you know you’re gonna spend 500$ this year on games, it behooves you to spend it jacking up your SG rank instead. After that you’ll likely win every game you would have purchased that year and every year thereafter. That’s not generosity. It’s prudence.
No dude, you have a completely warped picture of the place and certainly my motives.
I actually stopped using SG a few weeks back because I have already won games enough to balance what I gifted and not playing the games I had already won made me feel like I was denying the games to people who might actually play them.
If I was what you accused me of in your first sentence I’d still be entering contests and winning just because I can. Or for the trading cards. Meanwhile I don’t even sell or trade the ones I have because I consider it ethically wrong to take someone’s money for something so valueless or to feed the cycle I mentioned above which only rewards the digital mercantile class.
If you’re spending actual money on gifts you’re living proof the site is exploiting people. The irony. Suicidal children in your case if your story is accurate. My complaint is expressly on your behalf.
Jesus. No good deed goes unpunished in this shithole world.
I swear to fuck the only good thing about humanity is it might one day stop being humanity. Our only redeeming trait currently, is potential.
Ok… right, I just stumbled here and just saw a post that I truly did think was the running gag that’s been going on on the site.
Now, this is really simple.
1) It’s a private site that you don’t have to use.
2) You don’t have to give anything away
3) You get given a gift, not a resource to use. You enter in games that you’d like to own and play.
4) Everyone can choose the level of the giveaway, so you can give the game away to people, who are actually generous.
5) The site is about literally just giving away a key to some random person.
6) No one expects you to give away games that you’ve bought for giving away. Just give spare bundled keys away, if you want.
So… what you’re really complaining about is that you have a chance at winning video games and instead of saying “Oh, nice, that’s cool”, you say “Ew, free stuff? How dare you be generous and give people like me free stuff!? I want to spit on your gift and just give it to someone else, like that one friend that people just completely hate during the holiday season!”.
You’ve got a surprisingly arrogant stance on free stuff…
Is it fun being a total idiot? I hope so for you.
1. Privacy is irrelevant to ethics. Also, it’s open to the public. That same logic is used to this day to justify all manner of bigotry and exploitation. Remember you said that the next time a corporation fucks you before shutting your mouth since apparently being privately owned absolves one of having ethics.
2. And you don’t have to have an IQ on par with a carrot, and yet there you are.
3. Yeah, we’ve already established that you and your ilk are ignorant psychopaths with no concept of helping others. Quit confusing your incapacity for reality. If I were as stupid as you I’d conclude that Japanese literally can’t be spoken simply because I can’t speak it.
4. Maybe if you didn’t have sand instead of a brain you’d realize that I CAN’T limit my giveaways to LOWER ranks meaning that the whole goddamn domain is a pyramid scam rewarding the people with the most money invested in the system in the form of keys.
5. Apparently the site isn’t about giving away anything at all since at no point do I own the key. If I owned the key *I* could give it away to whomever and how ever I please, but no, it goes straight from steam gifts to steam. I never actually own it, thus it was never a gift. In fact no one owns any of these keys, we’re all renting legally. Just try to resell the games you’ve bought, see how that works out.
6. You’re such a moron it makes my eyes ache. The site itself explicitly values bundled games at 15% of non bundles games price. Where do you think the non-bundled games come from?
Tons of rich assholes buy or trade their way up the pyramid to again access to a never ending stream of free games from ignorant newbs like you.
“Giveaways for bundle games created after the bundle date will always receive 15% of their value.”
_”I want to spit on your gift and just give it to someone else”_
Is that seriously what you think of the gifts you get for the people you love? Oh wait, you’re a psychopath. You don’t HAVE loved ones.
Expect your next comment to be laughed at and deleted. I get enough morons out on the rest of the net, I’m losing patience for them commenting here as well.
I understand that Steamgifts.com may do whatever the hell they want because it’s their business. The caveat that you can’t retrade your gifts kinda makes the site suck, though. Before I knew about it, I entered loads of giveaways and even won one. But now that I enter only like 4 giveaways at once, my chances are horribly low.
I don’t want to enter giveaways of games I don’t like because I’ll be forced to add to litter my account with them or otherwise I’ll get banned.
Why would someone think retrading would suck? People who like game X could exchange it for game Y with a second person. Both parties would be pleased! Not like now, when 90% of people probably get games they won’t even play once.
It’s okay for them to ban retrading, though, because their level system would fall otherwise.
The only people harmed by any sort of consumer freedom, which is what we’re talking about here, are businesses that can’t compete fairly and instead wish to utilize all manner of IPL inspired and enabled vendor lock-in garbage to ensure that they get far more profit than they actually have earned.
Steam gifts being a trader worshipping pyramid scheme, the people at the top would be most “harmed” (harm only in the sense that they would gain at a slightly slower rate.)
It’s the exact same answer to the question why won’t steam let you give away games you’ve purchased.
The fact this bullshit is even legal is a testament to how corrupt the governments of the world are for letting lobbyists and the like invent this entire market.
As if renting out numbers isn’t blatant insanity on it’s face.
Emperor’s new clothes. Everyone expects to profit some day from it so they defend it. Not realizing their aspirations are a pipe dream since the whole point of IPL in the first place is to criminalize any sort of competition.
It’s logically and ethically bankrupt beyond even the worst excesses of religion. And I am not even exaggerating.
IPL is the basis upon which big pharma has built an empire of extortion. It’s literally an ideology of greed and pain and death where profit means more than anything or anyone.
wow what a read
Wait… So with your logic, entering a giveaway that someone give then winning and not be able to regift it to get higher level is considered as you said: So I can only enter giveaways for games I want to play myself. Let this sink in… I am obligated to be completely selfish on a site predicated on altruism.
Seriously if you don’t want to be selfish, just don’t enter someone else giveaway and let someone who REALLY want to play that game have a chance to win. By entering a game to regift what you won to gain more level is fucking selfish… The fact that you don’t get something that simple to understand and even crioticize it claiming it’s the complete opposite show how disturbed you really are.
You’re either a moron, a troll, or a psychopath.
You wanna talk logic you degenerate piece of shit?
You ever played the lottery?
Now imagine one of the rules is you can only spend the money on you, no sharing with family. And no buying tickets for other people either. No problem to you right? Because you’re a selfish worthless parasitic piece of shit. But see, normal people, with warm blood, instead of cold jello, give a damn about people OTHER than themselves. Difficult for you to imagine I know. But rub together a few brain cells and try it.
I give a fuck about my ponzi scheme pyramid rank level. But even if I did, I would still have a point because if something is fucking mine then it’s mine.
God I hate you brain dead ass kissing greed machines.
Where the fuck do they grow you people? Monsanto?
It’s like you’ve all been genetically engineered to kiss 1% ass.
GTFO my blog. I’m sure you have some fox news to watch.
You have some serious problems. You need help.
Thank you for proving my point.
Think about what this comment betrays.
1. Anon. Which means you’re a coward and a liar. There’s a difference between wanting privacy for protection and wanting it to being a shield while you act like a hateful ass.
2. You show a fundamental ignorance and lack of compassion by essentially using an entire branch of medicine as a slur.
That combined with the fact that you take the opposite side in a debate centered around a guy that wanted to win games for his mother and his girlfriend really tells us a lot about your brain.
You’re likely the kind of right wing tea party asshole that thinks being “tough on crime” is executing men and women with the minds of children.
If you find either of these assumptions to be incorrect then next time do two things. Bring your face and name to this debate like you have an ounce of integrity, and bring some argument other than an extended version of shouting “retard.”
Don’t know what’s with all the hate, but you do have many valid points.
Not much is done against bots. Using Google’s reCaptcha for every nth giveaway entered, or having any sort of human test, would greatly reduce this, but not much effort is done stopping bots.
People that profit are really traders that get cheap non-bundle keys, or get them from developers to “help promote their game”, or people who exploit the system, by having group/region-locked giveaways between a couple of people.
Having a 300 point cap rewards people who spend their points on games they don’t want since there’s no incentive in letting the points just sit there.
This site really is not designed for people who what to win games they actually want and not much has been done to change it.
Perhaps you could be able to enter for the three top games in your wishlist, but you automatically enter all drawings for those games and only those games?
Gut desire is a system with no need for points at all. No rank. Just a platform that let’s people gift unused keys to random recipients.
There might be problems with that but you get the general idea.
The root error is assumptions about profit motive.
I actually stopped gifting my spare keys because of this bullshit. But I’d have continued gifting them if it was random, and to humans.
The bot problem is actually a problem with dummy/bot steam accounts. Traders making asstons of accounts to win tons of cheapy games to get cards and sell them. Among other examples of graft and grift.
Anyway, thanks for the comment 🙂
Accidentally stumbled here again and remembered that I wrote to you.
So… first is still allowed. Walmart, for example, is a private company, so they can do anything as long as it’s legal. Doesn’t matter that the public can access it. Kind of a ridiculous argument.
2. You didn’t answer and just decided to call me dumb, instead of having a normal discussion…
3. You again didn’t answer, you just said that “Yeah, we’ve already established that you and your ilk are ignorant psychopaths with no concept of helping others.”, even though no one mentioned helping others, but ok…
4. Actually, you’re kind of right. There’s a pyramid that forms, but the rewards are very freeform, since the public makes the giveaways. If they want to give stuff to the elite, so be it. No one’s forced to give stuff away to the higher levels.
5. I meant that you, the giveaway maker, own the key. Also, when you win, you don’t own the key, no… That was never the point. Why would you even assume it. Just shows your ignorance. You own the game then, not the key.
6. Oh dear, you don’t understand the value of items, huh? It’s 15%, because it’s inherently cheaper… Would you buy a game for $40, knowing that it had been in a bundle for $2.5 with 7 other games? I have a feeling that you wouldn’t… If you do, then you’re either just too rich for your own good or you’re just insane.
Again, why do you think that everyone’s giving stuff to level 10? Level 10s and 9s have the least giveaways on the site.. I give to my own level, since I just want to give to them. I could give it to leeches, like you, but I don’t want to reward selfish behavior.
But, you can always delete my comment, like with my first argument, it’s your blog. You decide who gets on and who doesn’t.
You can live in your echochamber all you want, claiming that you’ve been wronged because the free stuff you just get given is just for personal use.
Also, it’s funny that you mention that I have no loved ones. I like irony.
“Accidentally stumbled here again and remembered that I wrote to you.”
Welcome back.
“Kind of a ridiculous argument.”
To you of course, because you’re a soulless lizard husk. (Maybe more like a roach or a jellyfish?) But if you were a mammal, with a full compliment of ethics, you’d get it.
“instead of having a normal discussion…”
With a lizard? Heh. Why bother? My full argument is already laid out. You present no new information. You’re just amusement to me. That’s why I waited till I was sufficiently bored to answer this drivel.
“even though no one mentioned helping others, but ok…”
Yeah that’s the whole point Sal. (Can I call you Sal? It’s short for Salamander.)
“No one’s forced to give stuff away to the higher levels.”
Except they are you ignorant wretch. Go try to make a give away for people levels one and two only.
You can’t. Because built in greed.
“You own the game then, not the key.”
Actually you don’t own either one dimwit. You have a conditional non-transferable license that essentially grants you no significant rights at all.
I don’t even own the key. I merely have access to it. This is all legally uncharted water anyway. Society won’t catch up to the technology for another 75 years. That’s why we have two sets of law. One for property and another for intellectual property. Eventually we’ll just have property law, and it’ll all be consistent. Of course by then we’ll have AIs helping.
“Why do you think that everyone’s giving stuff to level 10?”
Because I’m not a total moron like you that still doesn’t understand how steamgifts works?
10s can enter any give away on the site unless it’s to a private group. End of discussion.
“But, you can always delete my comment”
I can, and I might if your next one is boring. But I saved this one knowing it would be amusing to answer eventually. And it was. Textually kicking around a walking brain stem like yourself is one of the few forms of aggression I find sufficiently ethical to indulge in 🙂
It’s like a punching bag. Feels good for me, and does no real harm to you. If I thought you were capable of feeling some degree of hurt from my words, I wouldn’t type them because unlike you, I have empathy and ethics. Fortunately you don’t.
“Also, it’s funny that you mention that I have no loved ones. I like irony.”
I see you are either ignorant of the definition of irony, or of the composition of my social circles. Probably both. I’m sure there are people that love you, but you’re not capable of loving them back. That’s one of the problems with being your particular brand of emotional cripple.
Have a great Halloween Sal. Maybe you could go as a human this year.
This was entertaining 🙂
People like you genuinely have some brain problem I think
yeah, because woe is on SG that they actually expect people to *gasp* enter for games they are planning to activate and play themselves. Woo, go to gameminer you ungrateful prick where you can retrade to your heart content.
Ranks and such are there for I suppose incentives or whatever. Sure, the level system isnt all that good but the fact that you are angry about the basic idea of how it works is just astonishing
pyramid scheme? uh dude, you should really need to stop wearing that tinfoil hat of yours because it covers your eyes from seeing as well.
good grief idiots like you are hilarious to laugh at, especially how you are convinced that everyone is in the wrong and you are in the right.
Dont worry, we will all shed a tear for ya….NOT
“Tons of rich assholes buy or trade their way up the pyramid to again access to a never ending stream of free games from ignorant newbs like you.”
I smell some salty tears right there.
Speaking of genuine brain problems…
You didn’t say anything not already said and refuted, yet I’m certain you think your reply is clever and complete in some ineffable way. X)
All I need say to thoroughly refute it is: Scroll up.
What, you’re salty you didn’t win anything in your first month on a new account?
So the site’s rigged and there’s some… fucking gibberish of pyramid schemes? Oh, slash, they want you to only enter games you want in your collection… those crooked bastards…?
God, you’re an idiot.
I love having my intellect slandered by people with the reading comprehension of a sand bag. XD
Try reading the post sometime, or not. 🙂
I am use steamgift.com page
I feel a real difficult to won any gift i must say.
Day and after day i try spent ,full time morning to late evening.
Some have 12.000 user vote on Giveaways icon .It wry bad chance to win .
I must start make compliance about steamgift.com. It have a hard social culture.
I feel are social club for elite people , Dont not caring to help new people.
Many people are not welcome to start.
Dont want let in more people in and sharing .
Everyone on same terms or rules to get level 100 on steam profile.
It steam have most responsibility .
It time to bring is to public eye for bigger news paper in world . New Yorks time or BBC
A lot off secret and hard attitude in is steam club.
It’s not fair and it’s not on equal terms,
Some people have too much power in steamgift.com
For that they have been long time membership and has a high level.
Steam and game and card are for everyone in world. !
It time start think on same terms and equal
Steamgift must be more open and more welcome
It time to look in to what are wrong whit culture off card
Maybe I get kicked from steamgift.com
Mybea it time for steam stop game card and level off profile.
Card or gift are not helping to making great good quality game ( pc gaming culture )
To day are many people make game for card .
Games are not are in good quality .
It take people money .
Wean many people can make shit game and game never coming be finish .
People have stop make demo in steam.
It coming be steam biggest problem in future is .
No want pay bad game .
People are angry more and more if you look in steam comment about products early access.
Many games are never coming be completed.
Every bad games stay on store shop in steam web page
Should be delete from steam web page, because never coming be finish product.
It same law and rules for every product makes in world , TV , car , computer, food,
Do you want see bad low quality product in your shop at your street ?
Do you real want pay money for product not are have standard quality ?
Every game should have good control to any plat form .
And every game should have be testes, before sell on steam .
Maybe I get kicked from steamgift.
People must have the right to be heard,
Rights to expression or compliance about is or anything and talk open about steam problem.
hahahaha, this guy has some mental issues, “its MINE!” grow up man and leave all the conspiracy bs behind
Hey… You… Yes you… Fanboy.
Mayhaps you should try reading the essay and comments before trying to swallow your own leg foot first. X)
Steamgifts isn’t the dishonest scammer. You are, and you’re mad you can’t get away with it.
Yeah because wanting to give my fucking mother a game I won fair and square is a “scam.” >.>
You psychopaths need to be quarantined.
I agree with something. The way things work on SG promotes elitism, you just need to visit the discussions to see how high ranked CV users feel like their word has more weight and they will use your stats against saying something like: “says the one who has given half the amount of games you took”, and the stupid list of sentences regarding this continues (prove me wrong). So this CV and Rank has become a weapon of the “elite” there. Another elitist fact, the requirement to enter the site is to have a minimal of $100 dollars in games that were not given for free. I agree that this can control greedy people with multiple accounts using bots but what about those people who really want to win a game to play It on his steam account that’s worth barely 10 dollars? I agree with you that there can be better tools to control greedy persons there.
“You can’t afford games? Tough shit” said one of the most controversial current users on SG not long ago. Elitism anyone?
The Blacklist has become another stupid weapon for many people there. They will use It for any dumb reason they can find. They will threat people to use It or brag about how they already blacklisted certain person or in weird cases they will even provoke you to use It against them.
“Leech”… what a derogatory term in SG. Everyone is a leech for the elitists there. They have created their own concepts and rules besides the real ones.This is what the CV and Rank has created.
I do agree that the site should vanish these two elements. If a guy wants to gift a lot with nothing in return, why give him that? He didn’t ask for It did he? You’re feeding the egocentric people with this system.
I gift things from time to time there but the way the site works and people act there has limited my excitement on certain games. I have the tendency to check If the user is high ranked. If he is I don’t enter his giveaway. So that’s what you create with a system like this, you create highly marked differences just as in society.
Thank you for the citation and input. I was unaware of the internal cultural impact but I must say I’m not surprised since basically the whole thing rewards people with enough money to front load their purchases. As with so much else it’s paradoxically cheaper to be rich and these subsidized fops think they are SG equivalents of job creators when in fact they are more like parasitic paris hiltons.
Well, this was an interesting… thing to read.
But at least I learnt that earning about 600 USD a month now puts me in the top 1%, I guess. Woo, I’m rich! ^-^
(Granted, the SteamGifts forums do have an incredible atmosphere of rampant elitism.)
Thanks for taking the time. I can almost literally not imagine having that kind of income.
PC gaming is popular as a hobby partly because it CAN be done basically for free. The hardware can be scavenged or bought used VERY cheaply thanks to rampant ewaste producing business models and the replace it instead of fix it mentality. It’s the only hobby some of us can afford.
You don’t even need Internet for it if you scored a laptop. A visit to the library wifi and offline mode can accomplish a lot.
You don’t have to be playing the latest AAA games to still be a PC gamer. Indeed the low impact games are the more common games on steam gifts. That the SG community openly shits on poor players is a huge part of why I haven’t used it in months. It’s a fucking country club.
You snark but the fact is if you made a list of all pcgamers world wide and sorted them by income. You’d be in the top 10th of that list easily. You may not be 1%, granted, but seemingly you are in need of some perspective.
Salut.
Can you help me get unbanned on steamgifts.com? I can’t do topic at discussion/
If you’re speaking to me I’d only make things worse, as you can imagine I’m likely very much hated there to whatever degree I’m known at all. I do hope someone here helps you, though it’s equally likely that the people opposing me in this matter are deeply callous and unintrestedin helping anyone but themselves.
Good luck man.
Why did they ban you? Did they even say?
they don’t show me evideces. i told them everyone shouldn’t use this spyware sgtools. banned by mistake. noone wanted to help me. please do topic at discussion
Updated edit:
I made a support ticket asking for contact information that doesn’t require a login. I’ll share what they tell me. I’m sure it will be callous, elitist, and stupid.
Original post:
Compose your message and link me to where you’d like it posted. I guess none of these other assholes will try and help.
Man, I contacted them, they told me this:
I explained what I knew of your situation, we’ll see if they reply usefully, but I’m telling you now, they won’t. The place is a scam.
That’s such a stupid excuse. If you activated it as you were supposed to, your mother still could have played either off your account or on her own account via family sharing steam feature. You just probably wanted to trade/sell it or post a GA out of it, but got caught and are now butthurt. This rule is to prevent people to profit off someone else’s generosity.
Reward for not spending points? What? You do realize they have no real life value, right?
I’ve been sitting on mostly 300 points for over half a year now (I sometimes maybe enter one GA a day) – by all means, give me a cookie for it or something. rotfl.
It’s really simple – don’t enter for things you don’t want to play. And if having too much points stresses you out, just don’t look at them and sooner or later you’ll forget they exist.
Clearly you have no idea how library sharing actually works.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2ridui/steam_library_sharing_sucks_disappointing_your/
Your concepts of “profit” and “generosity” are equally devoid of merit as exhaustively explained above.
Gifting on SG in an investment in a pyramid scheme, not an act of generosity, and disposing of my property as I see fit is not a moral profit it is a moral right.
If I enter a contest and win a car, that car should be mine to gift or sell or burn as I see fit.
You people are ass kissing control freaks, end of story.
Try reading the comments before yours next time.
If they have no value then why cap them at 300 in the first place? You can’t have it both ways moron.
Because it’s not a trading site you retard. You can’t just take something someone paid for and gives it away in hopes the winner will play it and then just profit off it. It’s like profiting off a charity. Go lie to people you need money for operation or something and then buy yourself a car or something, and see how they like it. In real life you would go to jail for it. Thank the gods that SG can only suspend you.
What is literally the second word on the page? https://www.steamgifts.com/ TRADES
You people really are dim.
Newsflash: Kissing IPL thug ass is not gonna net you a patent on the vowels someday.
All I read was “I can’t cheat people off the games they spend money on and get away with it, waaah, waaah”
“It’s sooo selfish to limit my entries to things I actually want to play, waah, waaah”
“Those high level users are so stupid, kick them out so there is no one left to actually give away games to others, waaah waaah” (newsflash: they are high level because they gave away fuckton of games already)
Sigh. Haven’t read that much stupid in a while.
https://media.giphy.com/media/11TT5yMvJ3btU4/giphy.gif
“It’s sooo selfish to limit my entries to things I actually want to play, waah, waaah”
The mental gymnastics are real.
Let me get this straight. Entering a contest expressly to win a game for my mom or my girlfriend is selfish, but entering to win a contest for my pure and personal profit is, generous? O.o
Wow I’ve been doing charity all wrong. Clearly I should be snorting coke off a stripper’s rack instead of writing a check for cancer research >.>
I know exactly how family sharing works because I share my games with my fiance on regular basis. You however only read someone complain about it and clearly didn’t even try to use it.
“disposing of my property as I see fit is not a moral profit it is a moral right”
But it’s not your property, it’s the property of the person who bought it and gives it away. And they give it away under the pretense the winner will activate the gift on their own account (as is within the rules). Otherwise most people wouldn’t give shit, just look at SteamCompanion – similar site but without those rules in place, and what a hive of scum and villainy it is. Everyone scamming everyone. Anyone that has actually good games to give stays away from that site as far as possible.
And if you win a car you still have to pay taxes for it before it’s officially yours 😉 There are always strings attached. On SG the strings are – REDEEM YOUR GODDAMN WIN ON YOUR ACCOUNT – how hard is to understand that. So stop being butthurt and get your games form somewhere else. Or, gasp, buy them – if you pay for them, THEN they are your property.
So greedy bastards like you can’t enter EVERY SINGLE GA and then try to regift the games they didn’t want in the first place. And instead the people who actually wanted to play them win instead.
Giving a game is generous. Entering is not.
If you want to be generous – give games. And when you do decide to give games, I hope only scammers like you try to win them so you have to deal with the likes of yourself.
Entering to “win for someone” is just liar’s excuse for “they don’t allow me to sell/ trade/ regift that, waah, waah”
Giving a game gets you SG rank which means more and better free games. So generous >.>
You’re a rube if you actually think the SG elites are being charitable.
The reason you can’t understand my motivations is because you’re a spoiled selfish psychopath that literally can’t understand the concept of generosity.
You’re lucky I’m even publishing your self serving drivel 🙂
Yeah you’re right, trying to win puzzle games for my girlfriend is the height of greed. Never mind that she’s not even allowed to make an account on SG because she isn’t rich enough. You’re such a boot licking transparent mark.
Clearly you’re a liar. Because in the real world library sharing prevents the person sharing from playing on the account they shared even if it’s a different game.
If I could give my gf true access to my library without risking it being deleted for violation of TOS I would do it. You know how I know that? Because that’s exactly what I do with my netflix account and my amazon prime account which actually HAS actual sharing options.
But whatever, keep being a hateful delusional psychopath. I’ll keep publishing your shit posting so long as it amuses me to crush you in replies 🙂
Tell us more about how rich people are generous gods in the pathetic and transparent hope that they’ll somehow adopt you for doing so.
I see you have bought into the pyramid scheme and are still using the site with 30 wins and you just gave away another game last week. So you call a website a scam, but continue to use it, you are not very smart.
“You psychopaths need to be quarantined.”
And then sent to the gas chambers, right? lol, you have some serious issues.
There, now I am Bob and no longer Anonymous. Is that better? lol
I show a “fundamental ignorance and lack of compassion”? You should go back and read some of your own posts!
I don’t need an “extended version”, RETARD!
Oh sorry, was that another lack of compassion?
Your simplicity is adorable. Read the nature of the scam. I know it’s hard to grasp this being the lizard you are, but my beef isn’t with what the site does to me it’s what it DOESN’T allow me to do for OTHERS.
Just because it doesn’t let me give away my wins doesn’t mean I don’t still desire a game for myself from time to time.
My whole problem with the place is that my only options are selfish ones. Plus the games I give away are worthless to both me and the shithead elite that run the place. If one of them snags one of my giveaways, whatever, it will be offset by the 10 newbs who win the others. I’ll just never ever give away anything good on SG the elites wouldn’t be able to get from trade in 2 seconds.
Notice how you had to totally invent words for me to make my comment offensive. I don’t want to kill psychopaths, I want them managed. People with no ability to feel compassion shouldn’t be asked to participate in something where compassion is assumed. Such as normal culture. You basically have an extreme disability and it’s dangerous for you and for us to ignore it.
You confuse compassion for passivity. Kindness for weakness. It’s a common flaw among those of your pathology. You assume because we allow you to live and exploit that we can’t stop you. When actually it’s more like choose not to until we’re sure of the most ethical and effective course of action.
You have an “extreme disability”, you just don’t realize it. Almost everyone that has read what you have written here is trying to explain this to you, but you just don’t get it.
Wow, you are so delusional. So you think you are allowing people that don’t think the same way as you to live only because you have not decided what the most ethical and effective way to exterminate them is?
Did you do the Nazi salute after you wrote that? You have serious issues and need help. I really hope you are just a troll.
Are you enjoying our new president? I surely am. The US must have a very high percentage of inferior intellectuals to yourself for electing him. Are you still working on “the most ethical and effective way” to exterminate people like me? Taking out over half of the US population is no small feat. I hear gas chambers are pretty efficient.
Just curious, what is your opinion on eugenics?
The irony is that their very commenting here proves much of my point. It’s a pyramid scam cult. Look at the range of things I talk about here. But this is what gets 150+ comments? XD
Yeah, apparently my disability is rational thought and compassion. I’ll admit they cost me. Far more profitable to be a mindless selfish zombie like yourself.
Approving this comment just because it’s pure strawman gold. Your abundant psychological need to kiss SG ass is remarkable.
I love the implication here. Maybe they should have anew slogan? How about: Steamgifts: If you don’t like us, you must be a Nazi.
Amusing that your psychopathy assumes that extermination is the only type of management. Treatment and supervision are options also. You know, like we do with all the other serious mental illnesses? Psychopaths are only 1% of the population. Wouldn’t be hard to keep our eye on all of you.
My position on eugenics is that it never stopped.
http://underlore.com/the-tyranny-of-compulsory-schooling/
You think the teen pregnancy rate in this country is an accident?
Like Carlin said, all they’ve ever wanted are obedient workers. I’d be worried if it weren’t for kids today being staggeringly awesome thanks to having humanity’s library in every pocket.
“you’re a spoiled selfish psychopath that literally can’t understand the concept of generosity.”
Haha, it’s like you’ve discovered truth about yourself. Go repeat that into the mirror a few times and let it sink in.
People are spending their own money and giving away stuff whn they don’t have to. CV is just an incentive, they still don’t have to do it. No one is forcing them. And yes, people who give fuckton to others should be recognized somehow. Because that’s another thing that has no value in real life, cv and levels is basically just recognition and a meter of how much someone gave OUT OF THEIR OWN VOLITION.
“You’re lucky I’m even publishing your self serving drivel”
That’s because you’re attention seeking whore that can’t stand not to have last work and show it to public. It would probably kill you not to approve my comments and not to show everyone how you respond to them 😛
(Redacted.)
(Redacted)
You continue to prove my points. Thank you 🙂 What a loathsome human being you are. I genuinely pity anyone forced into close proximity with you. I wonder if this “own volition” tea party excuse is your mantra of absolution when you occasionally recognize the abuse you subject them to.
> It would probably kill you not to approve my comments and not to show everyone how you respond to them
I must admit there is an element of truth to that. I feel compelled by integrity to allow you to spew your ignorance and hate, and then having done so I feel again compelled to stand in the face of it on behalf of those not equipped to do so. Showing people how we respond is how we define who we are.
However, you are right to scold me for this and it is a problem. This compulsion to permit toxicity and fight it when in fact I could simply prevent it.
And in the spirit of this I’m going to publish redacted versions of your comments in future. Time will tell if this compromise is workable.
I would have published and responded to your comment but you had a point when you pointed out my weakness in doing so. Of course I never cared about your opinion or had any illusions of curing you of your ignorance, greed, and psychopathy. But as you correctly pointed out I was and am operating in large part out of compulsion.
This is me attempting to address that. Your toxic comments make it clear that I need to learn to selectively apply the respect I show others. Respect is earned and the benefit of the doubt can be expended.
You have shown yourself to be a weak and cruel person and my blog is no longer going to be a carrier of your odious memes. I do want to thank you however for this opportunity to grow.
Again my compromise is to publicly make it clear that you’re trying to speak but I am not allowing it but explaining why I’m not allowing it. I may not be able to prevent your hateful pettiness from existing but I can at least prevent it from accumulating here. I hope this choice on my parts is a net good. I’m honestly on the fence.
I would prefer to publish and respond, but looking back at my results, I’m unsure if that is the wisest option. Perhaps I’ll learn more from future comments.
(11 comments redacted)
I appreciate that you’re extremely angry at being “censored.” But you’re not contributing anything new to the debate. And you expressly mocked me for not censoring you. I published that one. And you’re the only one. And I’m making it clear that I’m doing it. I don’t just not publish comments.
I may redact people in the future though. This is my compromise. This is me making it clear you tried to talk and responding to you. It’s more than you would get from a company or an elected official. I could even use your hateful tea party logic and tell you it’s my blog and I can do as I please. But I’m not. This is me giving you way more respect than you deserve and infinitely more than society asks of me.
People like you do nothing but abuse the good will and honor of others for personal advancement. This is me not entirely tolerating it anymore.
The only new assertion you’ve made is that my girlfriend doesn’t even exist. Which is totally pointless to argue over for 2 reasons. 1. You’ll just claim I fake everything. 2. Even if you were right I still can’t give games to my mom either. Am I faking her too?
None of your other comments are worth my time to reply. If you genuinely feel like you’re “winning” this exchange for any reason then I am pleased at the outcome for you. If your comments suddenly become rational and calm I may publish them. I am moderating and reading each one. I don’t hold grudges. But if they continue to be nothing more than absurdity, rehashing, and childish abuse then I’ll continue to serve as a memetic containment vessel.
I hope your life gets happier at the expense of no one somehow.
(Redacted again.)
Another completely predictable reply (indeed some elements I expressly predicted in my final reply to her) full of infantile hate and nothing else. Just putting this place holder here to own up to the fact that I am not publishing said hate.
(Redacted again.)
She’s switching from outright hate to empty denial this time. I’m not gonna play copy paste he said she said. This comment thread is already bloated beyond any reasonable expectation of reader workload.
This is working, clearly she feels a little better. Maybe next time I’ll get a calm comment of substance. Though to be fair I don’t even know what that could look like at this point. The argument has been totally parsed above before she even got here. Still, I’m leaving the door open a crack.
(redacted)
This hateful, abusive, and most importantly empty argumentation, has taught me another important lesson. My baseline respect level needs to be lowered. Its current level still obviously leaves me open to harassment.
It is apparently a tragedy of the commons to offer a substantively free speech platform. To do so results in situations like this which defeat the purpose of the offering in the first place. I have two unappealing choices.
1. Engage in typical moderation behaviors including bans.
2. Allow what few comment threads I have on this blog to degenerate into 4chan level mindlessness.
I select option one.
My apologies to any hypothetical reader of this gargantuan comment thread. I’m essentially new at this. My blog is old but very few of my posts get comments at all, let alone in this quantity. And none previously got harassment of this commitment.
There will be no more redacted comments. I should have heeded the age old advice of the forums: Don’t feed the trolls.
Thanks for the interaction “princess.” I’m glad I learned this lesson on this post and not an important one.
My my what a heated argument…
I will offer my 2c on this, as a user of SG. Facts on me : I am lvl10, I have won a few games and have given away several thousand. If you want details I will give them to you, but I ma pretty sure my ratio defies any possibility of concluding that I have gained more on the site than what I have given (unless ofcourse you assign value to the rank – which I don’t – and frankly – you can check that there are very few high level giveaways compared to lower level ones).
Now to my point, I personally give away games because it gives me pleasure to do so, I am not rich but I am not poor either, I can afford to give away bundled games and a few unbundled games here and there. I chose to give away games instead of another charity because as a long time gamer I find joy in it and I feel good when I am able to pass this along. In a perfect world regifting wpuld not be an issue as the game would eventually find a good home, however I strongly believe the system in place more than anything protects me from those who only want to exploit it. Is it perfect, hell no, can it be improved, most likely… but for me – not being involved with the running of the site, I am glad there are some rules in place that do protect (the site itself) from those who would exploit it to oblivion.
Your argument about regifting is fine, but its fine for as long as the intention is a good one… and not simply a way to exploit the system for what might be perceived as more personal gain.
Now… about the ranks and what they mean to me personally. As I don’t enter as many giveaways I don’t really care for my own rank that much, its existence doesn’t bother me either, but the ranks do give a quick indication of what type of user can enter. Its only a quick indication because you can always find people with high rank that have won more than they have given or worse (and this is something that bothers me more) people who only make giveaways in small private groups – in essence exchanging games between themselves while gaining cv/rank – which in turn allows them to enter the giveaways others make at higher rank (as many want to reward those that give a lot by making high rank giveaways – which as I mentioned before is not very accurate).
The way I handle it personally is that I will always make open giveaways across all levels and I also join public groups – that have some requirements – these groups allow me to do what I believe is rewarding those that give more than they take from time to time. Other groups which I use regularly only allow people with very few wins to enter to win, giving new users a better chance to get some wins.
I have no idea at what levels the revenues for this site run, but as I am involved in the IT industry I seriously don’t think with one google adword space running its a lot of profit after monthly expenses – plus I am pretty sure the admins are not sharing in any of the profit – I know they are volunteers and don’t get compensated for the work they do.
Is there personal gain in what they do or in my own giving of games… ofcourse there is – some like the status – me I enjoy giving away games because they bring joy to people and that brings joy to me – I do it because it makes me feel good – maybe I need to feel it makes me a better person and maybe I am deluding myself, but I am pretty sure I am not harming anyone. As for the site, even if I stopped gifting (which I wont) I doubt I could ever win back as many games as I have given and there are no ranks to gain anymore or anything, I will keep giving and I don’t think I will ever feel exploited by it, I am there by choice. The moment I don’t like the rules or the way it works I will walk away, but even then I don’t think I will adopt a stance such as yours, simply because even if I don’t agree with its rules its not necessarily true that they are wrong or set with malicious intent, at the end of the day we exist to disagree, more than anything.
You’ll instantly reject all this because really psychologically you don’t have a choice.
I don’t expect you to listen. But I’ll type it for the record anyway.
Your ratio on steam gifts isn’t relevant because in your case the money itself was essentially extorted.
You are living off a rape backed monopoly. Yes rape, because what would be the end result of my openly ignoring the law? Prison. And what do all prisons outside of Scandinavia have a problem with? What’s the thing we’re constantly told is the most fearsome aspect of prison? Rape.
And your justification? That all is permitted so long as it’s “voluntary.” That somehow because you can leave that makes it ok. Neverminding the fact that the whole structure of this site exploits aspects of volition, such as loss aversion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
Funny how the whole planet is more or less built on that lie and yet the average human dies within 50 miles of their birth place. That’s just how minds are. And the people that dreamed up the volition excuses knew their victims could never really just walk away. Vendor lock in is a real thing, and I bet your paycheck depends on it. Directly or indirectly.
As with steam and facebook and twitter you only have 1 real choice for recycling your games. (A problem that only exists because of IPL greed I might add.)
My “choice” here is profit the 1%ers, or pay a massive opportunity cost which includes denying other poor people access to my spare keys.
> but I am pretty sure I am not harming anyone
Oh boy. If you actually listened while I explained how wrong you are you’d find yourself homeless and with a totally useless skill set. The cult of IPL is the most lethal religion on earth, and it’s a baby. You, Monsanto, and big pharma, all eating at the same monopolistic trough stuffed to brimming with your opportunity dead.
> maybe I am deluding myself
Indeed sir. Indeed.
I appreciate you being civil, and to the extent that you are deceived you seem to be a kind person. But it is beyond human limits for you to have the intellectual courage required to do anything but mentally wall off my arguments and deploy ninja-like mental gymnastics in your own defense.
Thanks for taking the time to read and comment. I do genuinely appreciate it.
You are full of fire !
I wont bother refuting your arguments there is no point, we would never agree anyways and will keep on living in different worlds.
Your rhetoric does remind me of a lot of friends of mine, they all share the same characteristic, they have extreme political and social world views and almost all of them are leftists (from extreme to moderate leftists). As I disagree with them I disagree with you, but I would never (even If I had the power) deprive you of your point of view. I have lived a bit longer than you, and my world/society view is pretty much set already. But I will say this, and this is something you also share with the friends I mentioned, like them, you seem to think that your truth is the only truth. There are only points of view, no absolutes.
It must be quite a thing to have such conviction that you wont even entertain the possibility that thing might not be exactly like that, and like my many of my friends you come off as a fanatic. Don’t get me wrong I am not trying to insult you, its just an observation. Also again like some of my friends you come off as very angry (maybe you are not, but that’s the impression I get).
As an avid long distance runner I would highly recommend it to you, it offers true stress relief and even makes the world seem much friendlier.
I think you read the whole SG thing from a very weird place allowing your world view to fit it into the mold of something adversarial.
> we would never agree anyways and will keep on living in different worlds.
I know. I said as much in the previous comment.
> moderate leftists). As I disagree with them I disagree with you
Of course you do. You’re profiting off the broken system. Why reform what allows you to exploit others?
> I would never (even If I had the power) deprive you of your point of view
Is that the bar you set for your ethics? It’s rather low. Ok so you wouldn’t deprive us of our “view?” How thoughtful of you. Just our power to implement any of it.
You live off a state backed monopoly. You’re literally this society’s version of aristocracy.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/
> you seem to think that your truth is the only truth
That is an infantile retort. Just because I know YOU are wrong about a given issue doesn’t mean I believe I’m incapable of being wrong. You childishly imply I was born with these views. That I popped out with them fully formed and hold them in the face of all evidence.
Well news flash, I have already been you. I own a patent for fucks sake. The difference between us is I was not given the chance to be corrupted by money.
> There are only points of view, no absolutes.
Never mind that that in itself is an absolute. ◔_◔
> its just an observation.
No it isn’t. It’s a consolation. It allows you to mentally dismiss anyone who tries to inform you of the evil you do. But said evil is profitable and so your entire mind rebels and convulses to avoid the noxious stimuli of realization. I expected exactly this.
For endless evidence that what you do is wrong and hurtful:
https://torrentfreak.com/author/rick-falkvinge/
> As an avid long distance runner I would highly recommend it to you, it offers true stress relief and even makes the world seem much friendlier.
I have no need to shut down my brain in order to evade realization that I’m a walking pathogen. You just essentially told me to go take my Soma and pretend the world is glorious.
News flash 2.0: It sure as fuck isn’t. It will be, but it isn’t yet.
> I think you read the whole SG thing from a very weird place
I’m sure ethics are very weird to someone who evades processing them with tools up to and including a forced exercise regimen.
This is why the red pill alt right is obsessed with “lifting.” In order to survive having zero ethics you have to subvert your own neocortex. You literally make yourself more of an animal because consciousness is painful for you because of the contradictions.
Again, I know this won’t move you. I wrote it for lurkers and people who already agree with me but lack the linguistic skills.
While its clear we have different world views, you have not read me – my position in society, economic theory views and even political views correctly. You make assumptions based on very limited information (ok, you don’t have much information to begin, but it is a bit strange that you would hold to such solid beliefs, considering the limited information).
If you want an honest description regarding my political views I am what we describe in Europe Social(ist) Democrats. Your assuming that I belong to what is generally acknowledged as the right is (by common sense definition) plain wrong. But as much as I despise extreme right rhetoric, I despise just as much the extreme left rhetoric. Those two are so alike they are two sides of the same coin.
Both share the same truism, which is that if you are not with us you are against us and if your views differ from ours you are the enemy – it doesn’t matter what you others think or where they lie in social views, just that they don’t share their exact ideology is enough (to kill them in most cases). I even have a personal (family wise) experience over this, my Grandfather who was not politically active or engaged in any political activity, was gunned down by communists, only because he was not one of them.
The way you spew out hate, I am sorry it comes out as hate, you will never achieve even the slightest bit in your quest to change the world, extreme views have and only will change it for the worst, but only for the short term. Like most in the extreme political spectrum that you lie, you believe in a utopia and what’s worse your beliefs do not and can never include meritocracy. Historically, every attempt to establish such societies has failed and what’s more it has proven beyond a doubt that the reason they failed is human nature. You would first need to change that to achieve even an inch forward towards your goal. The hate with which you seem to approach matters is close to anarchism.
Even if the world is not glorious, and for the most part its not, you can always find moments in your life that are glorious. Your whole “animal because consciousness is painful” is plain wrong for the simple reason that there is a difference between a utopianism (even if in my opinion your views would actually create a dystopia) and a someone who is a realist.
Nothing wrong with wanting to change the world, go for it, but you seems more like wanting to burn it down and maybe build it to your own personal image of what it should be – and let anyone who disagrees with you burn too – because you are so sure you have the right answer – if that is not arrogance I don’t know what is.
And you talk about ethics… seriously this is something I have laughed at so many times with… everyone on the extreme left claims total and absolute moral superiority where if you study history there is an abundance of proof that its anything but. Much as I hate the extreme right – they don’t seem to be spewing this morality nonsense all the time.
The world is not black and white – there is an infinite array of colors in between the two, you ought to try and release your hate and appreciate the things in between because the reality is that if you don’t, even if you live 100 lifetimes, you will go to your grave angry and unhappy.
I know you are set in your views and this will probably mean nothing, but one can always try.
I will insist though that running would help you 🙂
> You make assumptions based on very limited information
I’m going on the statements you make and the positions you take.
> such solid beliefs / if that is not arrogance I don’t know what is
Stop acting like self confidence inherently makes one wrong. You give me new data I’ll adopt a new position. Until then I’m running with what I know. It’s a blatant manipulation tactic to imply that rationality in contradiction of your needs somehow is irrational and I should be timid at all times. No doubt you’d sing a different tune if I agreed with you. This attitude of yours is just an age old tactic to leverage your enemy’s integrity against them. A way to trick them into acting unsure of themselves. Save it. As I said I was already you once, I just didn’t get corrupted by cash flow.
> I despise just as much the extreme left rhetoric.
Centrists are right wingers or neoliberals. Save your argument to moderation. Besides, what you do is more important than what you say and what you do is take a regular check from the most destructive religion in human history. The dogma of monopolistic idea control.
> just that they don’t share their exact ideology / The world is not black and white – there is an infinite array of colors
Keep spinning that lie. This isn’t nitpicking over a trivial disagreement. This is you being a member of a very profitable uniquely destructive cult. Your other evils are quite secondary.
> was gunned down by communists / historically, every attempt to establish such societies has failed / if you study history there is an abundance of proof that its anything but. Much as I hate the extreme right – they don’t seem to be spewing this morality nonsense all the time.
Oh here we go. Tell us more about “history” oh libertarian oracle of the alt right. Preferably with page references to The Fountainhead. ◔_◔ Tell us more about how sharing has failed and only greedy suits like you can save us ignorant bleeding heart liberals by letting you rape the planet and every wallet on it.
> you will never achieve even the slightest bit in your quest to change the world
You’re right. Except 1, the world is already going exactly where I’d have it go despite that. And 2, it’s only because I bought into the lie that calm civil debate and facts persuade people. When in reality exploiting emotions and lying with every breath and keystroke to convince the brainstem as opposed to the neocortex is what I should have been doing.
> The hate with which you seem to approach matters is close to anarchism.
Says the libertarian with a straight face. X)
> you can always find moments in your life that are glorious / you will go to your grave angry and unhappy.
Oh I have no doubt your greed and psychopathy allows you to purchase and experience moments of total sublime joy. It’s far easier to revel in the world when you don’t have a conscience and you do have a pile of cash. You aristocrats make me giggle.
> difference between a utopianism (even if in my opinion your views would actually create a dystopia) and a someone who is a realist.
Yes because doing anything other than shitting on the poor is “utopian.” And sharing will let the commies shoot us all. ◔_◔
Jesus. You people are staggering.
> go for it, but you seems more like wanting to burn it down
Yes because not backing your desire to patent and privatize the vowels is the same as wanting destroy the whole world. ◔_◔
https://www.thenation.com/article/trumpism-its-coming-from-the-suburbs/
That is you dude. You might be from across the pond but other than that the text fully applies. You should try punching up some time. That’s where your real enemies are.
> I know you are set in your views and this will probably mean nothing, but one can always try.
As I said, you’re far too corrupted by money and I’m far too honest, rational, and direct to convince you of anything. You keep using my line. I told you right away this was going no where. I’d have better luck talking the queen out of her palace. You’re such a rube. You have a slightly taller pile of scraps and in exchange you’ve completely surrendered your humanity.
http://underlore.com/avoid-my-mistakes/
> I’m going on the statements you make and the positions you take.
errr not quite, you make the necessary assumptions that fitted your twisted ideology and world view. So long as you do that you will always be the pure and right one…. but as I said you will never be at peace because you offer nothing constructive to the betterment of humanity.
There are other people who are like you and they are also fanatics, over at your side of the pond they mostly call them terrorists… of course in your view I am sure you call ALL of them freedom fighters…
I am done here ok and I would wish you well, but I am sure you would find a way to turn that into a negative as well, so I wont. If the world failed you my friend you have only yourself to blame….
tata.
> So long as you do that you will always be the pure and right one…
Why doesn’t anyone just ask me what my own evils and uncertainties are? No one ever does that. They just assume I think don’t have any because I’m telling them what theirs are. You keep telling me to advance to where I’ve already been. You keep telling me to have ration skepticism about my own beliefs never realizing that this is exactly how I got here.
I had your world view when I was 15.
> because you offer nothing constructive to the betterment of humanity.
You keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile back in reality: http://underlore.com/the-apex/
P.S. Funny how “constructive” adds up to your profit quite literally at the expense of criminalized innovation. Tell me more about how the 1% are job creators. ◔_◔
> of course in your view I am sure you call ALL of them freedom fighters…
XD you couldn’t be a bigger cliche if you hired writers and spent a year trying.
P.S. If anyone is closer to the stereotypical Muslim terrorist here it’s the right wing authoritarian type that ends up funding hell pits like Saudi Arabia.
> If the world failed you my friend you have only yourself to blame….
I’m sure that’s what you tell yourself of all your victims. They shoulda thought of X before they Y which justifies exploitation/suffering Z. Right?
Keep rationalizing your profits and the ideologies required to sustain them.
> I am sure you would find a way to turn that into a negative as well
Again, if you’re happy with the state of the world in any way beyond where it’s headed you’re a fucking pathogen.
You have 3 choices: Furious, Ignorant, Evil.
I think we’ve established which one you are.
And I do wish you well. Yay for negative utilitarianism. All I want is an end to pain and involuntary death. Even yours. I don’t make excuses for anyone’s suffering or murder. I bet you do.
http://underlore.com/the-apex/
Steamgifts and its admins are idiot scammers.
Constitutional patriotic republicans are actually better politicians than the rest.
Are there any such republicans in federal office? I don’t see any of them. All the “republicans” I see are pro war spending pro big government pro middle east oil dependence pro foreign aid pro (corporate) welfare pro drug war, etc etc. Actual (fiscal or otherwise) conservatives seem about as rare as actual progressives in American federal government.
Ah this was hilarious, shame I missed all the drama earlier.
You can’t both be so illiterate that simple rules are impossible to understand and try to argue politics, so just pick one.
Just 2 choices for you: Retard or a Normal Person.
Behold the intended product of the education system. A slave who’s actually smug about it.
Are you really so far gone that you think this is me not understanding commands? I’m objecting to the commands. Do I really have to type that there’s an important difference?
How slavish must one be to confuse the two? You’re like an android scolding another android: “Did you not hear the words of our Master? For surely if you heard and understood you’d obey as is the role of a slave!”
http://underlore.com/the-tyranny-of-compulsory-schooling/
I’m 3+ years on steamgifts. Seems i see the world with other glasses, mine are clean. 🙂
What is a scam is the first thing you should learn before writing such a textwall without any real informations.
You were just not happy with the site because you don’t win like others and then try to make the site bad with your small defined world, pretty stupido. Sometimes your arguments are like 1+1=3.
Over and out.
If I was as petty and emotional as you all seem to claim why would I publish your comments? Also your comment is the one devoid of argument. If any of my arguments are 1+1=3, then point just one out and we’ll discuss it. We both know the truth.
People have already pointed out that your arguments are 1+1=3.
The sites rules make sense. You haven’t won anything on the site? Good. You are ungrateful, and entitled. The conspiracy theories coming from you involving steamgifts is pure cringe. I honestly thought you were trolling at first but then I saw all your replies, and wow. I think you need some medical attention because there is no way you don’t have brain damage.
Publishing the comment to which this one is a reply because said comment is another glorious example of the diminished level of ethics it requires to not agree with me here.
The person didn’t put a real email so of course they’ll not see this reply unless they come back specifically to check for one, though I will reply for the record.
I have won games. That was never my complaint, which everyone who read the original post, let alone my replies, understands.
That’s all that needs replying to really, they made no new assertions not previously addressed.
The rest is just an attack on me personally, which of course is Ad Hominem and can be completely ignored. I’ll happily stipulate I’m Lucifer himself for the purposes of every argument since my identity and nature have no bearing on any argument I might might outside identity and nature.
Thanks for reading 🙂
The elitism on this site is out of this world! Especially the discussion section which is absolutely beyond toxic.
Care to share an example that springs to mind?
In a thread earlier a user made a non-offensive joke toward one of the “elites” and immediately had his account suspended. It takes but a moment in the discussion section to see you’re absolutely correct about the hierarchy on steamgifts.
That’s sad 🙁 It’s like that all over the Internet to one degree or other but truly the SG community feels like a special example. I suspect it has something to do with the mechanism exposed but the blue eye brown eye experiment. The moment you start applying hierarchical labels to people, even if completely meaningless, they’ll begin to internalize them.
I can’t believe what I’ve stumbled upon. This thread is pure gold, not valuable gold but cringe gold. Keep replying, in fact reply to me please. Tell me I’m wrong about something I haven’t said so I can show my mom and she’ll be so proud of me for calling you out on absolutely nothing in particular. Keep up the good work crazy man!
Publishing this one just to give insight and context into the quality and type of mind that disagrees with me here. Try to imagine the whole package. Like what does it take to make a person really think a comment like the one to which I am replying has merit. It’s fascinating really.
The fake data these types put in the user fields are interesting as well. They almost invariably use a fake and insulting email address, which of course has the effect of preventing notification of replies. Which is fine, but it also nearly precludes the possibility of a rational discussion, but then again from the nature of these comments it seems fair to assume that’s the last thing they are after.
In fact I’m not sure what they are after at all. /shrugs. I leave that for whoever if anyone ever reads this stuff.
Edit: He actually did try to reply, but it was more of the same tripe. I see no point since this far down the comment chain discussions might as well be private and why bother.
It truly feels like a scam, I agree with you
I agree for the most part, the elitist logic behind the site is sickening. Still, I’m happy it exists despite it being flawed and intoxicated by the collectors community.
Thank you for taking the time to write this post.
Since the blog publish date of November 28, 2015 you managed to get one Anonymous total agreement for your side on April 6th, 2018 and a few minor affirmations that changes could be improved throughout the two and a half years this blog was published. You are definitely entitled to your opinion and I commend you for providing the continued futile debate and open discussion. Personally I have come to the conclusion Steamgifts is not a scam, but it is not for everyone. I would rather play Steamgifts then play the State Lottery.
Thank you for taking the time to reply and your kind words, my apologies for the huge delay but I get very little interaction here and the notification email was lost in the shuffle.
It’s futile because of pandemic fact immunity and flat out double think. I’m sure if I could feed you people truth drugs and force you at gun point and polygraph to answer honestly and follow me through logic from your own premises outsiders would conclude you agree with me that the place is by definition a scam, but the whole reason I write and comment less and less is because reality simply doesn’t matter. The hypothetical above is literally what it would take just to make someone admit the truth, but not even those extreme steps could make them internalize it. Drink that in. On the other hand making you believe a lie is trivial by comparison. Put simply I’ve applied the right skills to the wrong goal. Critical thinking, ethics, and coherent logic simply have no place in the convince people of things toolbox. Those skills only apply in non human fields, such as the hard sciences and engineering. http://underlore.com/avoid-my-mistakes/
Edit: Perhaps that’s why delusional demagoguery is so adept at gaining favor with the masses, while heads of state and true scientists are rarely the same people.
Let’s face it just about ever aspect in life involves a scam of sorts to a certain degree, simply put a “give and take”. Every individual makes a choice of what they want to pay for something they want. Here’s a Steam code I received from https://www.indiegala.com/indiegala-golden-flash-giveaway and I already own the game. Sorry I have no idea what game it is, but it’s yours with no strings attached. J5MI5-BQ8AD-Z9J5L
Actually that’s not true. The very fact the multicellular life exists proves that cooperation is profitable and superior. Billions of generations of single cell life over the entire history of earth’s biosphere have been searching for a way to trump multicellular life and it has always and will always fail.
The fact that entropy can be moved around permits the shifting of suffering away from things capable of experience. Entropy on the whole remains, but it’s like the difference of what you choose to burn to keep the room warm. The firewood or the dog? The fatalist attitude that exploitation is unavoidable is purposefully promulgated to ease exploitation. It’s effectively a pathogenic meme that functions as a kind of weaponized cognitive immune deficiency syndrome. It’s a paralytic in the form of an idea. Divide and conquer in the form of a maxim.
“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”
Culture is a network good and the more of us there are, and the more we work together (by virtue of proximity if nothing else) the better it is. This is what drives the arc of history towards peace. And this is also why the TV wants you to believe the opposite. But in reality…
https://ourworldindata.org/slides/war-and-violence/#/title-slide
P.S. Thanks for the key, I offered it to my gf, if she doesn’t take it, someone else here will. I only play path of exile these days hehe.
Your correct, right up to the point when a multiplying single cell disease invades and destroys multi-cellular life.
I’ll check out Path of Exile, but the game scams seem abundant and the New Zealand developer inability to remedy due to naming, shaming and online mobbing law are a bit of a draw back.
Hopefully your gf enters the Steam key before some computer bot nabs the exposed key . See ya in-game 😉
What happens to those pathogens? If they win, the prize is death inside a corpse. Or they lose and die inside the victor.
And now that humanity is here, bearer of abstraction, arguably the inevitable result of organization’s adaptivity. Mere decades away from taking command of genetic design, obviating evolution itself. Time is not on their side and they’ve already been losing for billions of years. Single celled life is about to be entirely subjugated.
Their best case the species level is evolve until they join the winning team, either as a member, or a symbiotic agent.
Did you ever wonder why some random microbe didn’t already evolve into an organic equivalent of grey goo? Why nothing can “infect” asphalt despite it being Packed with energy? It’s because of the axiomatic truth of the universe as real as entropy that two working together is worth three working apart. It’s intrinsic to the fabric of our reality every bit as much as 1+1=2. Because everything is information.
So no. Not everything is a scam. 🙂 That’s just something exploiters tell you to engender fatalism and keep you thinking and feeling in directions that profit them.
I have an account for 6 years and I continue to create new giveaways for the pleasure to give.
Today, they got me banned for the reason I dared to use humor.
It was a Monster Hunter World giveaway created by a new user finishing in several hours (while the game will release in 5 days) and their moderator (Tempête Joachim) banned me for “Incorrect behaviour” (obviously, everone in comments claimed it was a fake).
My comment was “The guy who wins will be very disappointed coz it’s a MONSTER scam ! :D”
The SG administrators have serious authority problems to use their banhammer without warning or discussing before.
Why would I continue to support this community if their gurus treat us like that ?
Have you contacted them about getting the ban lifted? Thank you for sharing your story. Keep us (me) posted.
I agree with what you say about about steam gifts. Though you are a little heavy handed and the detractors weakly defensive.
They can’t seem to own up to the way steam gifts work. It exist because it is very profitable to some people. Its indeed a pyramid with bigger benefits up top and few down low. And a person just has to take a step back, accept it, and proceed to either participate or not.
The people who argue against you just can’t own it. They can’t say “yeah you are right, but it’s enough worth for me to participate”
On the other hand its like the casino, a lot of it is house advantage and isn’t so much a scam as a gamble people hopefully are aware of.
Thank you for taking the time to comment 🙂
I know I lack grace/tact. But then again, that assumes sufficient amounts of it would improve my odds of persuasion and I don’t see any evidence of that. At the very least it has limits, or else perfect persuasion would have been invented somewhere and we’d be a unified species by now. And that makes me think of how odd the word awareness is in such contexts. Being told something doesn’t mean you understand it really. For who would honestly gamble still or the like if they really understood what they were doing? I mean I would argue that the only people that really understand blackjack are the card counters and they are specifically banned from playing. It seems to be that the vast majority gambling is theft essentially, the exploitation of the ignorant.
So if you are stupid and you don’t read the FAQ of the site you should not use the site? Ok!
There’s so much irony there I think it’s collapsed under its own gravity.
I finally came to my senses after using it for several years and started seeing through the lies, deception and corruption there. I was suspended for challenging authority and the rules being completely vague. I wanted some real changes, offered suggestions in appropriate places, all of which were never answered, and proposed some answers of my own to help out their incompetent staff.
Anyway, eventually I was suspended for fake spam violations that are not even against their own terms of use. After my “reply-bumping?” abuse (which is their responsibility to fix – derp), they give me 2 weeks. I gave them a nice piece of my mind, and got permabanned. I was level 10 for quite a while, used the site a lot to give games out. Wanted real change and ended up paying the price because idiots run that place. It’s a cash grab operation, and patreon money going to people who do not give a rats ass about the community that keeps it running, much like many countries in the real world. Except if this were a small business model under normal circumstances, it’d go bankrupt in no time flat.
I asked some questions about my permaban and it’s been about 4 months, and no response yet. How can it possibly take that long to answer a question, unless staff is just lazy. All of this proves my points I had laid out about the lack of efficiency and pathetic rule system. A few bullies are also immune there, and they use their power to ban those they want out. It’s a team of about 6 individuals that I am aware of as far as proof, but there are probably a handful more that are manipulating moderators to do things with their current full-fledged abuse of power they have in place. My challenging that power is what got me ultimately banned.
My condolences on the ban. I know being removed from even a shitty place is painful because after all we were engaged enough to get banned in the first place. (Not always the case thankfully, some bans are near instant.) I appreciate the comment as a data point and expression of support. I’m much less of a gamer now. For years after this the one game I played was poe and just recently I’ve dropped out there leaving me with only the occasional hellgate london fan server login as my entire active gaming thing. I still watch game related content on YouTube though. Challenging power will get you sanctioned in any context. That’s an important life lesson. Predators and parasites have to be handled. They can’t be reasoned with. If you think they have been reasoned with then YOU’VE been handled. Thanks again 🙂 Good luck finding a better place, or adapting to the lack of one.
So you wanted to use a bot to win games and instead of activating game son your steam account you just wanted to sell them and you are angry that you got suspended?
Do you break the rules everywhere where you are?
Also do you break the law in your country?
I’m just going to assume there’s a massive language barrier on this one or trolling. Someone reply to explain if I’ve missed something.
I cant stop laughing… thanks for that, you are either a very good troll or an absolute moron with delusions of grandeur 🙂
its lovely just lovely…
Speaking of lovely… Publishing comments like this, proving your cohort in this discussion has no valid points or rebuttals to offer, just empty hateful noise noise offered up in defense of your service to corporate psychopaths. 🙂 Stay owned.
This is the funniest shite I’ve ever read. Thanks for the lols
And quite logical apparently since you rebuttals are so limited. I mean it’s simple, if I’f made an error of logic or premise it should be easy to point it out. Simply make a refuting counter claim you can prove or ask me to prove one of my essential claims that you know I can’t. If all any of you have is insult and some weird attempt to imply that because you can laugh at an assertion it is therefore wrong, then you don’t objectively have anything at all do you. Thanks for yet more support by omission 🙂
Alot of people has contributed to this site for a very long time. To say anything bad here is to get attacked by these idiots who has paid alot here without caring about what type of site this is. of course there going to want to defend there investment on this site. But this site truly is cancer full of bots and innocent people getting banned for dumb reasons. I had a ton of games to giveaway on this site but I am so glad that I didn’t after taking a step back and thinking about everything as a whole. If you don’t contribute and pay money you have no chance of winning anything especially with all the bots they fail to ban and account multipliers. This site has been a waste of time for me the past year you get like 1 99cent game per month at lvl 5 contributor and thats entering giveaways every day. if your married or have kids they can not use the site only 1 account per house hold or you get banned so alot of innocent ppl get banned instead of the bots.
Oh what fun… the problem is not SteamGifts the problem is the inability to see any good in anything, any idiot with a keyboard can sit behind the safety of their screen and deconstruct anything, it doesn’t matter if any good is being done, if you put your mind to it you can find flaws in anything. Anything I don’t like and don’t understand I will demolish – facts don’t mater only my opinion does and the strength of my arguments is my own bias. Good causes are actually a fantasy and nothing good is an act of selflessness, if there are exceptions to that rule, it doesn’t really matter because the big picture speaks for itself.
The fact that I still approve these drivel and cultist replies alone shows your arm chair psychology is way off.
No matter what brush you choose to paint me with the facts and logic remain unchanged.
Fanboys bring no counter arguments, only attempted shame.
In my opinion, you insult too much to be taken seriously. And your point being so weak, your pov being so biased, don’t help much you your cause (do you even have one? If so, I doubt you are a positive influence on it).
Good luck on getting anyone convinced of anything ever.
This post is ancient history. The days of me thinking rational discourse convinced anyone of anything ever are over. The continued existence of multiple religions is conclusive proof against that thesis. In short, facts, whatever they may be, have no power to persuade. It is emotion which guides belief, and emotion alone. Your understanding of discourse, like mine, is largely received opinion. We have little to no access to the data that matters. It’s behind security walls on corporate and government servers in the form of NSA mass collected data, and proprietary user analytics.
Think about it, if facts persuaded and it was simply a matter of presentation of them that always won over equally presented lies, then why is there still so much disagreement in any context you choose to name? Even among hard scientists roughly half are at the other half’s throat over something or other. And if any religion represented a correct metaphysics, would it not eventually replace all other religions through discussion alone? If they are all false, then why hasn’t atheism become the dominant thesis? Put simply, you’re scolding me from a position of profound ignorance. I can be as crass as I like because no matter my tone or protocol, unless I surreptitiously manipulate your emotions, intentionally or otherwise, your beliefs will not change.
It is my very honesty and rationality and logical consistency that ironically prevents me from persuading because my chances of accidentally manipulating from that starting point is effectively nil. Thanks for reading and commenting.
I will be celebrating my 2 year permaban anniversary soon! Just a couple more weeks. I have so far gotten no response on my tickets after 23 months. That’s quality service *anybody* can vouch for, or maybe I am just low on the priority list. At any rate, it’s pretty bad when you can’t get a simple “Yes” or “No” response, or any attention when you send tickets here and there to try to remind those reviewing tickets that you still have something labeled as “pending”. Last I checked, the word “pending” in an adjective form/diction means – awaiting decision or settlement. So, after 23 months… it’s still in this “pending” status… further establishing how pathetic this site and its staff run things, at least in my mind.
I don’t know how that place stays afloat in all honesty. A couple of directions in the future I could see changing that:
Maybe there will be laws eventually to keep predatory pyramid scam sites like SG away from honest consumers who just want to give because it is fun, and the community can have a fair and honest platform that gives power to the users, and not narcissistic admin/mods that do not understand how to run sites properly, determine right from wrong, and decide they will keep areas grey on purpose to victimize people who do not know any better using their… so called ‘judgement call” dogma.
Second thought on the opposite side of the coin: Let’s say there is a more “utopian” site that has the best of intentions, doesn’t allow a few bad apples to spoil the entire bunch, and attracts some attention because they actively work on and develop their site for the people on a fairly active and efficient basis… Going to be trouble for steamgifts, since they won’t be able to keep up. The trash users with potty mouth and gutter mind philosophy will end up getting their just desserts, and I will be a public contributor again, instead of gifting steam users from my friends list randomly here and there when I can.
On the bright side, I saved up enough money after the first year to buy a really high end laptop (since I was going to spend a lot of that side money on gifting members of the steamgifts community until the staff decided to slit their own throats). I also retained a lot of great relationships from the site, and I stayed connected to some. Most these days are from steamtrades instead though.
I’ll bet the quality continues to go downhill with more and more users being banned because moderation doesn’t understand how to judge situations fairly and objectively. When you pick apart their system and make them look bad, they take it personally… Immature people react before they think. This happened to be the case in my previous post. Instead, things got removed and hidden that incriminated certain individuals I will not name that are “untouchable” and “can do no wrong”. These same users with pocketed staff to pretty much run the show, do very little to actually contribute to giving away anything – well… the entire staff doesn’t give away much, in all honesty. I think I gave away more than all the above mentioned combined each month, maybe double or triple their total combined amount.
I don’t mean to ramble, not gonna recheck what I have added, but this just reminded me of the sham I once had confidence and faith in, since new comments were added recently. Things have improved with their rules, last time I checked, but people had to suffer unnecessarily beforehand as a result. I kind of predicted that one though, as failure to act created irreversible consequences… I tried to convince those who could do something that these changes needed to be made as soon as possible, since, at least to the average critical thinker with any level of empathetic or compassionate understanding realizes that reduction of obscure rules is beneficial for everybody – the better we can communicate, the more we can figure out the root issues and come to compromises and agreements. Grey rules are going to have borderline cases and people are going to get unnecessarily adversely and negatively affected. It’s sad once you see the truth behind the smoke and mirrors.
Yeah the main value of this post now is potential interaction among the commenters. I barely like games at all anymore, except POE, and Epic satisfies the free game urge. The games they have given away more than offset any money I have ever spent on gaming, which really was my goal from the start. I just felt like all those unplayed games sitting in my humble account and the like were going to waste. But that time too has passed. SG is still a scam imo, as your customer support experience shows, but it’s an irrelevant scam now to me. I cant help but wonder where links to this post are being found after all its time. Good luck with your ticket man, I hope the situation resolves beneficially for you somehow.
Just arrived here from a search for “steamgifts scam”… The five-year arc of this comment thread is impressive! I’m not sure why I spent Christmas evening reading the entire thing; I guess the mix of strong arguments and good ol’ internet mud-slinging against a wide backdrop of history, sociology, psychology and politics gave me the diversion I didn’t know I needed.
FWIW, I’ve decided steamgifts has some merit and some good people, but the overall structure and policies are such that I won’t spend time on it.
I’m glad I read all the way to Innoman’s comment that “facts, whatever they may be, have no power to persuade.” This really sums up the tragedy of where we are today, and fighting against it directly isn’t working. I’m not sure yet where to go from this point.
And so, I present no facts or new arguments. I’ll just say thanks to everyone that commented here, and wish you all a better 2021.
Thank you for taking the time and your kind words. If you liked the specific comment, I have a whole essay on the topic” https://underlore.com/debate-is-a-myth/
Wow how long did it take you to respond to all of the replies in such depth? This dedication is seriously impressive.
I would say between 15 seconds and 5 minutes per reply. Thank you. It is my blog. Sadly this is the most active post on it. Which really says something about humanity. I had hopes it would be this one: https://underlore.com/solutions-and-the-human-sacrifice-lottery/ or https://underlore.com/debate-is-a-myth/ but no.
Couldn’t agree more, good blog!