Fairfox: It's true that whether you give a game away to the first person who asks or you make it a giveaway, you're basically doing it for no return other than the feel-good factor. But regardless, personally speaking I'd like it to be for somebody that truly wants the game, not the sort of person that will collect and gather up as many games as possible through devious and deceptive means, never play them and just let them collect virtual dust. I don't feel good about that, or the hint/possibility of it.
Anyway, on a more general note, I don't like the words 'entitle', 'entitled' and 'entitlement' as I think, online, they've become some of the most overused for the last couple of years, abused over and over and applied wrongly, but I
do think those that complain are too entitled. As per before, it's fine to feel a slight pang of disgruntlement to be excluded, but complaining about it publicly pushes it over the line to entitlement and sour grapes. Honestly, people should be on the forums to help others and DEVELOP INSANELY WITTY BANTER (capscapscaps) first and foremost.
I think it depends about what they're complaining.
Complaining about being excluded by rep when it's well established that people get downrepped for ridiculous reasons, is fair. If it were me, the rule would be X number of posts rather than X rep, just because posting, even bullshit, does require a certain amount of effort. And if somebody is posting excerpts from the collected works of Shakespeare, or something equally lazy, that's difficult to argue about.
And whether or not somebody is a scammer, having them excluded when they have the correct answer doesn't look good. Regardless of intent of the person running the giveaway.
Ultimately, either the folks running giveaways will find a way to adapt or the giveaways will go away. The status quo is just not sustainable and trying to catch people cheating is not realistic in many cases.
hummer010: It's extraordinary easy to not have low rep on this forum. Be part of the conversation. Don't just ask for games. Giveaway the odd game. Stay away from certain threads (open this, the ninja thread etc.). You don't even have to be nice, just look at tinyE! :)
If you have low rep, and all you do is ask for games, you're never going to have high rep.
It's extraordinarily easy to have low rep in this forum. Post something that's controversial, especially as a new thread and you can easily lose 30 or 40 rep points as people start piling on. And that's even without pissing somebody (and their army of alts) off. I find that if I post something that people take exception to I can lose rep from it for weeks, even pas the point where the thread isn't on my list of recently posted to threads.
There are some people here that bear grudges and have the emotional maturity of a toddler.
The easiest thing is to keep your head down, never disagree with anybody and you'll probably find you get that 1 rep per day and after the better part of a year you might even be allowed to join in the contests.
I don't personally think that's a healthy feature of the community here. It's dysfunction that should be addressed. But, I'm not even sure how to address it.