We've lowered the requirements to enter contests after looking at hundreds and hundreds and comments that were removed and realizing they were preventing "real" Redditors from entering contests. This isn't set in stone and we'll continue to evaluate it.
The required comment karma is reduced from 200 to 150. This isn't total karma which includes post karma. This was keeping too many of you out, and the trolls / resellers tend to either have 11 karma or in the thousands (I suspect bought accounts but who knows).
We've reduced the percentage of comments that must be in non-give away subs from 45% to 35%. This is the one that seems to bite most of you - it's also the one that has prevented most the accounts we think are only using Reddit to get free stuff. The number of accounts that have suddenly deleted every post in give away posts has sky-rocketed and we have banned 6 or 7 users for varying duration for trying to circumvent this rule. Please don't do this since if we catch you we will ban you. We also have plans on enhancing the bot to detect this so we don't have to do it manually.
As a future enhancement, we plan on only counting comments that are entries in give-away subs - that is, a top level comment. Non-top level comments will just be ignored. This is so you can have discussions in give-away subs and it doesn't count towards the percentage. I'll announce this when it goes live.
And as before, comments in meta posts won't apply in give away subs.
We welcome feedback and suggestions. On that note, we don't have any plans to making instant give aways illegal. The OP is giving away a game for free and we've always wanted to provide the OP as much flexibility as we can in how they do that. With the new rules in place we hope those instant give aways have a much higher chance of going to a non-bot.
