<blockquote><hr>
TTL
And...I wish that friendships would not dwindle to ZERO. Just because we haven't kept in touch doesn't mean our friendship should show it never happened. Let it read 1 or something low, but losing the data on how long we've known each other is awful.
I'd love to have balloons back. Black gloves...they were the source of so much griefing that I'm not a fan of them. There were griefers who thought it fun to "collect" enemies with certain sims, especially those on the top of the 100 list, so it was like having a bounty on your head. Griefers tend to be the most obnoxious and persistent of players, so nah...I vote against gloves. Why put out bait for the players we least want to attract?
[/ QUOTE ]
I look at it this way....
You'd make an acquaintance maybe, speaking in RL terms, by handing them a balloon, but the interactions we have to do to show friendships actually take time, representing the time it takes to form close friendships, which to me is what 100/100 represents. If anything I wish it wasn't so EASY to get to 100/100, or that you could only gain 10 points in a calender day or something, because as it is the friendship web doesn't mean what it should mean, it represents how long someone has to sit and click interaction after interaction, and then most likely they never see the person again until they have to get in touch to 'freshen up' the link.
The only way I'd be in favor of bringing back balloons is if gloves/enemy links were done away with all together. Yes, some people thought it was fun to collect enemy links back in the day, but that was because of the 'top 100 lists', it was easier to be the Most Hated than the Most Popular. Now that we will be doing away with top 100s in the new game, I see no constructive reason to need enemy links, only the griefing tool that was the reason they were done away with for to begin with.
So no, I'd have to say I don't want friend balloons back, or if they do come back they shouldn't be called 'friendship' balloons because that is not a representation of the time it takes to really cultivate a friendship so much as the interactions are. Maybe a compromise of this would be if somehow the coding could be set up so that chatting with the person, either in room chat or IM could build the friendship, since that IS really how friendships are formed, by getting to know the person you're talking to....but I don't know if it's possible in the coding to set that up, only our glorious saviors (dev team
) could tell us that.
I quoted Dali though because she does bring up a good point...if I had a best friend...in game terms someone that I had 100/100 relationship with, and say 5 years went by between conversations for whatever life circumstance happened, when I finally talked to them again, our relationship probably would not be as close, the 100/100, and maybe not even 50/50, but I doubt I'd forget I ever knew them, which is what 0/0 seems to mean to me. Maybe there could be a way that we could have 10 'friendship locks' as we had friendship balloons, that would allow us to pick 10 people with whom we have links that we NEVER want to see them disappear. Have it be the same as skill locks, based on earned time of the account rather than age of the sim, with 10 being the maximum, the catch being that locks can only be 'swapped around' once every 30, 60 or 90 days, whichever....to really make them mean something and prevent people from swapping the locks around so that none of their relationships decay. At first I was going to say make it where you could not unlock a link that you'd locked, but I thought twice about it because I didn't know how many people would actually go for that.
Anyway, that's my opinion
