I know this is a silly question, but: Is there any reason to make friends?

In other words, what functions on the site are related to your list of friends? Do you get notification of their posts, or somesuch?

I should probably mention that I'm from the pre-Facebook era, and only have listed friends ("Geekbuddies") at one site, BoardGameGeek. And they're all people I know from the non-online world.

Um.

It seems to be a way to artifically boost your Points score. You seem to get 1 point per friend, so having 100's of friends gives you 100's of points.

Points supposedly determine your 'win' at the monthly prize draw, although wether that actually happens doesn't seem to be declared or announced.

Luddite said:

I was told I won a December raffle and was emailed to get my address. But nothing has arrived yet.

Incidentally ColtsFan76 how did you manage to accrue so many points?

I'm on 206, and frankly i've no idea how i got to that total. Before Xmas i seemed to get points for pretty much everything, but now i haven't had any for weeks.

I see members who are FAR more prolific posters than me who for some reason have lower points scores. Maybe i'm just a bit of a dullard but i really can't see any rhyme nor reason to how the points work.

So when i see scores like yours it makes me scratch my head even more!

Presumably nealy 200pts come from your extensive friends list but that's still 500+ points from other sources. I'm really curious to know what you did to get them as this points-enigma is driving me nutty!

Oddly enough, you don't get points for posting more often. From what I have deduced, you get 5 points for your first reponse in a forum. You also get 5 points for your first thread in each forum. So this is why people are seeing a spike in the beginning as they establish themselves in a forum and then no more points. You stop in to say hi and you get 10 points right away...but then that's it. A lot of people were abusing this by posting in every game's thread with generic questions like "Will I like this game?" "How long does it take to play?" and "Is this good with 4 players?" FFG busted them out and removed their points I heard.

You also get points for each friend that you have which seems to be the major source of everyone's points that are in the top 10. Other points come from registering (I think 10 or 25 points right off the bat) and logging games owned. Games owned are not a 1:1 ratio though. I am thinking it may be 1 point for every five games or 1 point each for the first 10 games and then less as you move on. I haven't figured out that one yet. There was a bug in the beginning that allowed people to claim a game, get a point, then delete a game for another point. As far as I know, that has been corrected and maybe people got their points taken away. Or maybe it was the top 5 or something. I wans't in on it, just heard about it.

Finally, I am not sure if you get points for buying stuff in the on-line store. I haven't seen this anywhere but it seemed that a lot of people went up around the time of the clearance sale. The game I wanted went out of stock before I got a chance to buy it so I never tested that theory.

As for my own points, I am not sure exactly how the points were distributed. About 200 from friends. Maybe another 200~250 from posting in the threads. Say 25 or so from registering and games. And then I got a special bonus of about 250~300 directly from FFG (I want to say it was an odd number like 260). It just appeared one day and was what sent me from about #10 on the list to #1. I was just recently passed by frouvne because of his vast friends network. When I asked about it, they told me it was a gift for some of the behind the scenes proofing I did for the Arkham Horror League and some of my files I sent to them for BattleLore. I think it also had to do with some of the support I give them over at Board Game Geek. So that is where the "mysterious" chunk of points came from.

Ahh, right. Cheers for the candour mate.

It would seem my assumption was right then...there IS no rhyme nor reason to the points, since FFG mods step in and give / take for random stuff. So aside from spamming every user and ammassing a vast array of 'friends', gaining points is essentially random. No worries.

Fair enough. I'll crawl back under my rock.

I got no points from buying from the FFG online store, so can affirm that is not a means of gaining points.

Wu Ming said:

That's good to know. Seems to be a missed opportunity.

It would be nice if you could could actually contact people on your friends list. As far as I can tell there is no PM system set up for the forums or even just for people on your friends list and all e-mail addresses are hidden even on friends. That way people could actually..... you know become "friends"...

You can set your email so your freinds can see it.

jadrax said:

I wonder how many people with 600 friends would do this?

jadrax said:

I do, unfortunately it seems I am the only one who does. It's not like I am able to ask them for their e-mail in a message of some kind...