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Giveaway fairness concerns

Asked Nov 13, 2026·1 reply·Last activity today·Open in Discord ↗
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Smart FlamingoOriginal post

Hey team, so I have used the giveaway function several times while streaming however a couple of nights while using it i was made pretty uncomfortable by it. I had somewhere around 20 prizes for my viewers and at least 5 people won a prize twice. Considering 30-40 people participated in each giveaway, i can't help but think that this was more than a coincidence.

The way each giveaway was conducted:
I set the command: !100
Everyone posts the command.
I draw the prize then give it to the winner.
I reset all entries.
I change the command: !130
Repeat for each prize (commands were issued based on the prize being a card number).

I would understand a coincidence of 1 or 2 people winning a prize however at least 5 across 30-40 people seems a bit more like a pattern.

Has there been any concerns about this before? Could I have done something wrong? Is there anything I can change?

1 reply

night

Hey! You didn't do anything wrong, and nothing's broken. Nightbot picks each winner uniformly at random from the eligible entries, using a public, verifiable randomness source.

Honestly, what you saw is just what fair draws look like at those numbers. With around 20 prizes and 30-40 entrants, every draw is independent, so on average about 4 people are going to win twice. Seeing 5 or more happens roughly 20-40% of the time, and getting through 20 draws with zero repeat winners would happen less than 1% of the time. It's the birthday paradox, basically. Feels wrong, but the math checks out.

One thing worth knowing: resetting entries between prizes also wipes Nightbot's memory of who already won, so the "Unique Winners" setting doesn't carry over from one prize to the next. If you want each person to only win once, you've got two options:

1. Collect entries once, turn on "Unique Winners", and draw all the prizes from that one list without resetting.
2. Keep doing it per prize like you are now, and just remove previous winners from the entry list before each draw.

Hope that helps!