Starwood have just launched a new daily competition, which pleasingly is open to UK residents. You can win starpoints or Amazon giftcards. It's in conjunction with MLB - Major League Baseball, which I gather to be like a village rounders match, but with more pauses and worse food.... ;-) Takes a minute or two to enter/play each day, you just need to remember to head back each day to maximise your chances of winning! Details, and to enter, at https://www.spgpromos.com/getinthegame/
I've played this twice and just get offered 15% off the MLB shop. I assume that means I've not won. They should put a message there to say if you've won or you haven't.
Day 3 update. Chose the Giants as my home team and Dodgers as away. Chose a knuckle ball first up. Immediately got a message saying I'd hit a double. Clicked the link. Was taken to the same page as yesterday for 15% off the MLB shop. Shrugged and closed the window. Then had an email from SPG saying I'd won 5000 points! "YOUR PRIZE: 5,000 STARPOINTS®. Congratulations! Your prize will be reflected in your account in approximately three weeks."
Every day so far, picking a random set of teams and throws, I've had miss = strike 1, miss = strike 2, hit but then caught so out, and only the "save 15% at the MLB.com Shop" Clearly you lot were much better at rounders at school than I was ;-)
Those you who've won - do you happen to remember the time you entered at? It occurs to me that some of these competitions will have a certain number of prizes to give away each hour or each x minutes, and if you enter towards the end of that time period they might have run out. If we knew when people won, the rest of us might be able to better time our entries to maximise our chance!
Seems this one is worth persevering with. I entered again today having not played at the weekend due to mammoth childcare duties, and won another 1k points... Still 3k points behind Litefoot though
Shockingly no wins for me yet! I did do exceptionally well out of the last promo/game though, so certainly can't complain. If it's anything like the last one, I think timing is likely to be important as gagravarr suggests. I was playing for each of my family's accounts and all the wins were immediately after the hour, and in the morning UK-time (when the millions of American SPG members were sleeping presumably).
tom - was that a second win on the same account? Did you get a second email definitely confirming it, because on the last game they ran you could only win one prize.
Actually, I should probably just go and read the terms and conditions rather than speculating. I'll let you know if I spot anything interesting!
I've had a quick glance through and the wording is similar to last time, with the game period being "randomly seeded with winning time tags", but unless I was just extremely lucky last time (possible but unlikely), what they mean by random might not be entirely random - I'll be sticking to times immediately after the hour, the quarter, half etc. One key difference with this game is that you can win ONCE PER DAY, rather than just once so it's definitely worth continuing to play. Not being in the US, we're eligible for 799 out of the 1360 prizes, with 255 of those being specifically for non-US entrants. Roughly half of the prizes are for 1,000 Points (425), the rest being for 5,000 (the 255 non-US prizes), 10,000 (85) or 20,000 (34). The game period runs from 9am (EDT) on March 3rd to 23:59.59 on March 18th - so 375 hours by my maths - which averages out at about 2 prizes per hour. I'm not certain about SPG's membership numbers, but suspect that outside the US, China is probably their big market and I'd be amazed if some smart people on Chinese forums haven't worked out how to best take advantage of this already, so given that there's a decent chunk of specifically non-US prizes I'm going to be playing when China is sleeping from now on in order to maximise my chances of getting some of the 255 5,000 points prizes. It'd be great if people can carry on posting the times they win at so we can see what "random" really means. It's times like these I'm grateful the forum hasn't really taken off yet - we could really cleanup here...
I really wouldn't recommend creating SPG accounts for your pets or fictitious family members or any nonsense like that, but it's definitely worth signing up actual family if they're not already members - remember you can transfer SPG points freely and easily to members of the same household.