How Do I Deepen a Casual Pogo Friendship?

There are no hard and fast rules for finding friends on line, or in real life for that matter. Some people have an easy time of making friends in both places, while others find it easy to make friends online, but not so much in real life – and vice versa!

In many cases, two people will find that they are naturally drawn to each other, and a friendship grows. In other cases, it takes one person to lead the other into the friendship. Someone might say “You know, I really enjoy playing games with you. Would you mind if I added you to my ‘Friends List’?” If the person is open to it, they’ll say “Sure!” and it’s likely things will progress from there.

Of course, if your online personality is a bit more reserved than your real-life one, it can be more of a challenge. You may have to take a deep breath and risk a little rejection in order to build new friendships.

And you have to accept that you may be turned down, and that you’ll have to deal with the disappointment. If it does happen, don’t blame yourself, and don’t blame the other person. You don’t know what’s going in his or her life and it could be that under different circumstances a friendship could be formed.

I have actually addressed this issue in the past, and several outgoing and friendly people write to me asking to contact the player on their behalf in order to befriend the letter writer. Unfortunately, that’s usually not something I can do, but– guess what? With the recent launch of Forums, people can actually leave messages for the letter writers, and the letter writers can, if they choose, respond either in the forums themselves or on Pogo.

So, after you read today’s column, head over to the Pogo Forums and see what happens!

It’s definitely impolite for people leave messages on other people’s Guestbooks requesting gifts or anything, really. It’s also pretty rare. It sounds like one or more people are targeting you for a mild form of harassment.

Your “Wish List” idea is intriguing. While it does seem a bit forward to post items you want in your Profile, if you and your friends are in the habit of giving things to each other, then it might serve to be helpful. You might want to preface the “Wish List” with something like: “I do have a wish list for those friends who want it, and here it is!”

As for your other concerns, there are a few things you can do to better manage your Guestbook, Gift and Profile settings. It really depends on how private you want your Guestbook to be. Let’s go through some of relevant options you have:

• Options Below the Message. Below each message there are two options: Delete and Options. Delete, obviously, deletes the message. Clicking the Options link will give you… well, options! These include “See Guestbook” (which will take you to the message leaver’s Guestbook) “Add to Friends”, “Block User”, “Report Abuse”. If someone leaves you a message that’s clearly in violation of our Terms of Service, then you’ll want to report them here.
• Guestbook Settings. Here is where you can choose who gets to see your Guestbook, how you want to approve your messages, and whether or not you want to receive an e-mail when you someone leaves you a new message.
• Gift Settings. If you want to keep your gifts anonymous and the messages that come with them private, you can choose the appropriate check boxes here. You can also choose from who you’ll accept gifts.
• Profile Settings. Here you can choose how public or private you want your Pogo Profile to be. You can choose to let everyone see it, only those on your Friends List to see it, or turn it off completely. And if you have your Pogo account linked to Facebook, you can choose whether or not you want your real name and Facebook photo to appear on Pogo.

There are more things you can do within the Profile Settings that have to do with your account, e-mail subscriptions, and Mini Snapshots. I encourage everyone to poke around this area just to see what’s available. If you read last week’s column, you’ll know that there were some surprises even for me!

Games are competitive by nature. Part of the competition in Dice City Roller is done through the auctions. So, unfortunately for you, you either must compete during auction time, or choose a non-auction room.

It’s a common strategy in any auction to wait until the last second before making a final bid. It happens on any online auction site all the time.

In any game situation we must take into consideration that part of playing a game is strategy, and to win a game, you may have to “best” another person. Rude? Not in the setting of the game.