When Palia’s Tinker & Timber update launched last month, it was accompanied by an innocuous feature called mystery gifting. Basically, players were able to pick up gifts for each other at heavily discounted prices and then dispatch them to buddies without knowing what they were giving away. Discount reverse lockboxes, perhaps?
Anyhow, it seems as if people figured out early on that they could arrange for those gifts to be sent to them by creating some financial incentives for doing so, and now Singularity 6 is cracking down on it with the energy of an exhausted dad.
“We want to clarify our stance on soliciting trades of in-game items for Mystery Gifts,” the devs write. “We consider this practice to be similar to real-money trading (RMT) and therefore against our Terms of Service.”
“We’ll be making an in-game announcement about this topic before our next patch goes live, to make sure folks are aware of the clarification. […] We won’t take action without substantial proof. We understand that genuine gifting between friends is part of community life, and we want to absolutely ensure we avoid penalizing legitimate gift-giving. […] If you suspect someone of violating our TOS, please report it through our support site rather than discussing or reporting on Discord. We really appreciate your reports, but we may not be able to share the outcome or confirm any bans. […] Trading Mystery Gifts one-to-one with others is not specifically against our TOS. However, please only do this with people you know and trust as there may be a high risk of being scammed otherwise.”
That said, the devs remind players that they “can’t police external groups or platforms,” so apparently y’all should just be a lot more subtle about your illicit plushie trade.
