User blog:AmyAgain/My Thoughts on the Friends Element of the Game

I was level 150-ish before I started to see the real benefit of friends. I had MT-generated friends before that – and some of them were decent about WL items and such. I would visit when I was out of passes for a particular location; but thought the CIs that fell went to my friend – not to me. And while I would occasionally change the time on my phone for energy, never considered that it could be a way to gift. Finding this wiki has changed how I play the game and the friends element is a major part of that.

There are two main functions of friends – visiting/charging and gifting. I see many people who only want friends who visit daily. I am a daily visitor. (Sure, I miss a day every now and then but in 365 days, I’m going to visit 350 or more.) I have many friends who are daily visitors; I have many friends who hardly every visit. I’m fine with both – because those that rarely visit either set it up that way or make up for it tenfold in other ways. When it comes to charging, there are many, many opinions. I’ve had friends who had such complicated instructions for who should charge what, when that I knew I wasn’t a good fit on their list. It was my New Year’s promise to myself not to comment on charging other than to say, I’d prefer friends not charge my trophies.

As for gifting, I have friends at levels ranging from 40-something to 600-something. I have friends who TT and friends who don’t. Friends who can’t or don’t TT, I do expect to visit and send a pass not a fixer. TTing is time consuming. Six days out of 7 when I TT, I honor all special pass requests in names and send in “levels” to my friends so as to not send passes to rooms not yet available to that friend. Sometimes I’m sending 4-5 different passes each day I TT, which is in average of 30-40. No one makes me do that, I enjoy it. But it does require time and commitment. So yes, if someone doesn’t TT and only visits every two or three days because they have more than 100 friends, it probably isn’t a good match for me.

Let me digress for a moment and talk about number of friends. The max friends one can visit or gift a day is 100. Now I have some very, very good friends who have more than 200 friends. I have NO IDEA how they manage that – but they do and kudos to them. In general, when a person has more than 100, I’m suspicious and certainly more than 110 for me, is generally too many. Again, that’s FOR ME.

Back to gifting, I know some people need fixers. I try to TT fixers at least twice a week. When I do, I only send fixers that are on the WL – and only to those that need them. I know others TT fixers to their entire friends list. I think that is very kind of them. It just usually isn’t going to be a match for me.

When it comes to collection items, I usually can gift about 30 a day from extras I have in inventory. That’s easy. My next level challenge to myself is I’m learning how to gift entire collections – and emulating some awesome friends who I consider mentors. It was such a cool thing the first time I received a collection – and it is still cool now every time! I have a goal to try to send a collection to the majority of my friends list at least once a month – hopefully twice. What happens though is I send one collection and get FIVE in return! I am soooo overwhelmed by the generosity of others I feel I can barely think about replicating. I am working on it – especially with players still at lower levels building inventory. I hope my friends will always let me know if they need something specific as I will try to help.

Finally, I have deleted friends. And I’ve been deleted by others. It sounds so mean – and it can cause hurt feelings. But really it isn’t personal – just a difference in playing styles. There are SO MANY awesome people playing this game that there are enough friends for everyone. And there are many, many, many “right” ways to be a good friend – because everyone has their own opinion about what makes an awesome friend. I have a goal to be a great friend. I’ve made some missteps along the way and am trying to learn from them. I’ll handle some things differently in the future. And I’ll continue to strive to emulate some players who I think are super friends – some many levels above my game level; and some many levels below. There are awesome friends at every level in Seekers Notes.