Each eligible forum user can ask for one normal and any number of "daggered" games per month.

There are no particular criteria to determine if the key should be "daggered" or not. Usually games become "daggered" for some time after official GOG giveaways.
Check your own privacy settings first. You need to allow chat messages with everyone.)

@bluethief and @AlexTerranova
Thank you kindly for your answers, much appreciated.

I have to say that I have been to a lot of forums over last thirty(ish) years, but this one is the second worst when it comes to features and user-friendliness (I mean at technical level).

I believe this forum is basically the same since GOG started, so that explains it.

Now I'm curious to know what`s the absolute worst one...

Probably Tapatalk.
Although Dynaverse that makes you do 5 "are you human" questions every time you post where some of them have ambiguous answers, and it won't tell you what the correct answer was. Miss one and you get 5 new questions to fill in before you can post comes close.

I would like us to be able to nominate ourselves so that we can pick a game we know we will like and then if there is a long list of games to pick from we can take our time familiarizing ourselves with the games on the list and change our mind if we find a game we like better.

Alternatively but to accomplish the same thing,

Being able to say "This is the game I've picked, but please delay giving it to me for a couple days so I can look at the list of games and find out what they are." Of course this would be limited, once a month, and would probably count towards nomination limit. Two days would be sufficient most of the time instead of the week given for nominations.

I would suggest not dropping a large number of available games all at one time.

Dropping too many games at one time -- especially when there are some highly sought-after titles involved -- makes it very difficult for a person to find a game and request it with any degree of certainty that during the "feeding frenzy" a particular game hasn't already been requested (even in the time it takes to write and post a request).

Breaking a large number of available games into multiple, smaller, more easily managed "rounds" IMO can largely alleviate this problem. Smaller rounds are relatively easy to search, find a game, and find out quickly whether it's been requested; there's much less chance of multiple requests for the same game and resulting 2nd and 3rd requests. It's also potentially easier on the person running the giveaway.

(in a situation where "rounds" are used, I would suggest letting people know ahead of time the total number of "rounds" for specific day's drops.)

Just a thought

^ That adds a lot of work onto the maintainer (Lone_Scout). If everyone reserved then requested, it would potentially double the workload. The rules were kept as simple as possible to make it manageable. People generally under-appreciate just how much work is involved in managing these.

Then should we abolish nominations as well? Like isn't this is the entire idea of nominations? So what we are really talking about is giving advantage to those with Gog friends, aren't we? This kind of favoritism seems problematic.

It would not double the workload even if everyone did it. Because all that need be done is mark down who's made a delayed request for other players who want games in the giveways post 2, the actual game list need not be touched unlike when a request is being filled. And surely a system could be figured out to even further simplify it. Maybe someone else could help with this?

If my idea is accepted, I could be the one who notes all the delayed requests and hands it over to LS. It could be limited to two days and only when a large list is introduced the first day of the month.

Alternatively

Maybe the list could be shown ahead of time. Give people a chance to look it over, before they can make a request.

Also if we could get links to the game pages, that would greatly help with looking over the titles.


The problem with that is, unlike the nongog giveaway which seems to no longer exist (please point me to if someones brought nongog giveaway back) Gog monthly give away is limited to 1 key a month. Meaning people rather have to gamble to pick a title in a list as to whether something better would be available next batch.

Also this would be alot more work to be done right. I believe with consideration of the 1 game per month cap, each batch would need to be sorted according to popularity.

Well I suppose if it's a kind of gamble and each batch was of roughly equal size and players are told ahead of time how many batches would be coming and when, that could work.

FWIW, ~99% of the list (namely everything donated by Doc, minus the extra editions of Skyrim and possible items donated by other people) was shown ahead of time, here.

In general (not specifically directed to you):
I think the current system works fine. It's an insane amount of work for Lone_Scout, which I'm very grateful that he's willing to do at all. I'm against anything which would make his work harder.

None of us "deserve" to receive the very best game possible. None of us "need" to be at the very front of line with requesting a game. (Yes, easy to say for me this time around, since I lucked out with looking at the thread right as the games showed up, and had picked out a top 10 of desired games before, when Doc asked me in the fightclub thread - but I've also showed up a day or two after such a huge drop - and still found plenty of games to choose from which I really liked.)

There've been many people who just wait until the big mass of requests was dealt with, to then look over the shorter (and still amazing) list of games. If you want to do "better" than that, than that comes at a cost of dealing yourself with the chaos of how swiftly things move. (And Ctrl-F to search other recent requests shouldn't be that hard.)

1. It doesn't say that these titles are going to appear in monthly Gog giveaway.

2. It doesn't say when these titles are going to appear in monthly Gog giveaway.

3. Is that going to be held every time or is that a one off or occasional with some giveaway additions?

4. Not everyone knows to look for this thread or other threads like it. And not everyone has all the time in the world to read every Gog thread.

Current nominations aren't a problem precisely because they're fairly rare as a % of requests. It would definitely massively increase the workload to handle up to 300x requests for 150x games. Eg, if 150x people all pre-requested 'reservations' for themselves then later put in 150x more proper requests, the workload would be:-

0. Go through 150x games and copy / paste 150x links to the game pages.
1. Log 150x pre-requests in chronological order
2. Filter out and respond to edited pre-requests
3. Go back and edit the game list / a separate database to mark what's been pre-requested
4. Log 150x proper requests in chronological order
5. Filter out and respond to edited requests
6. Cross-reference requested vs pre-requested games (far in excess of current nominations)
7. Look up 150x keys in private database to send out
8. Send out 150x keys
9. Update the private key database to mark what's taken
10. Update the available games list minus games given out
11. Respond to those who requested already taken games
11. Respond to those who requested a game that was pre-requested by someone else
12. Respond to those ineligible (forum inactivity, etc)
13. Respond to those eligible but who can't be contacted due to chat settings

Bold (0,1, 2, 3, 6, 11) is all the extra workload you're requesting, definitely far more than current occasional nominations. Besides which it's also unfair for Person A who can't decide between games X or Y to hold up other requesters for two days out of indecisiveness if say Person B who definitely wants game Y and only Y but posts 5s later, whilst person C who wants either games X or Z and asks for game X doesn't know they need to ask for game Z if they don't know if you're actually going to request game X or not. I can see it causing a lot of antagonism for people to sit around 2 days waiting to see if the game they requested is taken because someone else couldn't decide what to ask for when they could have asked for something else. As least now you can see who wants what game for sure before you simply by scrolling up so that you know you need to ask for something else.

Rather than dump all this extra work onto Lone Scout, the best thing to do if you don't know what games you want, is to simply browse the site now then add a load of interesting ones to your wishlist, then when a new batch of games gets added, just cross-reference them and pick one. Something that blocks others (otherwise valid) requests more than it gives you what you actually want would add a significant negative tone to the giveaway, IMHO.

Why would you want to request a gift you're not sure you want? O.o

To be clear, I think your idea is good.

I am just not sure if that's the best solution, but it is a solution, at least in part, even a smaller batch takes time to look through and familiarize oneself with. How much batches there will be, announcing when the batches will appear and making the batches of equal size would help.

I still feel that one solution would be to announce the game list ahead of time for picking, maybe also put links to the games like was done with non-gog to make it quicker for everyone to look over the game titles. This could be done in combination with batches or not (only next upcoming batch would have it's game list released if batches)