It has been a very long time since there has been an announcement posted for the group and I think now it is a good time to make one since a few things have changed. Lets just jump straight into it:

1. As you might have noticed Reforced is not the one who wrote this announcement. Group ownership has been transferred over in September last year. I didn't see a point making an announcement about it back then since it did not affect at all how the group was being ran, but now a couple of things are changing so I thought I might as well mention it.
   
   
2. There is now a new application thread on SteamGifts (the old one has been closed already for the better part of the month as I had limited amount of time to check it due to travel). You can find it here[www.steamgifts.com]. Only change made to the application process made is how we handle people who have unactivated/multiple wins. If you are already a member and have unactivated/multiple wins expect to be contacted at some point in the near future about it.
   
   
3. I have updated the FAQ a little to hopefully make a few things more clear, detailed and accurate with the way the group is being ran. I would suggest everyone to take a look to get a refresher, but there are no major changes except the one mentioned in the previous point.

That should be it. If you have any questions please feel free to ask bellow or contact me directly!

How time flies when you're playing games having fun! On the 10th of January the group will exist two years. Things are running smooth and we seem to have reached a stable member count of over 850 members, who've created over 12.000 giveaways totalling to more than 19.000 games: That's a lot of playing going on! 😄

A long overdue shout-out is in order for our new administrators MouseWithBeer[www.steamgifts.com] and Morikalina[www.steamgifts.com]! You may have seen them handling group requests or in your giveaways sending out warnings to players who are taking a bit longer. Also behind the scenes they're doing a lot of great work moderating giveaways. We're very happy with them having joined the team. ❤️

As for festivities: at the moment you'll find more than 1000 group giveaways[www.steamgifts.com] ending on the 10th of January, so go and take your chances on some hidden gems in there.. 💎👀

We all wish you a great 2019!

Steam has recently changed the Privacy Settings of the service. The games in users' libraries and their playtimes are no longer displayed by default, which makes it impossible to validate that group members play their wins. We therefore changed the group rules to require public profile and public game details, including playtimes.

Changing it is very simple, just go to your Privacy Settings and change your "Game details" from Friends Only to Public and make sure the checkbox bellow is unchecked. That's it! Here is an example[www.playingappreciated.com] of how it all should look.

Thank you in advance!

How time goes by so fast! With over 600 active members and 3000 giveaways (for a total of 6000 copies and 1600 unique games), we can say it has been a wild six months! :) The number of giveaways has been increasing, with last month setting the record at 786 giveaways[www.steamgifts.com]. The group is very much alive and growing, and we are very happy with how committed members are to play their wins, and how generous giveaway creators have been.

In this announcement we would like to update you about a few recent changes and improvements. Some of which have just been rolled out this week. The FAQ and main page will be updated accordingly soon.

Starting from today we will stop sending reminders to winners who didn't play their games or didn't play them sufficiently. Instead we will only send a warning once a month is over, and only if the winner added a comment thanking the giveaway creator. Members will have 7 days of grace to meet requirements.

Since April 9th giveaway creators have an option to approve their own created giveaways. This enhancement was well adopted and we decided to evolve it further. At the end of the day, if the giveaway creator is happy with how the game was played, we are likely to be happy too. Moving forward we will not review giveaways that creators already approved. For easy distinction, these giveaways will still be displayed using a lighter shade of green, but will automatically be moved to Played and will be considered as played for all intents and purposes.

As a reminder, the current group policy is that winners are required to play the game if they won it via Playing Appreciated. If they are also members of other groups the giveaway is shared with, we don’t enforce this requirement, as they could have won it even if they weren’t PA members. This policy was recently a subject of some debate. To better re-evaluate its impact and look into alternative options, we are now in the process of gathering more data. For giveaways shared with other groups, where the winner is also member of groups other than PA, the giveaway will either be approved if played sufficiently, or move to Unfollowed if not.

Currently we (and especially a big thanks for Yirg for putting allot of time in this) are modifying game data (playtime and achievements) for almost every game, to ensure the data is as accurate as possible. The initial data is still based on SteamSpy and Steam, but this is then overridden with data from more reliable sources such as HowLongToBeat.‎com, Astats.nl, Exophase.‎com, reviews from Steam, as well as member feedback and statistics we gathered already in the group tool. If any member feels the data for a game is inaccurate we would encourage them to report this to us. Simply create a topic in the members forum or join the group chat and report it there.

As some might have noticed, for the last couple of months we require new members to first play and finish a game before getting an invite. Gone are the days where people just added a comment "invite me", joined the group and then leeched games with no intention to play. We also made it possible to join by creating a giveaway for the group. So far both methods seem to work very well and help weed out freeloaders. Here are some statistics[www.steamgifts.com] gathered last month following a request from group member Rupti.

Among the planned enhancements to the group tool are the addition of links to Steam reviews and videos by winners. Are you still missing something else or would like to see something done a bit differently? Suggestions and comments are always welcome! Feel free to make a suggestion in a dedicated thread in the members forum or to raise it in the Open Discussion thread, and who knows what will happen in the next six months of Playing Appreciated! :)

Definitively not a super secret hidden giveaway! xD[www.steamgifts.com]

Today exactly one month has passed since this group started! We are proud to announce that there are currently 399 members and 300 giveaways, giving away a total of 408 games! In a perfect world that would mean more than one game for every member. We hope to keep it like that and are very happy with this great start and community involvement.

As the group grows bigger, moderation will become more important to adhere to our primary groups goals: playing the games within a month. Therefore I'm pleased to (officially) announce that Yirg[www.steamgifts.com] will be helping with that and has already done so in the last weeks, which is greatly appreciated.

For the most common questions we've made a FAQ on the group page. Due the group size moderation will be become more strict, as doing it case-by-case would simply take too much time. For this reason we have built a group tool[reforced.nl], where anyone interested can see the progress of group giveaways and we can be transparent about it.

Not played wins
Many question asked by giveaway creators were about how we will handle games that were not played within a month. For the time being this will be as described below.

For games that were not played within 3 weeks we may add a courtesy warning, but only when the winner thanked the giveaway creator. Moderators will reply to that, giving the winner a handy reminder that he or she has to start playing or they won't meet the one month requirement. This warning will only be posted in the first giveaway the winner is about to miss and will not be repeated.

If the game still is not played after 4 weeks a giveaway will be marked as non-played. We will check the giveaway page for any comment from the winner as to why this happened. If there is no comment, the winner will be kicked from the group without a further warning. When he/she applies to be a member again, the previous winnings have to be played first. On a repeated offence, the member will be permanently banned.

Other questions, comments, suggestions
Almost every day somebody will be available in the group chat. Feel free to hop by to say hello! We also have an Open Discussion thread where you are also free to drop a message.

That's it for now! Please subscribe to the group announcements forum to get notifications about any further announcements.