It would be awesome (and easier on the Blue Manchu crew) if the average player could gift NON-EQUIPMENT in-game items and currency to each other. For now, that list is merely Pizza, Gold Pieces, and Figures. I'm sure y'all have thought about this, but my ideal process would go as follows: 1) Jon decides to gift Farbs the founder's figure set 2) Jon goes to Cuthbert's and selects the set 3) Jon checks a box marking the item as a gift 4) Instead of flagging the set as purchased, a long string is randomly generated, like a Steam key. 5) Jon emails this key to Farbs 6) Farbs goes to the Loot Fairy's Castle (or maybe just somewhere in the options pane) and pastes in the key 7) The set is flagged as purchased in Farbs' account For gifting gold pieces, one would perhaps have to go the Loot Fairy's Castle and designate a portion of one's own reserves to be assigned to a key, after which the transaction proceeds from step 5 as above. Note that requiring purchased items to be designated for gifting at the time of purchase prevents abuse of the free pizza given to each account. Since the keys are redeemed to particular accounts, anyone attempting to trawl for keys can be banned easily (and they're unlikely to find anything anyways...). I really really really really really want this because it would facilitate all sorts of player-coordinated interactions, or even just a more friendly relationship between players. At the very least, it should make even BM-sponsored tournaments easier to administrate.
I want this too, and it shouldn't be too hard to implement in some way. Unfortunately what is very hard to implement is some means of controlling laundering. Consider this scenario: 1) noircat registers a new account 2) noircat purchases an insane amount of pizza for vast sums of real money 3) noircat gifts that pizza to many different accounts 4) noircat disputes the payment with their credit card company, and gets all of their money back Usually at point 4 we would modify noircat's account to make up for the loss, however in this case the pizza (or whatever else they've gifted) is now sitting in other player accounts. What do we do if that next account has also passed some currency on? From which pocket do we pick the pizza? Figuring out a fair resolution for this is very time consuming, especially if the perps have made an effort to cover their tracks. I'm sure that there are things we could do to mitigate this, but it certainly makes it much less of a no-brainer. In short, people are the reason that we can't have nice things.
I think that if you make it so that you can purchase something directly for another account—rather than buying it, and then gifting it—you mitigate a lot of potential problems. The scenario you suggested, for instance, would not be possible if noircat had to buy pizza for each of those accounts individually. I would really love just some way to buy pizza and say "put this in User X's account."
Or, for instance, if I got really tired of the game or very disappointed by the direction it's going, I'd like to be able to give my remaining pizza and club membership to someone who I feel has been helpful. And close my account.
The crucial element in my scheme is that GP is the only re-giftable item. Purchasable items can only be traded by designated them for gifting at the time of purchase. (This would have been clearer if I used pizza rather than figures in the OP.) If each key is tied to a single transaction, you'll know exactly where that pizza went when the key was redeemed, and can modify the account appropriately. I would love to be able to transfer pizza and figures and club membership at will, but that's Hard, and I'd rather have rudimentary gifting than nothing at all.
