My working theory - I'm a farmer and get up early in the morning, have my coffee, and log on to read my email, etc., unless I have to go in to work at my real job. One of the "etc.," things now is doing the silly Abound contest. On days that I don't go in to work, I've won 500 PlusPoints.
As
@dioxide45 hints at, the first person to log on after the date/time randomly set for a prize wins that prize as an instant win. If no one else has logged onto Vistana for several hours and done the Abound contest, there are a lot more randomly set date/times that are covered by the date/time I log in. The prize I've won twice is being awarded 996 times over 12 weeks, which is 84 days or about 2016 hours. If the date/times for the awards are randomly spread in a uniform distribution, there would be one about every two hours. The same analysis is true for the 1,000 Bonvoy point prize, won by
@dioxide45 per
this post by the way,
@CPNY. The other prizes listed have fewer occurrences, being awarded 120 or 240 times each, so would only show up about every 17 or 34 hours. In a way, that outcome makes sense as the PlusPoints are for use only in Abound, which is what they are trying to get people to use, and giving those away will drive usage. The other prizes are a bit more tangentially related - an Abound towel is the closest to an advertising memento, while the Bonvoy points and the Shutterfly book are more travel related than Abound related.
Anyway, back to my theory - if I log on to Vistana and run through the contest at a time in the morning when no one has been on in several hours because it isn't a Tuesday and there are no highly desirable dates for traveling 6, 8, 10, 12, or 13 months out (covering all the options for VSN and Abound), I am more likely to instantly win a prize than if I log on to Vistana in the afternoon. The prize I win will probably be either the 500 PlusPoint one or the 1,000 Bonvoy point one because there are a lot more of them. The rules indicate that "Odds of winning an Instant Win Game prize depend on the number of Instant Win prizes available divided by the number of eligible Instant Win Game plays." As is true with a lot of things in the timeshare world, that is true to a certain extent if looked at from a macro perspective, for the player in an individual instance, the odds of winning an Instant Win Game prize that is randomly distributed by time is influenced a bit more strongly by how many other players are entering around the same time as they are.
I was hoping to test my theory this morning as it's still a bit too dark to go out and feed the critters, but the Vistana site is just giving me an HTTP error 500, which is no where as good as giving me the 500 PlusPoints.
