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Steam Summer Sales 2014 |OT3| Sale over, new thread tonight/tomorrow

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jokes aside, Ive never used the blacklist, but the amount of giveaways I do I really should. I didnt know the problem was real, I always thought it was a myth

guess it isnt :/

Every rumor/myth is made up a certain amount of truth. Just like the rumor of hugging Gabe will grant your immortality. It won't but man will it fill you stomach full of joy.
 

Alien8

Member
jshackles, a suggestion for Enhanced Steam... I don't now if it would be feasible or not.

On each game's store page, when you click on a screenshot a new browser window (or tab) opens. If you want to see some screenshots, you must swicht between tabs, opening and closing all of them, which is a bit annoying.

Would be possible, after clicking on an image and opening the browser window, to add something that allows to rotate through the screenshot carrousel of the game stotr page? I'm thinking something like arrows to browse to the next/previous image, but I don't know if it is doable or not.
 

Turfster

Member
wtf at the color race right now.

0RRdP.gif
 

The_Monk

Member
I wish the blacklist was taken more seriously and used more frequently. There are lots of abusers that are winning giveaways with public blacklists just because they keep a low profile and are sneaky. I have spotted some of them but I'm pretty sure I have missed a lot of them too

Since we are talking about this I just would like to add that I encourage people to report to the moderators if you get any sort of offensive, rude/personal attack (or worst) via PM from anyone. As someone who had to deal with this in the past I regret not speaking up during the first times and now I see I should have. Just my two cents, sorry for the Off Topic...
 

Caerith

Member
The ones handled by Modbot originate as emailed gifts. Or when you anonymize the link does it also remove the ability to cancel?
They don't fully anonymize. When a gift link is redeemed, even with the email cut off, Steam still auto-friends the giver to the recipient.
 

GuardianE

Santa May Claus
Enjoy your weekend with a side of sick combos.
Used the blacklist this time. Hopefully I'm not bugging anyone with these giveaways.

ModBot said:
Instructions for participants:
I am giving away a Steam key. To enter this giveaway, send a PM to ModBot with any subject line. In the body, copy and paste the entire line below containing the key.

Rules for this Giveaway:
- If you are a lurker you are not eligible for this giveaway. You need five or more posts in either the current Steam thread or the previous one to be eligible
- This giveaway is a raffle. The winners will be selected by random draw 3 hours after the draw was created. Any games not claimed after that point will be given away first come first serve.
- This giveaway has a manual blocklist. The giver has identified members who abuse giveaways and restricted them from participating.
- Do not trade keys you win off-site to enrich yourself. Don't try to claim games you have no interest in collecting or playing. Don't claim games to give them to friends off-site.
- If the key is already taken you will not receive a reply. Replies may take a minute or two:

header_292x136.jpg

Devil May Cry 4 -- MB-A65AA3AABCCAF8C6

t1404002972z1.png

QcaKxiy.gif
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
Stump, any ETA on 1 hour raffles? I need those in my life bad

Well, there are basically two reasons for changing raffle timings:
1) Different raffle timings work better for ModBot technically in terms of being able to find and identify posts and edit out the winners. Originally modbot only knew how to look back through the thread page by page, so obviously long-term raffles required reposting or me to manually attach giveaways to posts before the timers expired. I've actually solved this by teaching ModBot how to use GAF's search engine to find results, which in turn basically should near-100% solve any failure-to-edit problems. Going forward ModBot will be able to edit out every single post so even reposting will be no problem.

2) Different raffle timings are something that users want because they don't want to have to continue reposting their raffles or whatever. We've talked about it before. I'm not against it, I'm just not sold on arbitrary raffle timings (pain in the ass to debug, subject to abuse for people doing things like "lol a 15 year raffle enjoy getting this when u retire", presents more visual confusion and requires users to read more closely than pre-set categories) and I haven't quite decided based on thread speed which pre-set timings are the best. It's not hard for me to change the timings, I could switch all 3-hour raffles to 1-hour raffles by editing a line of code. It's more about trying to figure out the timings that make the most sense for users. 24 hours is probably too long for most users, that's the one I'm least happy with.
 

Accoun

Member
Woah, I can't believe I actually read all of the unread posts since yesterday istead of just skipping to the last page... -_-

And since I finished it - thanks for Ikaruga, Mokoi. :-D
 

Soroc

Member
I'm not so convinced that the entire Steam community has been divided so perfectly into five teams so that on the last day, for the past couple hours now, everyone is crafting so consistently that the difference between the highest and lowest team is never more than five thousand points, whereas in all the other days the difference quickly became in the ten thousands and one team ended up with hundreds of thousands of points in the lead.

Well I personally waited till today to craft the rest of my badges and sell off any duplicates I had remaining. I think most others would do the same, especially on teams that weren't winning 1st, 2nd or 3rd over the last 2 days. There doesn't look to be many point stealing going on today. My theory is most people just want to get rid of the cards one way or another since they are just going to disappear anyway.

I mean in the grand scheme it doesn't really matter, if you have cards to sell I would wait till much later in the day because compared to previous sales it looks like the value of the summer cards are going up slightly as people get crazy trying to finish off their badges. I wish i didn't sell mine right away, I could have made a good bit more off the cards I think by waiting.

I voted for Divinity: OS since it really peaked my interest!
 
Makes sense, I guess. Can't say I understand why people do it though. Everything I enter for is something I'm interested in. I guess if you're entering to sell shit you don't care about that bundle spare not being worth much by itself since it's all free money to you.

I dunno, I haven't gotten around to everything I've won in modbot raffles (the backlog is ever present and looming), but I'm thankful for, and appreciate, every single one of them.
 

Chojka

Member
Since we are talking about this I just would like to add that I encourage people to report to the moderators if you get any sort of offensive, rude/personal attack (or worst) via PM from anyone. As someone who had to deal with this in the past I regret not speaking up during the first times and now I see I should have. Just my two cents, sorry for the Off Topic...

It floors me that someone would treat such a great pillar of this community that way. You have been nothing but awesome and hospitable since I have been here.
 

Enco

Member
Personally I feel 24 hour raffles are far too long.

Maybe I'm just impatient but I would much prefer shorter raffles as default (3 or 1 hours is plenty).
 
n8C13F1.png


Really how stupid does Valve think we are? How in the world is this not rigged?
Yeah... It's pretty obvious that at least today is somewhat "guided" by the invisible hand of Valve.

To people who think Valve wouldn't do it, need I point to the Potato Sack event leading into Portal 2 wherein Valve gave players the impression that their actions would lead to Portal 2's early release?

And then the entire thing was basically rigged to always have ended at midnight. Valve isn't exactly against giving their fanbase the illusion of influence while controlling it behind the scenes to encourage more sales.
 

kierwynn

Member
I bought this during the flash sale because I was unsure about it. I decided I wouldn't play it anytime soon, so figured I'd give it away.

ModBot said:
Instructions for participants:
I am giving away a Steam key. To enter this giveaway, send a PM to ModBot with any subject line. In the body, copy and paste the entire line below containing the key.

Rules for this Giveaway:
- This giveaway is a raffle. The winners will be selected by random draw 3 hours after the draw was created. Any games not claimed after that point will be given away first come first serve.
- This giveaway has a manual blocklist. The giver has identified members who abuse giveaways and restricted them from participating.
- Do not trade keys you win off-site to enrich yourself. Don't try to claim games you have no interest in collecting or playing. Don't claim games to give them to friends off-site.
- If the key is already taken you will not receive a reply. Replies may take a minute or two:


Octodad: Dadliest Catch -- MB-7EADC63BA7992855


t1404003261z1.png
 

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
while not to harp too much on javadots but was it ever known how he did that shit.

or was he really that good.

IIRC javadots was around during an era where raffle functionality was preliminary and not frequently used; he mostly exploited the fact that you could camp giveaways and claim them immediately. But let me be clear that the root problem with javadots wasn't the abusive behaviour (we have tools to respond to that), but rather the way he gloated and later turned to insulting members who were bothered by his conduct.

Well, despite Modbot saying that someone else won Banished when he edited out your message, I got the PM from Modbot saying I'd won, so many thanks, frost.

Perhaps modbot has a bug in his coding?
Or maybe I've hacked it to send all the winning codes to me.

This happens very very very very very very rarely and is caused by the following:
- ModBot spawns a new thread every 45 seconds. In a period where ModBot gets spammed with dozens of requests and multiple payouts, it's possible that the heartbeat will take more than 45 seconds
- As a result, two heartbeats can run at the same time. In programming this is called a race condition, when two programs are both trying to access things that are supposed to happen in a certain order but don't.
- When a giveaway is assigned to a person, before the edit occurs, there's a brief part in ModBot's code designed to detect when this is happening and prevent it. In other words, it should be impossible for multiple people to win the same thing because the second one heartbeat picks a winner, the other heartbeat should no longer be able to pick a winner. The more common situation is when one person gets two win PMs, which is annoying but not harmful.
- In the event that the timing is near-entirely exact and one person wins and then the next person wins before the first win is written temporarily to the database, a double-win could happen. This has happened very rarely in ModBot's history and I thought I had fixed the last of the conditions that allowed it to happen.
- ModBot is running slower than average because besides being totally pummeled, he's also not running on his usual server. The database performance here is not as good.

I have a way to further fix it (I had thought I made it impossible enough that it would never happen again), but I won't be able to implement it during the sale.

Edit: In the mean time, I've set ModBot's heartbeat timing to 75 seconds instead of 45, which should give him a bit of breathing room when a heartbeat is running long.
 
Well, there are basically two reasons for changing raffle timings:
1) Different raffle timings work better for ModBot technically in terms of being able to find and identify posts and edit out the winners. Originally modbot only knew how to look back through the thread page by page, so obviously long-term raffles required reposting or me to manually attach giveaways to posts before the timers expired. I've actually solved this by teaching ModBot how to use GAF's search engine to find results, which in turn basically should near-100% solve any failure-to-edit problems. Going forward ModBot will be able to edit out every single post so even reposting will be no problem.

2) Different raffle timings are something that users want because they don't want to have to continue reposting their raffles or whatever. We've talked about it before. I'm not against it, I'm just not sold on arbitrary raffle timings (pain in the ass to debug, subject to abuse for people doing things like "lol a 15 year raffle enjoy getting this when u retire", presents more visual confusion and requires users to read more closely than pre-set categories) and I haven't quite decided based on thread speed which pre-set timings are the best. It's not hard for me to change the timings, I could switch all 3-hour raffles to 1-hour raffles by editing a line of code. It's more about trying to figure out the timings that make the most sense for users. 24 hours is probably too long for most users, that's the one I'm least happy with.

I'm a fan of the shorter times.

I've been doing 15 minutes because I don't want people to have to wait 3 hours to win a game... and I can't even stomach 24 hours. I'm all in the interest of trying to give most users a fair shot (which is the draw of the 24 hours, so everyone has a chance to enter)... however, I would most likely use a 30 or 60 minute raffle if it existed.
 
2) We've talked about it before. I'm not against it, I'm just not sold on arbitrary raffle timings (pain in the ass to debug, subject to abuse for people doing things like "lol a 15 year raffle enjoy getting this when u retire", presents more visual confusion and requires users to read more closely than pre-set categories) and I haven't quite decided based on thread speed which pre-set timings are the best.

What? But I'm waiting for those 15 year raffles, imagine the tension. Too bad that wouldn't be sufficient for a Half-Life 3 giveaway.


Anyway, I just want the 15 mins to be something like 30 mins. And I think many others support this idea, since most of the time, correcting, preparing and posting the giveaway takes most of that 15 mins. Most of my short raffles start at 7 mins.
 

Zafir

Member
Personally I feel 24 hour raffles are far too long.

Maybe I'm just impatient but I would much prefer shorter raffles as default (3 or 1 hours is plenty).
I dunno. If it's a good giveaway, new release or a game that's still pricey, it's a good idea doing it 24hours. Issue with 15mins or 3 hours is, it screws over people from other time zones.
 

Caerith

Member
Well, there are basically two reasons for changing raffle timings:
1) Different raffle timings work better for ModBot technically in terms of being able to find and identify posts and edit out the winners. Originally modbot only knew how to look back through the thread page by page, so obviously long-term raffles required reposting or me to manually attach giveaways to posts before the timers expired. I've actually solved this by teaching ModBot how to use GAF's search engine to find results, which in turn basically should near-100% solve any failure-to-edit problems. Going forward ModBot will be able to edit out every single post so even reposting will be no problem.

2) Different raffle timings are something that users want because they don't want to have to continue reposting their raffles or whatever. We've talked about it before. I'm not against it, I'm just not sold on arbitrary raffle timings (pain in the ass to debug, subject to abuse for people doing things like "lol a 15 year raffle enjoy getting this when u retire", presents more visual confusion and requires users to read more closely than pre-set categories) and I haven't quite decided based on thread speed which pre-set timings are the best. It's not hard for me to change the timings, I could switch all 3-hour raffles to 1-hour raffles by editing a line of code. It's more about trying to figure out the timings that make the most sense for users. 24 hours is probably too long for most users, that's the one I'm least happy with.
24 is okay for something you want as many people to have a chance to enter as possible, but 12 hours would probably be just as accessible. I think it's the gap between 15 minutes and 3 hours that's the hard one. It's really easy to miss a 15 minute giveaway, but 3 hours is kinda long.


I wonder how The World Ends With You would play with M/KB?
Mouse for bottom screen, keyboard for top?
 
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