I would love to participate, but I do not use twitter, nor do I ever plan to do so. I happily share about gog in person and sometimes through my blog. I can't abide the invasive nature of twitter though.

You will likely be able to take part in the upcomming quests.
Looking at the twitter feed yesterday, there's at least half a dozen different links.

I was kind of thinking of a RESTful based API, but it seems that Twitter doesn't provide that for simple retweets, only for full fledged tweet widgets (though I only took a short glimpse, so please correct me if I'm wrong here). The reason for my concern is elaborated below in response to ET ;)


I think I kind of hinted at this question and it would be more important with a different community. I'll try to explain below.

This could be risky. Considering that Twitter accounts do come free of charge somebody could potentially create a thousand of them (and I've been part of communities where users *would* do just that) and win a dozen games. What I'd have expected is the use of Twitter's RESTful API to tweet for them. This way, you have a full bijective association on the two sets (GoG accounts and Twitter Accounts). With this knowledge and power at your fingertips, you can restrict winning a game to people that already have purchased at least one game at GoG (as GoG accounts are free of charge as well, somebody could create multiple ones, which gets a lot more expansive with a side condition of a game purchase ;)). Not only does this eliminate bogus accounts, but it can be used to offer your customers to tweet on game purchases/reviews later on as well, so the effort leads to recyclable code and long term promotion.
Just my two cents though and less important here, as I think, or well, at least hope that there's less destructive mindset at work in the community around DRM free old games.

That doesn't work that way even for tweet widgets, at least from the dev work I've done against it.

The tweet widgets only take predefined message (which can be changed by the user) and shorten the page URL via the t.co URL shortner, which is operated by Twitter. There's no relationship created between the user and the originating page of the tweet.

For example, I could very well copy that t.co URL and the text and use it in another Twitter client and the resulting tweet will be indistinguishable from a tweet made via the tweet button/widget. Heck, if the timespan between a tweet done from a button and the same exact content via a client is small enough (and no other tweets have been made) you'll get a duplicate tweet error and your tweet won't be posted.

In short, there's no way to tie a Twitter user to a page that generated a tweet when using the Twitter button/widget.

So no, you can't create a full bijective association on the two sets (GoG accounts and Twitter Accounts) without hacks; you could create this for example by placing that tweet button on a page with a unique URL for each specific GOG user, but this means that (1) each URL will be different and (2) you can't do retweets of that post because it will lead to a user-specific page.

Number 2 is the largest problem, as you can enter the contest by simply retweeting the tweet done by @GOGcom; if they had used a custom URL to tie the user account that RT would be invalid (because it doesn't identify you as a particular user), and if they only used the hashtag the clone issue wouldn't be resolved.

In the end, as with all internet based contests, it's all about trusting that your users won't do such a thing as there's absolutely no 100% way (not even close to that) to certify that each entry is for only a particular user and not one of its clones.

Also, these contests are made to get more people to find out about the service and maybe even join the website. You want your current users to entcite other people who follow them to retweet to get a chance and win and if that URL is custom to a user, people who don't have an account won't be able to enter and it means that the whole point of the campaign isn't met.

In short, you want it to be as free as possible from an entry standpoint so that the traffic and new users generated be as big as possible.

As I said, I have never bothered with developing anything for Twitter, so I can only go by the documentation that is available to the public. Judging from signing in with twitter, I would have guessed that your web appearance can create an oAuth based verification to the customer's Twitter account. Now, if that is true, you'd know the GoG customer (as s/he's logged into your web appearance anyway and handled through session/cookie) and you'd have direct access to the Twitter account, send the tweet and be done. That way you'd have the relationship between both accounts. I'm rather unsure where I lacked an obvious stumbling block?

I'd rather considered the effort and resource drain on creating the widget to be the determining factor here.

That's a completely different point (from the technical perspective), but true non the less. Got me there, as I didn't consider this! ;)
Ah, well, I'll just silently mutter on the lacking PR work by GoG (no feedback/progress report/winner's list on the game survey, the broken swords developer's question, or GoG question time)

The signing in with Twitter is for external systems such as comments and the rest and doesn't tie in to the relationship between the user and the tweet.

For example, I can chose to sign in using Twitter and comment on a webpage, but all that does is verify my identity against Twitter (oAuth, just like Facebook) and uses the Twitter display image and URL; it also gives me the option to tweet that comment, but that tweet won't be tied to the page the comment was made on except by URL, and I've already said what the problem with the URL approach is (no retweeting possible).

Sign in with Twitter isn't used when using the tweet button, as that is tied directly to the Twitter Login system.

my name in twitter dragontheuntame

The rest of Might and Magic plus Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon games please.

Oh and Assassin's Creed. Why not?

Sorry GoG, but I don't like Twitter. You'll have to do a lot better if you want to bribe into joining that evil.

As a complete and utter non-twitterer except for contests (There, I admitted it :P), did I do it right? :P

http://twitter.com/Lasharus

I guess this question got missed earlier so I'll repeat it.

What's the winning criteria for the grand prize? If it one chance per user regardless of the number of quests done or do you have a higher chance to win the more quests you enter?

Oh ye baby!!! Let the quest BEGIN!!!

Haha, here's my contribution ;)
http://twitter.com/#!/DPicanzo

I made a twitter account just to tweet this. If I win thats great but I really just wanted to help spread the word about GOG in general. Its a small thing to do to help this great site :)

MOF

At first look I thought you'd be doing one prize draw for all acts/quests of the GOG Hero thing, which would make it mandatory to link tweets with their respective GOG accounts. I was mistaken.

Wow, lots of Twitter hate here, I'm rather surprised. I don't really use Twitter, but I do have a Twitter account just for occasions like this. Having Twitter followers or being a Twitter addict was never a requirement for the contest, just being able to tweet the message was and since Twitter is free, I don't see why people don't just do the same. But if you don't want to, that's fine with me, just increases my odds of being one of the winners.