Thread:4solace/@comment-32738051-20161105220101/@comment-32738051-20161106201325

Okey dokey, here goes. I'll start with some basics of what I do and have done then we can take it further based on whatever questions you have.

Quite possibly the most important thing to remember is no matter what advice you get or what you end up doing now, know that it will change repeatedly over time. I can't tell you how many times I have changed my methodologies and that has been affected by my time constraints, my level of interest in the game, whether an event is in progress and whether or not I'm participating in it, what I've learned to do in game (particularly time travel), and what my friends are doing and how regularly they play.

The first thing I did was to set a reasonable limit on my number of friends, which has changed over time. I was interested in the Friendliness award up through 50 friends and so that was my high limit. To go beyond that number complicates gifting since the daily free gift limit is 50. But I find that my current gifting patterns work best if I have between 42 (7 pages of friends, 6 per page) and 48 friends (8 pages). With time travel, I end up gifting 1 page of friends per day, with 2 pages on either Fri or Sat night, effectively gifting collection items to each friend every week.

The next thing I did was to set criteria for keeping or removing friends and a way to track that. I have always used activity as a basic criteria but how I judge that activity has evolved over time. Early on I judged it by how long it had been since the last time I received a collection item or combining element from each friend. But I found I was too often deleting friends so I changed that to track when each friend sent me any gift, even if it was only a thank you. It really helped back then to use a tracking spreadsheet, not only to keep track of gifts received but also what I gifted them as well as certain other info, like preferences and special requests. If a friend went 7 days without sending me anything, I stopped gifting them CIs. If a friend went 14 days without sending me anything, I stopped gifting them CEs too. And if they went 30-60 days without sending me anything, I deleted them. I still find it surprising how many players never send anything except TYs.

But as you can imagine, tracking can be time consuming and it takes away from how much you can do in game. Once my friends list had finally stabilized to the point where most of my friends played at least regularly, if not daily, I dropped the spreadsheet and started fine tuning my gameplay so I could standardize and simplify so I could do more and spend less time doing it. It used to take me weeks to cycle through my friends for CI gifting; now that I TT and have simplified my methodologies, it only takes 1 week. Also, I no longer track activity according to gifts received but instead by whether or not their gift box is full. If someone's box fills up during a calendar month, I keep track of it in my head and if they haven't cleared it by the next month, I delete them. If they're on this Wiki, though, I will reach out to them here first.

As for adding friends, I do like to add new friends periodically when I have room on my FL. But I set criteria there too; currently that is levels 40-200 and regular, if not daily, players. I like referring to the Top 1000 list regularly and prefer to be in the top 50% of my friends, or higher, in each of the 5 stats. And the max level helps with that. Also, higher level friends tend be harder to gift and gifting is currently the most important thing I do in the game. I find that setting a minimum level helps weed out the casual and less regular players as well as those who tend to quit playing. My minimum is a bit arbitrary. I could probably set it lower with little risk of new players becoming inactive or leaving the game. But I remember when my minimum was only 25 and I had to delete too many players. Lastly, I don't advertise it but I don't add new friends from the game anymore...I'm only accepting new friends who are already on this Wiki. This isn't always the case but I usually find Wiki players tend to be more committed to the game.

Well I could go into more detail but this is probably a good place to stop and give you time to digest it before moving on to anything you want more details on. 😊