Sponsored Giveaways

What a Sponsored Giveaway Is

A sponsor picks the prizes, picks the dates and pays. The game then lists the giveaway where players already look for giveaways, writes a cheerful description of it, and holds a draw when it closes. Winners are credited automatically. The sponsor does not choose them, meet them or receive a thank-you note beyond the one the game writes on their behalf.

The prizes are virtual, carry no cash value, and are as untradeable as everything else in the castle. See How Draws Work for the longer version of that promise.

Sponsoring One

The Sponsor a Giveaway link sits under Candy Giveaway in the Village, and again on the giveaway page, for anyone who has just looked at someone else's prizes and felt competitive.

• Prizes: donator point bundles, VIP months (which stack, so ten places of one month each is a very polite way to spend a Tuesday), Chronos Gems, Resurrection Stones, gold and gems. The list is shown most expensive first, at the Prefect's Lounge's own prices. Only prizes that stack are on it. Anything that cannot be added to a pile, such as a one-off cosmetic, is not for sale to the Department of Redistribution.
• Size: up to 10 places, any mix of prizes, at least $5 (500 donator points) and at most $500 (50,000 donator points) of prizes per giveaway, and no more than three giveaways waiting or running at once. The price is worked out by the game from the catalog. The form does not carry a price, so there is nothing to haggle with.
• Length: a giveaway can run for about a month at most, and can start up to 30 days from now. The form defaults the start to one hour from now and says so.
• Payment: real money, through PayPal. An unpaid giveaway is held for a couple of hours and then quietly forgotten. Take as long as the hold allows: whenever the money lands, the giveaway opens 15 minutes later, or at the start you picked if that is still further away, and the end stays exactly as far past the start as it was. Nobody has ever lost a giveaway by stopping to read the receipt.
• Public or anonymous: a public sponsor is named on the giveaway and on the Most Generous Giveaway Sponsors board. An anonymous one appears as "an Anonymous Benefactor" everywhere players can look. Staff can see the name. Staff are sworn to secrecy and, frankly, bored.
• The description: the game writes it. Sponsors cannot add text of their own, which has spared everyone the poetry.
• No editing after payment: check the preview, tick the three boxes, then pay. After that the giveaway is exactly what you paid for.
• Canceling: a sponsor can cancel only before anyone has entered, and the money comes back as donator points. Once a single ticket exists, the giveaway is a promise to a stranger, and the Ministry takes promises to strangers seriously.

Entering

A ticket costs 10 beans. If you would rather not spend any, the Ministry has arranged for the beans to find you.

• The free entry: every new day, natural or bought (a Chronos Gem or a Point Parlor extra new day counts), brings one free entry in each open giveaway. You will find beans in a pocket you were sure was empty, and they go straight into the jar. It is one free ticket per giveaway per new day, claimed from the giveaway page.
• Use it or lose it: claim it before your next new day or it is gone. Unclaimed entries do not pile up. They are simply never sent, which the Ministry files under "savings." Once you have claimed one, the page shows a countdown to the next.
• The cap: nobody holds more than 100 tickets in one giveaway, however the tickets were obtained and however long the giveaway runs. A free player who claims every natural new day can reach it. A paying player gets there sooner. Nobody gets past it.
• One place per player: tickets are weighted, so more tickets means better odds, but one player can win only one place. First place is drawn first, then second, and so on, skipping anyone who has already won.
• Short of beans: Buy Beans in the Prefect's Lounge, or buy a new day and collect the free entry that comes with it. Neither raises the cap.
• Who may enter: you must be 18 or older and not live in one of the places listed in the giveaway's official rules. The standard list: Washington, New York, California, Connecticut, Montana, New Jersey, Tennessee, Indiana, Maine, Louisiana, Michigan and Maryland in the United States, plus Belgium, Quebec, Italy, Brazil, India, China, the Philippines, Australia and Germany. Some of these places ban giveaways outright, and the rest wrote their laws broadly enough that the Ministry would rather not find out. You attest to all this with a tick box when you enter. Void where prohibited.
• Sponsors and their alts: a sponsor cannot enter their own giveaway, and neither can accounts the game can link to the sponsor. Staff handle the rest, as they do for every other giveaway, with a clipboard.

When One Is Live

You should not have to go looking for a giveaway; the giveaway comes to find you. While one is running, the Village says so in pink, next to the link. A new giveaway also makes the news and rings your alerts, once. In a giveaway's last 24 hours you get one reminder, provided there is still room on your ticket card; players at the cap hear nothing, on the grounds that a nag is only useful when there is something left to do about it.

The Draw

When a giveaway closes, the next scheduled roll draws the winners with the server's secure random numbers. The roll runs twice a day, so there is a short wait between "closed" and "drawn," during which the Ministry assembles its dignity.

• Too few players: if, at the first close, fewer players have entered than there are places, the giveaway is extended once by seven days. It is the only extension anyone gets.
• Leftover places: after the second close, any place still without a winner is credited to the sponsor as donator points. Prizes nobody won do not vanish. They go home.
• The fingerprint: every finished giveaway shows a draw fingerprint, a short code made from the tickets and the winners at the moment of the draw. Staff can recompute it from the records, so a result quietly edited later would no longer match its own fingerprint. The winners themselves come from the server's secure random number generator, which no player, sponsor or member of staff can steer. None of this proves you deserved to lose.

Every Giveaway Costs 10 Beans Now

The Candy Giveaway and club giveaways follow the same rules: 10 beans a ticket, the same free entry with each new day, the same cap. A giveaway run by a club says so under its title, naming the club and its tag, and the name links to the club page; the winner's owl names it too. The Ministry once let each giveaway set its own price. It no longer does, after discovering that a price written on a card is only as stable as the person who wrote it. See Bertie Bott's Beans. Beans also arrive from login streaks and the Term Pass.

The Ministry's Own

One giveaway a month is not sponsored by anyone: the Ministry runs it, and its prizes are items you cannot get anywhere else. It follows the same entry rules as everything above. See Exclusive Giveaway.

Official Rules

Every giveaway has its own official rules on its page: who is running it, who may enter, the dates in UTC, the prizes, the odds, the draw and what happens to leftovers. The headline is no purchase necessary, because the free entry is real. The Terms of Service have a short Sponsored Giveaways section that says the same thing in a more formal coat.

Elections

Sponsor a giveaway whenever you like, candidate or not. A Minister's platform may not mention one, though. The reasoning, and the story of the rule that changed, is in Minister Elections.

See Also

• Exclusive Giveaway
• Bertie Bott's Beans
• How Draws Work
• Minister Elections