Gifting Strategies - Updated for post-MG strategy

Hello all, Your friendly neighborhood gifting Nazi here to offer more advice on how to be efficient with your gifting and not irritate your friends LOL! MM is a highly strategic game, so part of your strategy must include organized gifting practices. Advice for the post-MG fix daily player n00bs:

Two types of gifts: Chargers (the items in the small boxes under the charge button on the collection menu) and Collection items. When you gift a charger, it does not come out of your inventory, you keep the ones you have. When you gift a collection item, it is deducted from the amount that you have. You can send up to 50 chargers per day and up to 10 collection items per day (one each to each person), and you can drop the counter by paying 10 diamonds to keep gifting other people. Some collection items can be bought from the collections console, and therefore you can gift them without dropping your gift counter (and gift multiples to the same person... look for the collection items with the cash register icon) but they do cost quite a bit in diamonds to buy so be careful!

1) Fundamental changes in friend management: Too few friends and you’ll never get all the chargers you need when you need them (especially for Full Moon), too many and they’re difficult to manage (also some people delete people with much over 500 friends because they can’t possibly have time to interact with many). I’ve found 150 is a nice sweet spot; you can get through the whole list checking each person’s wall in 3 days by doing 50 at a time so no one is neglected for long.

2) Daily wall charger requests: These are the ones that show up on your wall after someone has gone into their collections console, tapped the chargers for a collection and hit "Ask a Friend". These do NOT come out of the daily 50 charger gift allowance and do NOT come out of your inventory. You should grant ALL wall requests you get for chargers; all it costs you is the time to tap that button. Try to send out a charger request to every friend, every day… it is wise to take the chance to stock up even if you have no quests/tasks that require what you’re asking for. Browse the forums for the order of quests and what might be coming up that you could need a lot of.

3) Daily proactive gifting: On a daily basis I go to the friend list and pick a friend that's in a different spot in my list than the previous day (that way I can cycle through my whole list usually within three days) to visit and start a "gifting run", going manor to manor checking wish lists, walls, and leaving tips (bankers check first, some people don't want banker tips). Concentrate on wish lists first and foremost. This part (#3) is the one that varies from person to person the most based on game focus and the amount of time each player has to spend in-game.

4) Trade requests: Let’s just say it… Chargers are not an acceptable trade for collection items; they are not nearly as valuable! It is perfectly acceptable to browse a friend’s collections and ask politely if you have something they’d like to trade for a particular item of theirs, but you definitely need to take the time to look at what they have if you’re going to ask. But here's your list of DON'Ts: DON'T send an item (collection or not) without asking first to see if it is an acceptable trade, ask for something a person has only one or two of, ask someone to give you a collection item in trade for a charger, or just ask someone to help you with your WL when you have nothing but collection items in your list (ask for something specific and offer a trade). In general I think most people avoid actively asking for trades too much because you don’t want to be seen as a beggar, but it is fine when you really need an item or have built up a rapport with the player.

Other notes:

• One of the reasons why people think I’m a gifting Nazi is that I personally have a big beef with what I call "random gifts". If you really want to help or need something out of someone’s collections but don’t have anything from their WL, simply ask what you can send instead. Just picking something missing out of one of the collections is a waste because usually even if it’s not on the WL there’s something else they would’ve put on the WL if they had the room.
  
• When you’re visiting to look at WL’s, the order in which you visit friends is the same as the order you see them in on the “Ask a Friend” screen. It is the order in which they were added to you as a friend, not the order in which they appear in the friend list.
  
• If you are leaving the game or taking a break for a while, remove all of the items off of your wish list and post a note to your wall so people know not to expect a return gift from you. If you are for sure deleting the game never to return, consider deleting your friends first.
  
• Many people keep a spreadsheet to track gifting habits and identify friends who’ve become inactive. This is time consuming but can be a rewarding exercise from time to time as you’ll find weeding out inactive players means less work for the same outcome.
  

Comments and additions to these tips welcome... also continue to discuss your own strategy and how/if it changed after removal of MGing.

[quote="Soozicle"]Hello all, Your friendly neighborhood gifting Nazi here to offer more advice on how to be efficient with your gifting and not irritate your friends LOL! MM is a highly strategic game, so part of your strategy must include organized gifting practices. Advice for the post-MG fix daily player n00bs:

Two types of gifts: Chargers (the items in the small boxes under the charge button on the collection menu) and Collection items. When you gift a charger, it does not come out of your inventory, you keep the ones you have. When you gift a collection item, it is deducted from the amount that you have. You can send up to 50 chargers per day and up to 10 collection items per day (one each to each person), and you can drop the counter by paying 10 diamonds to keep gifting other people. Some collection items can be bought from the collections console, and therefore you can gift them without dropping your gift counter (and gift multiples to the same person... look for the collection items with the cash register icon) but they do cost quite a bit in diamonds to buy so be careful!

1) Fundamental changes in friend management: Too few friends and you’ll never get all the chargers you need when you need them (especially for Full Moon), too many and they’re difficult to manage (also some people delete people with much over 500 friends because they can’t possibly have time to interact with many). I’ve found 150 is a nice sweet spot; you can get through the whole list checking each person’s wall in 3 days by doing 50 at a time so no one is neglected for long.

2) Daily wall charger requests: These are the ones that show up on your wall after someone has gone into their collections console, tapped the chargers for a collection and hit "Ask a Friend". These do NOT come out of the daily 50 charger gift allowance and do NOT come out of your inventory. You should grant ALL wall requests you get for chargers; all it costs you is the time to tap that button. Try to send out a charger request to every friend, every day… it is wise to take the chance to stock up even if you have no quests/tasks that require what you’re asking for. Browse the forums for the order of quests and what might be coming up that you could need a lot of.

3) Daily proactive gifting: On a daily basis I go to the friend list and pick a friend that's in a different spot in my list than the previous day (that way I can cycle through my whole list usually within three days) to visit and start a "gifting run", going manor to manor checking wish lists, walls, and leaving tips (bankers check first, some people don't want banker tips). Concentrate on wish lists first and foremost. This part (#3) is the one that varies from person to person the most based on game focus and the amount of time each player has to spend in-game.

4) Trade requests: Let’s just say it… Chargers are not an acceptable trade for collection items; they are not nearly as valuable! It is perfectly acceptable to browse a friend’s collections and ask politely if you have something they’d like to trade for a particular item of theirs, but you definitely need to take the time to look at what they have if you’re going to ask. But don’t: send an item (collection or not) without asking first to see if it is an acceptable trade, ask for something a person has only one or two of, ask someone to give you a collection item in trade for a charger, or just ask someone to help you with your WL when you have nothing but collection items (ask for something specific and offer a trade). In general I think most people avoid actively asking for trades too much because you don’t want to be seen as a beggar, but it is fine when you really need an item or have built up a rapport with the player.

Other notes:

• One of the reasons why people think I’m a gifting Nazi is that I personally have a big beef with what I call "random gifts". If you really want to help or need something out of someone’s collections but don’t have anything from their WL, simply ask what you can send instead. Just picking something missing out of one of the collections is a waste because usually even if it’s not on the WL there’s something else they would’ve put on the WL if they had the room.
  
• When you’re visiting to look at WL’s, the order in which you visit friends is the same as the order you see them in on the “Ask a Friend” screen. It is the order in which they were added to you as a friend, not the order in which they appear in the friend list.
  
• If you are leaving the game or taking a break for a while, remove all of the items off of your wish list and post a note to your wall so people know not to expect a return gift from you. If you are for sure deleting the game never to return, consider deleting your friends first.
  
• Many people keep a spreadsheet to track gifting habits and identify friends who’ve become inactive. This is time consuming but can be a rewarding exercise from time to time as you’ll find weeding out inactive players means less work for the same outcome.
  

Comments and additions to these tips welcome... also continue to discuss your own strategy and how/if it changed after removal of MGing.[/quote

Beautifully said and written!

I thought of a couple more things to add (earlier, let's see if I can remember them lol )

oh yes!!

5) Wish List (WL) Management: make sure to search a room immediately upon updating your WL. The updates are not visible to others until you do, but you can also go in to a lower level room (such as the kitchen or living room) and use the door in the upper right corner to exit (the game will behave as if you've run out of time). Whenever feasible, try to leave at least one low level charger on your WL for your friends who don't have any of the collection items there. I usually try for a variety of collection items (not all from the same collection), and one lower level charger. Of course this isn't always going to accomplish the goal you have at hand so just use your best judgement for ways to give lower level folks a way to gift you easier. This will help discourage random gifting and make the game flow easier for your visitors.

6) Study up on what is a charger and what is a collection item. Lower level players may not recognize the difference, particularly for higher level rooms they may not have opened yet, so this is of particular importance for them. One way to tell is when you gift from a WL... did your inventory number drop? If not, it was a charger and not a collection item.

Just two more tidbits to add to round out the 'gifting strategy' post!

A few additional points/comments

Wall gifts also do not count against the one per person per day limit, so if you fulfill the wall request first you can still send a charger to that friend as well.

You can only send a charger to somebody from their wishlist if you are the right level and if you have at least one of that charger in your inventory. Even though you must have one to gift from a wishlist, as Soozicle stated, it is a charger and therefore will not be deducted from your chargers. Otherwise, you can only gift the chargers that are in your gift list.

In terms of random gifting, I do not see that as a big problem, provided people are sensible. If people send common chargers to higher level players, it will be frustrating. If they send mobius bows, green klein vases, or olympic chargers then most players should find a use for them. For higher level random gifts, i would think island chargers would also be good.

Soozicle wrote:I’ve found 150 is a nice sweet spot; you can get through the whole list checking each person’s wall in 3 days by doing 50 at a time so no one is neglected for long.

3) Daily proactive gifting: On a daily basis I go to the friend list and pick a friend that's in a different spot in my list than the previous day (that way I can cycle through my whole list usually within three days) to visit and start a "gifting run", going manor to manor checking wish lists, walls, and leaving tips (bankers check first, some people don't want banker tips). Concentrate on wish lists first and foremost. This part (#3) is the one that varies from person to person the most based on game focus and the amount of time each player has to spend in-game.

Hey, Sooz! Great writeup! Thank you!

I have a question regarding the interaction of the two parts I quoted. I'm very interested in this since I'm still working on refining my gifting methods and am always willing to learn new ways.

If I understood your suggestion correctly, it would mean that I would visit 50 friends every 3 days (for a total of 150 friends).

What happens when you use up your limit of 10 collectibles on the first 25 people? That means the remaining 25 people have no chance of getting a collection item from me even if I have the item and am willing to give it to them. And what if one of those 25 that got left out habitually gives me collection items on a regular basis? Or what if the first 25 people were predominately high level players and the second 25 players were predominately lower level players who generally have a greater need for help?

I don't want to go through all 50 people twice, noting what each person wants and then deciding which of the 50 get the 10 items. Plus, I have found that there are certain people who gift me on daily or almost daily, and I'd like to try to reciprocate as best as possible to those people while still not leaving out others.

I like your idea, but I'm not sure how to work it in so I'm not ignoring those who have been kind enough to gift me each day while also ensuring that I'm helping those who are lower level than me who have very little and really need the help. Any ideas of how to work that in with your gifting schema? Thanks!

That's why I didn't elaborate more on my own methods... you kind of have to play it by ear according to what works best for you.

Personally, I visit the first 50 the first day, then after reset the next day visit the next 50, and so on, so to start with I will always have at least 50 chargers to give away and 10 collection items for each group of 50. Usually I will reserve my collection items for people I see struggling with some of the tougher quests, like Lover's Ikebana, Miso Soup, etc, and I do have my MMUFF friends that I give preference to in that regard. I do try to keep a few on hand to pay back people who came by and gifted me (without me gifting them first), but that is actually fairly rare unless you've just added a new friend. But usually, if I visit someone and they have a charger on their WL, it's just a given that I'll send it to them, and if that's all I send them (even if I leave tips) I tend to let it lie at that, no wall post because I figure they should be gifting my charger wall request anyway and that's sufficient 'payback' (to me anyway). I do tend to skip people whose WL doesn't have anything I can give them on it, assuming that the next pass by they might have something there, because usually I'm already booked up with my 10 items anyway. I very rarely have enough diamonds to drop my counter, but when I do it's always the collection item counter that I drop. I was tired of searching rooms so I actually visited every single friend and gave away 20 collection items yesterday... so I'm fresh out of diamonds today!

Anyway, that's my PERSONAL procedure, but each person has to modify according to their own game playing habits, number of friends, level, etc...

Vicki, I have a similar strategy to gifting as Sooz but I prefer to have my friends around the 100 mark.

I have a core group of friends that I visit and gift every day, I think at the moment that it is about 20 people. I probably give half of my collection items to these friends. That leaves 35 gifts to disperse amongst the rest. I aim to make sure that over a four day cycle everyone else gets two presents. I have a handful of players that rarely send presents to me (but they do send wall requests) and that have an astronomical number of friends. I usually gift these players only once every four days, sometimes even less.

If friends leave a collection item either from my WL or a random collection item, I don't try to reciprocate with a collection item gift. I see it as an act of kindness and a gift. I assume if they are after a particular item they would have asked to trade. This is the approach I take to gifting collection items, I gift what I don't immediately need with no expectation of receiving anything in return. Although a thank you note is always nice.

I can count on one hand the amount of times I've dropped my gift counter. At ten diamonds a pop it is too expensive, IMO, to do on a regular basis.

I understand the desire to want to help as many people as possible and gift collection items to everyone who leaves one for you but unless you have a tiny number of friends that's not going to happen. I think by and large most players get that gifts need to be rationed amongst your friends, we are all in the same position. You need to get into the mind set that the gifts are just that GIFTS.

Given the 10 item limit and, to a slightly lesser extent the 50 limit, I encourage players to have a mix of items on their WL with a bias towards charging items. at least if you want to increase your chances of receiving something. I used to go through friends' collections to see what they needed but I rarely do it now.

I realize this is a very old posting discussion, but on the 50 charger limit, I make sure to stop at 49 so that I may continue to fill wall requests until my next reset.

Just for collecting info - it might be important to know that there are some Events where even (some) chargers get taken from your inventory if you tap on them on your friends wishlist (valentine's arrows and cupid wings comes to mind). You're fine if you send them from your gifts tab though - if you have them there at that moment...