Thread:Merrimack/@comment-27681107-20170427071006/@comment-32738051-20170427143157

The first one is easy Elisa...everyone will always have 1 more friend in the Top 1000 with Friends only checked because that screen also includes one's self and includes one in the friend count. So your friend has 400 friends but the Top 1000 Friends list includes him making the count 401. If your friend additionally clicks the Find me button and then taps on his own avatar, he will see in the details popup that his friends count is actually 400.

Regarding the friends at very low levels, I'm not sure if he was making a comment only or if he has a question and, if so, what that question is.

Regarding Level and Reputation and Charging, each player actually has 2 levels: 1 for Experience (which has 2 stats: 1 for experience total and 1 for game level, both of which are shown in the upper left of the player's desktop) and 1 for Reputation (which also has 2 stats: 1 for total reputation points and 1 for reputation level, both of which are shown as player's stats in the upper left of a friend's desktop when the player is visiting their friend). When players refer to Level, they mean game level, aka experience level. Almost no one ever refers to reputation levels because it can only be found in the one place and is only visible to one's self. But the reputation points is the stat used to determine one's ranking in the Reputation tab of the Top 1000.

Note: The Friendliness desktop award is a completely separate stat related to friends and is solely based on the number of friends one has. I mention this since one can also see one's friends' Friendliness awards in the Top 1000 as well.

But getting back to your friend's Reputation question, yes charging will help increase one's Reputation points and level. The Friendship chest also awards reputation points. But charging doesn't benefit the friend nearly as much as it benefits the player and I would argue that a friend's gifting habits, which aren't tracked in game, are at least equally, and perhaps more, important as their Reputation is. Likewise, Hiring isn't tracked in game and a player gets to choose for one's self where and when to hire one's friends. Plus everyone charges at different rates and in different ways and with different benefits to their friends due to their professions.

Like I charge only when I reach 4,000+ Power/Strength points (which is more than my max) so I can charge the max actions (currently 10, though I use less because I only charge desktop awards) for all friends in my Friends list, thereby using up most, if not all, of my available points. This means that my Reputation may be lower than that of others, because I charge less frequently, but I more than make up for it with my gifting, for which I time travel so I can boost what I can do. Also, I'm a Merchant in game and my friends don't often need coins as much as they need other professions. Plus any friend, regardless of profession, can benefit a player when that friend charges their Pyramid, Sphere or Cube as these awards give out double the normal items when charged by a friend. And I always charge those awards when I visit. And my friends can always hire me if and when they want more coins.

My advice is that your friend should base judging how good a friend is on both their visiting habits and their gifting habits. Your friend should review how his friends gift him and his friends' Reputation points and also their Power/Strength points available vs. their max and their number of friends. If they are always using their available points, that's a better sign of their friendship than their Reputation points. If they have very few friends and are always using all their points and they're frequently charging your friend's desktop items, that means they're a better friend. But if they're charging less and have a lower max and a large number of friends, it probably means it takes them a very long time to help all their friends, which shouldn't be counted against them. Similarly, they could have either very many or very few friends but always have a huge amount of available Power/Strength points, especially compared to their max, which probably means they're almost never currently visiting and charging, in spite of a high Reputation that they may have earned a long time ago when they had different gameplay habits. But it could also mean they would rather gift than visit currently. It's very hard to see the total picture or even just the big picture since there is so much that isn't tracked, unless one chooses to do so manually offline and that can be very time consuming, and since there could be good reasons why friends play the way they do. Judging one's friends becomes more a matter of one's gameplay preferences and habits at any given point in time versus how well their friends benefits to them match that and that, for at least most players, is always changing.

Not sure about the friends limits. It sounds like the Great Glitch caused G5 and MyTona to at least temporarily limit players to no more than 400 friends due to the server issue. Plus they also scrubbed everyone's Friends lists on the Friends server to eliminate the inactive players. I'm not sure what level of inactivity they used as a baseline and also I don't know if they removed inactive players entirely from their database or just from other players' friends lists. Nor do I know in the case of the latter whether they only eliminated inactive players from large friends lists only or all friends lists. I myself only lost one inactive friend out of several inactive total but I only had about 45 friends before the loss occurred. Best advice here is to just move forward and add new friends to replace those lost and wait and see if that 400 friends limit was temporary, as it should be since there are rewards in game that depend on higher numbers of friends and as it appears since there are players on the Top 1000 with much higher numbers of friends currently.

Anyway, I hope all that helps your friend. One last thing: here are some more links for articles here on the Wiki that your friend may want to check out:
 * Reputation Levels
 * Visiting
 * Gifting
 * Hiring Friends
 * Power
 * Desktop Award Levels: Cube, Pyramid and Sphere