Board Thread:Friend Code Exchange/@comment-26764586-20151004044841/@comment-32738051-20151004165035

Yep, that's me. Boring player name I know...it's an old habit that dates back to playing video games back in the 70s and 80s. ;-)

As for gifting, all my strategies I've come up with on my own and they keep changing as my levels and my free time to play the game keep changing. However, those strategies are based mostly on the great info Foss and others have posted in this Wiki. In particular, I've referenced Foss' pages on Friends (in navigation links), Gifting (related link in Friends page), Collections (in navigation links), and Combining Elements (related link on Collections page). But necessity is the mother of invention and I have mostly gone looking for info when I'm desperately seeking ways to improve my game play or to avoid pitfalls that really annoy me. ;-) Which happened a lot more often before I created my spreadsheet tool. I too don't have a lot of friends...only 2 more than you. But before the spreadsheet tool, I was too often removing friends who went inactive because that was the only way I could be sure I was helping those who were active. Now with the tool, I can keep inactive friends forever and it won't detract from my helping the active ones. As for collections, I have a spreadsheet of all the collections I've built at least once. That is a criteria of mine: build it once before gifting it...thereafter, I'll gift it when it's in my inventory and I think a friend would have more of a need for it than I do at that moment. So far, I've built 123 different collections at least once and I consider all of them fair game for gifting when they are back in my inventory. Before the tool, I never really knew what I needed so I never really knew what, at least at the higher levels, I could and would want to gift. With the tool, I've been able to gift some really great collections, gift my friends elements to build them and really vary my gifting not only for each friend but in general among all of them. It's not perfect and I'm sure there are times some friends would rather I just stuck to their wish lists. But none of them have ditched me yet as far as I know. ;-)