Reinstating deleted friends
If I delete someone from my friend list and then reinstate them, does our friend progress pick up where we left off, or do we have to start from the beginning?
I have a few friends who wait up to a few weeks to open the final gift for best friend status, which I assume is because they want to batch it with final gifts from a bunch of other people, so they can drop a lucky egg and get 2 million XP or whatever in one shot. I find this extremely annoying, as I try to make sure to have a gift interaction with as many of my friends as possible, and it takes time to go through the list and check the gift status of everyone with whom I've not achieved best friend status.
I'm considering deleting some of these friends to send them a message, but I'm not sure I want to permanently give up all the progress we've made, since I know them personally through raids, etc.
To people who do this (wait prolonged periods to open the final gift, in order to maximize XP while minimizing lucky egg use) lucky eggs are not that expensive. If you care that much about XP, you can buy 8 lucky eggs for 500 pokecoins, or 10 days' worth of free gym coins.
Answers
Any number of your unopening friends might be 2nd, 3rd, or more accounts. Might not earn that many coins with those accounts, plus bag space often gets cramped. Those kind of accounts can build up 50-75 gifts to open and they can obviously only get to open a max of 20 a day...for them might be easier just to leave the gifts near a milestone unopened til really motivated to do so.
***I also get annoyed when I’m trying to send buncha gifts but the other end has unopened ones...however I do have other accounts that are fishing for XP/SD and backup supplies that are swamped with unopened gifts (+no bag space, accentuated with needing available space to spin+get PvP rewards).
