DeletedUser29726
I never said you didn’t. I just said why I aid from the friends list always.
If you aid from the friends list most days and hit everyone and then say every sunday or something aid from the town hall instead to do a friend list cull it breaks the theoretical "i aid from town hall and so do they so we never aid each other anymore" conundrum.
You can also break it by aiding from friend list after the town hall even if they haven't aided you if you want to give them more time before you cut them (i.e. you might want to allow that 'maybe they're just away for the week, if they still haven't aided me next week then I'll cut them')
Mass spam is not a good alternative for seeing which of your friends are active - I don't know many people who like receiving those messages. Some cut the senders off. Some just bitch about receiving the message. Some intentionally just ignore them and make the sender do the work to drop them. One Machiavellian approach is to follow the instruction and leave the message but then slap them on ignore so the next time they try to mass message people including you the group will fail to be created and they'll have to figure out who of the 100 or so people they're irritating has them on ignore (not sure if that actually works - but I'd try it at times if it did - especially on off worlds that I'm heavily inactive on )
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On an unrelated note, as a not particularly aid-oriented person, my personal process when I need to cull:
1) Decline all random friend requests that I don't recognize
2) Aid from town hall - of those who I miss, cut any lower players I don't have deals with as they're likely never to be all that useful, unguilded players who I assume have quit the game.
3) If I need to cut further, look for players who have never been involved with my GBs (threads, goods sales, unsolicited donations, etc)
4) If I still need to cut further, look for guildmates (it's fairly frequent for them to send requests, and I often do accept - but I already have contact with them for trade and GBs and aid - and taverns aren't really worth eating a spot for)
5) If I STILL need to cut further, look for people who I haven't interacted with GBs in either direction recently.