SorrowBorn: I wonder if perchance there might be a "Vote to UNKEANE." button during the next sale, that once a number of votes have been tallied, moves the sale onto the next set of games to prevent the stagnation that occurs so often upon finding these Keane like games.
Though I have no clue what kind of vote limit it would have.
Any idea has to be passed through a filter of "If this were to be done, and I was a bad guy, how easily could I abuse it to my own advantage or even to just cause havoc?" People would most likely just click on that "vote to unkeane" button on every single game that came up that they didn't care about, and it wouldn't take long to get enough random people who are monitoring the site trying to just get freebies to force the sale to the next game prematurely. That would just be random people just being people though without any real ill will per se. But then it would be easy to write a python script containing a list of one's own wanted games such as the one that already exists out there (and thus just modify that script) to do:
while (game not on my wanted list) {
jam on the "vote to unkeane" button
}
Then fire that script up over the Tor network 100 times or similar.
One always has to take "gaming the system" into account to prevent abuse, and to think outside of the box about how one would go about trying to abuse anything and everything because there's always "that guy" who is going to do it. :)
I'm one of the "good guys" or so I like to think and my motto is that if a good guy like me can think of a way to beat the system in theory, then someone or 10 someones out there either have already written the script or are in the process of doing so.
Ultimately, GOG knows if this promo format is giving them that which they seek, to draw in new customers and bring in new revenue or not. That's true even if some portion of people don't like the format at all, or if it has real flaws. If it is working to bring in revenue and new customers they may tweak it here and there, but I wouldn't expect them to do anything to make it more complicated nor to make it easy for hackers to game to their advantage or cause disruption. If the promo is not bringing in customers or revenue at a rate they expected, then they'll rethink the whole promo and replace it with something else rather than add ugly hacks to it. Since this is the 3rd Insomnia promo though I think it's safe to say that economically it has worked out well for GOG, and they've refined the process a few times now to run a little smoother so as long as they're seeing the numbers they want to have, they're probably not going to institute any major changes that could disrupt the flow, but certainly nothing that will lower their sales figures to give people higher chances of winning freebies or to force the sale to end sooner. It would just work against their end goals.