Friendship Bracelets

[Spock]

I probably have more time than I should to be able to play this game and have found it rather unrewarding to visit my friends gardens repeatedly only to find no change that I can help with to earn Friendship Bracelets.

In order to encourage players to visit their friends gardens, would it be possible to allow a reward of one friendship bracelet if the garden has not been visited in the last one or two hours? That way the visitors would get some kind of reward for doing their "civic duty even if their friend never had anything they could help with.

I realize it will require a lot of additional storage, even if the only thing stored was a simple time stamp indicating when the last visit was made. The time stamp would be reset and the bracelet awarded if the time difference was great enough. Even this would require enough storage for each player times the number of friends they had. Perhaps it could be actually stored as an encrypted cookie on the individual players computers, with a single encrypted check value on the server to ensure the cookie wasn't tampered with, instead of on the Server? If the check values didn't match, like when first set up or if the cookie had been tampered with, then the cookie would be zeroed out and reset to the current time, therefore starting the wait for the next "visiting Bracelet" all over again.

Sorry, just trying to help while also thinking like a programmer ...

[Spock]

Another idea just occurred to me, Many times I am unable to help my friends because all of their plants are ready for harvest. Why not allow us to "harvest" three of their plants in exchange for bracelets?

It wouldn't bother me to come back to my garden to find some of my ripe plants had already been harvested as long as those plants went into my inventory.