It was a mess. Luckily I have the money for the key, so I won't feel too upset about it, but for future optics for the company I'd suggest a much better way of doing this.
Keys were being distributed, assumedly, through a twitch chat bot that was tracking chat activity. I took these pics (shown below) during the 50 key giveaway, but there were a few smaller ones before that.
The first few giveaways went seemingly "fine". The bot found some chatters and then mods supposedly gave them out keys. They'd stop chat and the bot would post names of chosen players.
7tv allows users to see a short history of messages of other users (seemingly only from the period of the latest few minutes). During the first few giveaways some people used that feature to look at those who got keys and saw that those users "didn't have history of messages" (which I assume simply meant that they were active within an hour or two, instead of the last few mins). And the ones who found that out commented on this fact.
The next few giveaways had "technical issues", so usernames weren't posted in chat and mods supposedly gave out keys w/o chat knowing who received them. I assume this was the case because the tracker could no longer properly track hours-worth of messages. Alternative is that mods changed the tracker settings from hours to minutes.
The alternative becomes a definitive fact for later giveaways because mods simply said "be active right now, because giveaway is going on; you'll get a pm if you win". Which means that the setting was most likely 1min. Winners weren't announced.
Then we come to the last giveaway of 50 keys. I assume picking out random people from the spam was difficult, so mods decided to come back to the first version of the giveaway, but with the 1min setting. So they'd stop the chat completely, after the chat had been spamming messages for a while because mods said to be active cause giveaway would start soon.
And here's where we come to a problem. Throughout the entire stream mods been saying that spamming chat won't increase your chances of getting a key (I assume to try and lessen the spam, and because 1-2h setting of the bot would've caught their message). But here's how the first 19 key winners looked like against the latest messages in chat.
Here's how to read the picture. The right part goes bottom-up right-to-left. So remorni was the latest message in chat before the giveaway and czejkenwow's was the earliest (kaprin's and mine messages are repeats to show the cuttoff). The left part is the winners of the giveaway. There you read them up-to-bottom left-to-right. Remorni was the first winner and Atwood was the last announced in chat winner.
As one might notice, all 19 names were within the latest ~30 names in chat. I assume mods noticed this "peculiar" function of their bot, so the rest of the keys were given out by hand w/o announcing winners in chat.
Now, I won't deny that I'm a fair bit butthurt. I spent the last 27h paying attention to the donation values and repeatedly typing smth in chat to upkeep my activity at all times. I missed another opportunity to try for giveaways during the previous stream, because I didn't know this particular rule for the giveaway (and I don't know if it was explained anywhere before the stream).
Due to some other circumstances I only slept 4h in the last 2 days, because I knew this would be the last chance to try to win a key in a giveaway. Now, the 4h is totally on me (although the previous stream did went over 2h the plan), but the 25h of stream still stands.
So, obviously, having noticed the "peculiar" function of the bot beforehand, I spammed messages quite a bit, in order to be within the latest messages (as obvious by 3 messages within the latest 30). So when NINETEEN OUT OF 30 names got picked, while mine didn't - it stung quite a bit.
When mods announced the invisible giveaway after the 19th winner - it stung even more. I assume they did so because they noticed the "peculiarity" of their bot, which was now way more obvious than before. I noticed it before because I clicked through the Pet giveaway winners and compared them to the chat names. There were 20 winners, most of which were within the latest 40 names in chat. Obviously mods did not notice this during the last pet giveaway.
Now for conclusion . Intrepid, please do better. I dunno how, but I'd imagine a tiny bit of better preparation/research could've let you avoid this issue. This definitely left an even bigger sour taste in my mouth than the previous small blunders (for obvious current reasons).
This was unnecessarily messy.
