New Pet Society Collectibles: Stickers!

Looks like Playfish is getting its popular social game, Pet Society, into the Facebook gifting scene. Players logging into the game starting yesterday received the following message from the Mayor:

Hello there villagers!
We're playing an exciting new game here in Pet Society: collecting stickers!
Send stickers to your friends to help them complete their collection and maybe they'll send some to you in return!
Some stickers are common, some uncommon and some are rare... how lucky will you be?

The Stickers feature can be accessed through the new navigation icon (next to the Camera button); a sticker book will open up, allowing you to send stickers to friends and view any stickers you've received.

Currently there are slots for 18 stickers in each of five categories (Food, Clothes, Furniture, Toys and Plants) -- 90 different stickers in total. The rarity of each sticker is indicated by the color of the sticker's border (Bronze, Silver or Gold).

Collecting items has always been a popular meta-game within Pet Society -- we've seen people showing off their completed theme sets (the Princess bathroom, the Faerie living room, etc) and even their rare Golden or Rainbow Poo items (yes, really). The stickers are a great new addition to the game, but we have a few issues with the implementation.

First, each 'sticker pack' only contains one sticker. You can only send packs to eight different friends per day, and the stickers are randomized, so even though you can view a friend's sticker collection, you can't directly help them complete it. This is different than other gifting systems we've seen on Facebook games -- Mafia Wars and Yakuza Lords, for example, both allow you to pick specific items to send (granted, Pet Society is very different from those games in other ways as well).

However, like most other Facebook gifting systems, Pet Society stickers can only be accepted through the main Facebook requests screen, not through Pet Society itself. After clicking on the pack to open it, you'll choose to either paste the sticker in your collection book or 'recycle' it for Sticker Points that you can redeem for more rare sticker packs.

We like collecting items, we like stickers, and in the end, we do like the new Sticker Collection on Pet Society, but it feels like it'll take too much effort to complete. Hopefully Playfish will make the process less complex in a future update.

Have you tried out the new Pet Society Stickers? Are you finding it complicated, or are we just slow?