is AndrewBaton / PurpleDragonHag / TulipRose in some way affiliated with Hede developer of Climb Challenge? scam detector going off like crazy

scap

SCAP

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forums.indiegala.com

BobbyDoggy

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Registered on the forums in October 2019 but never posted. Never did any giveaways until 17 Nov 2022 and there's 10 of them all for the same high-priced game

Also I think TulipRose is their alt
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tuliprose

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store.steampowered.com

Climb Challenge - Castle on Steam

The player needs to climb the building by clinging and climbing the walls.
store.steampowered.com store.steampowered.com

I noticed because of the massive 80 coin cost to enter draw




By the time IndieGala catches onto this they probably will have already awarded this guy crazy coinage to enter into a bunch of draws and get keys.
If this is a scam the sooner they're countered the better.

What's an expedient way to report this?

This was derived from the massively inflated price for this game at $114, a misleading tactic done to give it a -90% sale and still earn coin.

AndrewBaton suddenly has ten keys for this game to give away when it happens to be at such a large price?

Even if these keys were valid (questionable) it still looks like a very iffy tactic, like keys were mass-produced or mass-bought at low prices and held back from donation until convincing the developer Hede to octuple the price past a hundred dollars.

This seems like a manipulation of the donation system to me, so that you get a higher coin reward for donating the keys than you ought to have based on the purchase price.
 
curtainferno

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Those Climb Challenge - Castle keys come from a DailyIndieGame bundle. Hede is an utter trash game dev, but personally, I wouldn't fault IndieGala users for taking advantage of Hede's shitty business tactics. (Heck, I'm a little tempted to do so myself, now.)
 
madlibrarian

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curtainferno said:
Those Climb Challenge - Castle keys come from a DailyIndieGame bundle. Hede is an utter trash game dev, but personally, I wouldn't fault IndieGala users for taking advantage of Hede's shitty business tactics. (Heck, I'm a little tempted to do so myself, now.)
Click to expand...
DailyIndieGame usually buys these trash keys in bulk at Russian keyshops to bundle them.
 
purpledragonhag

BobbyDoggy

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Yes, like Curtainferno and MadLibrarian said - it's trash games from bundle. And I spent my money to buy these keys, why not? Got it from one of shops, I will not advertise, whoever needs it will find it. I don't use multiple accounts, what am I violating? Everyone can buy similar keys and make giveaways on their own behalf. Why SCAP decided to specify my nickname and raise this issue is not clear. You can always hide the distributions you are not interested in using the extension.
 
dothacker

SlayerofDragons

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Someone posted in gamers lair about it already, and though this entire issue about ridiculous XP farming is unfair to other people, Andrew himself is not breaking any rules. It's the developer who created this situation that is the problem.

HEDE, the developer, is known for taking advantage of numerous asset flips and bundling them to turn a profit. It just so happens he's discovered a new business model, as someone pointed out in aforementioned thread: Blow up the price to insane level, then nearly always run it at 90% off. It's a "scam sale" because you think it's discounted but it's really just trash. His games are completely copied and pasted premade packages that he slaps a price tag on, see some of the detailed reviews by sentinels of the store.

Andrew has a history on steamgifts of giving away tons of these russian games to easily glide to level 10... russian stores sell them for pennies on the dollar, or you can buy them through DIG, and IG has no safeguards to prevent scam pricing from completely obliterating the entire purpose of the giveaway level system, that steamgifts is zeroing all of them to combat. Expect even more of these as time goes on. As it stands, Andrew has not violated any rules and is not a scammer. However, morally speaking, it is unfair to many others who have to give away thousands of games to reach the same level he can reach in less than a month, and there will be many more exploiting this in the near future - especially if HEDE or other such devs release more 100$ priced trash.

Let this be a lesson: Levels are meaningless here. People can legitimately bypass them with minimal investment. You're better off not creating giveaways for high levels, unless you're okay with giving it to people who basically got there in a couple dozen giveaways that cost them less than ten dollars.
 
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scap

SCAP

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Yeah I was thinking of gifting stuff to level up but now I think I'll just save it for trades.

Maybe there could be some way IG could retroactively redact some of this XP as prices are adjusted and rely on stuff like steamgifts to amend the IG points assignment?

sad thing is IG is dropping a dime to do 1iS giveaways for Tales games based on levels

1st Vesperia https://www.indiegala.com/giveaways/card/tales-of-vesperia-definitive-edition/915491
2nd Symphonia https://www.indiegala.com/giveaways/card/tales-of-symphonia/915492
3rd Arise https://www.indiegala.com/giveaways/card/tales-of-arise-deluxe-edition/915493

Would normally cost WAY more coins to big on these games, I think IG is undepricing them as a promo.

I already own them from purchases some years back but it really annoys me that this won't be retricted to generous givers as intended but also to key-miners since we can't fix this.

It's not something to blame an individual miner for, of course (if they didn't do it, they'd be competing against other miners who would) but the broken system.

Can IG not manually intervene to reduce value of a company's games to the minimum possible, just like they did for these Tales draws?

It should be 1iG to enter the draw and 1xp for giving it, that's it. HEDE clearly isn't worth more.

I could see even undervaluing these games to punish developers who engage in the tactic to discourage people buying the keys for giveaway purposes (maybe even give 0 XP for them) which should drive down sales of the shit game.
 
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