Asking friends for Unique Oil not working

[zenobia42]

I have tried twice now to "Ask Friend for Unique Oil" as part of the "Potion Shop Gossip" quest. Both times I went down the list and checked all 250 of my neighbors and hit "Send." My counter still shows 0/50. While it is technically possible that all 250 of my neighbors have gotten the request and not one sent it to me, it is extremely unlikely after a number of hours have passed. Typically, I get the day's limit of 20 in a couple hours. Zero in many hours? I don't think so.

I already hard closed and re-opened my game a few times, and also closed everything a re-started my iPad, to see if the tally started moving and it did not.

[SparklyOctopus]

Hello! If you sent a request to 200 neighbors, only 20 of them will get the requests on that day. Then, the next day, another 20 will get the request and so on, until the queue of requests is empty. If you send your requests to over 20 neighbors, there is a chance that it will randomly select an inactive neighbor who wouldn't see your request. We usually suggest to send your 20 requests per day to neighbors that you know are more active. Hope this tip helps in getting more Unique Oil from your neighbors! Good luck!

[zenobia42]

Hello! If you sent a request to 200 neighbors, only 20 of them will get the requests on that day. Then, the next day, another 20 will get the request and so on, until the queue of requests is empty. If you send your requests to over 20 neighbors, there is a chance that it will randomly select an inactive neighbor who wouldn't see your request. We usually suggest to send your 20 requests per day to neighbors that you know are more active. Hope this tip helps in getting more Unique Oil from your neighbors! Good luck!

This is a HUGE change from the way Castle Story worked until... whenever the recent change was made. It was that it sent out ALL requests you had, but only let you RECEIVE 20 of what you were asking for a day. There were many discussions about the mechanics of it and the consensus was that you should just ask everyone on your list because all that mattered was that enough people got the request that you would get 20 replies. If you are not familiar with it, I can try to look it up myself. But suffice it to say there is more than ample proof this is how it worked.

When did this change? Without notice to us I might add.

And WHY? Do you have ANY idea how laborious it would be to try to determine exactly which of my 250 neighbors is active enough that they should make my list of 20? It's ABSURD!

[zenobia42]

Seriously, since I sent to 250 people, do I really have to wait 250/20 = 14 days (two entire weeks!) before my cue is cleared and I send again? REALLY?

TWO WEEKS, during which time I can expect maybe 5 responses a day tops (instead of the until-now typical 20 responses in a few hours) due to having inactive neighbors, like everyone has?

Am I now expected to either now take weeks to complete quests that formerly took a few days, or to take a number of minutes each examining all 250 kingdoms in my neighbors list to try to determine which are the 20 most likely to to respond? Do you have ANY CLUE how long that would take? You can't just visit a neighbor's kingdom once and know for sure he/she is active or inactive. Occassionally, you can see buildings animated meaning they checked in recently, but usually not. So you have to visit them a number of times over a period of time and mark down each time whether something was moving or not, and if they fail that test whatever number of times, they fail and are deemed inactive. You can't even go by who responded to your last request because the news feed is too short to show them all!

Well, I guess I have 2 weeks to spend studying all my neighbors in detail until I will be allowed to try again. But do you have ANY CLUE that that sucks ALL the fun out of the game? How VERY LITTLE -any- player would want to go to such extreme and time-consuming and boring measures????

[SparklyOctopus]

I've posted an update to the other thread:

Sorry about the confusion everyone! There appears to have been some miscommunication with the game team. There were no recent changes to the gifting mechanics. To clarify, if you have 250 neighbors and you send all 250 of them a request for an item, all of your 250 neighbors will receive the request. When they respond back, you are only able to accept 20 of them. If 21 neighbors responded, you are only able to accept 20 of them in one day. Sorry again, and I hope this clears it up.

I've checked your account and it seems like you have received your Unique Oils. It may just have been a slow day where you did not receive any Unique Oils. I'm glad to see you are receiving them now!

[zenobia42]

Thanks for taking the time to check on the actual mechanics and my account. Yes, I did get the last of all my oils this morning! It was strange to me that it took hours for even one response to come in. But on further reflection, I was basing that thought on the most recent few batches of requests I sent out... which were all for timed quests... when people are more likely to check frequently to see if there are requests on their wall to respond to.