Disclaimer: The following is all my 2 cents, and if you don’t feel comfortable giving away keys, then please don’t.
TBH I have been reading complaints to this effect for literally years now. They generally come from communities where people do everything and anything and then go “it wasn’t me”. I assumed Humble won’t reinstate them, because they have damning evidence.
By everything and anything I mean:
- Selling
- Trading
- Group buys / Bundle splitting
- Bulk purchases / redemptions
- Multiple accounts
- other stuff I probably don’t even know about because I don’t do any of it, so I’m not up to speed with all of the abuses
Many subreddits are rife with people openly conducting these activities. There is literally no mystery about it. They’re not the folks you see here who obviously buy for themselves and then share their left-overs.
It’s pretty mind-numbing seeing the number of Humble haters who apparently do nothing all day, but post on subreddits and other communities about how terrible the bundles are, and how every bundle is absolutely worse than the one before, thanks IGN, disaster-disaster, and so on.
IMO the math is damning - they cannot all be honestly disgruntled customers. They have an axe to grind, and why?
The relevant subreddit moderators should have mopped up this whole mess but, as you probably know, every subreddit can set their own rules, and as long as they are not in violation of Reddit’s general rules, then nothing will happen.
This means if a subreddit has mods who are part of the problem, they won’t do anything.
Other subreddits and communities may have mods that don’t think it’s their problem to solve.
BTW originally the complaints came from people who redeemed keys instead of gift links – in fact I used to suggest to use the latter instead. The reason is simple: if someone sold Humble gift links on eBay or other platforms, the trick would become abundantly clear to unsuspecting customers. A part of those, who don’t know about Humble (yes, this is a thing even though it may seem crazy to you), would then skip the middle-man and go to the source.
Afterwards, there were reports of people getting banned for giving away links, and since it is extremely hard for a third party to figure out what’s truly going on, I stopped giving any advice. That was years ago, mind.
I really wish Humble would come forward and pull the chair from under people who regularly sell keys, because they have the hard data, and I’m sure we would have some good laughs seeing what some of these folks were actually doing instead of just hearing “not me not me”.
Back when I was still playing HotS regularly, Blizzard would also be rather mysterious about the reasons why people were getting banned.
As a result, the subreddit was full of users claiming immaculate innocence. Others would spend all day long spreading lies, like that Blizzard would ban for simply typing anything in the chat. (whereas, for something to happen, not only the rules needed to be violated, but also the incident had to be reported multiple times - since usually even the most egregious behaviors don’t get reported by enough players in any individual match, this meant that accounts that were affected, were being toxic in dozens of matches)
This secrecy created the conditions for people to blame Blizzard, and then insist they didn’t do anything wrong. I’m sure the parallels are obvious.
From time to time, Blizzard would take some of the most outrageous claims and reply to them; some users were turned into veritable memes, exactly because Blizzard could prove the wrongdoings beyond any doubt.
Ha! You know what would happen, don’t you?
The moment rules are delineated, abusers would make sure to stay within the limits.
