Gifting and Wishlist Changes

Apparently the developers have been toying around with a new gifting system, and it's honestly incredibly annoying.

The general gist of it is that when you send a gift to someone, it comes into their "requests" box rather than being directly sent to them in game.

Many players do not have this feature as it is still in testing (probably released to just 10% of the gaming population). If the changes became permanent:


1) When you receive a gift, you have to click "accept".

2) You are limited to sending 24 gifts a day since you are sending out requests rather than in-game gifts.

3) You get notified in your feed when you send or receive a gift. If you have a large mafia, this information floods your screen and you can't see who is attacking you (this is getting removed tomorrow; see below).

I'll be blunt, if this was permanent, this would be a terrible change and would be incredibly annoying. Good luck trying to trade for Lotto Collection pieces when you can only gift 24 items at a time, and who would even want to trade if they had to accept 100s of requests to get items.

But, it's not too late for this to change.

Here is what one of the developers had to say about this (taken from the forums):

"Hey guys,

This change is to improve the wishlist feature so that users can see when people help them on their wishlist.
This change is not final so please give me feedback on it.

Pros:
You can now know easily when users gift an item on your wishlist

Not sure why you guys feel it will take much longer, seems like it is 3 clicks vs 1. For the next update we will try to give you back the gift all button so you can help your friends faster.

Please keep the feedback coming. Looking forward to it."


After a lot of complaints, this follow up post was made:

"This was a test to see if users would like to see who helped them on their wishlist specifically.
We have pulled back the test for most users.

For some of you still in the test, please be patient. We will monitor feedback and decide accordingly."


After more complaints, this follow up post was made:

"Soon we will be rolling out a change to let users accept all gifts in game (so you don't have to click on every Facebook request)"


Then:

"I understand your frustration. Multi Gifting to one person is another feature we are rolling out soon.

There are certain technical limitations that we are working through but we will get you a new and improved gifting system within the next month."


And finally:

"Hey guys,

Seeing how this has caused inconvenience to a lot of you we are going to kill the player update tomorrow.
Please be patient until then and we apologize for the inconvenience. "


If you want to read more or join in the discussion, the original thread can be found here. Get your opinion heard before it's too late!

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Here is what this all means:

1) A new gifting feature was rolled out, but pulled back for many due to initial complaints. As a result, many people will not see this just yet (unfortunate for players testing this; does not bother me)!

2) Gifting will eventually be changes that gifts will be received as Facebook requests. This change will limit you to sending 24 gifts (Facebook limitation) since it is a Facebook request (bad change).

3) Players receiving gifts will have to accept these requests to get their item.

3) However, a new gifting feature will be out in about a month's time that will allow players to send many gifts at one time. In other words, you will be able to send 50 blackmail photos with the click of a button. This will be a great change.

4) You will soon be able to accept all gift requests with the click of a single button. This is great too because I know I turn down a lot of free gifts simply due to my very large mafia size.

5) Player updates for sending and receiving gifts will be gone sometime tomorrow (thankfully).


Conclusion

All in all, things over the next month will be a little turbulent in regards to gifting. There are some definite downsides, like the 24 gift request limit per day. This would make something like sending your new friend a bunch of collections take several days. On the other hand, sending 100 untraceable cell phones with a single click (dubbed "multi-gifting") would be an awesome change.

We'll have to wait and see whether or not this "multi-gifting" feature works as planned or not.