Default Settings

Another way that Zynga seems to be trying to recover some of their lost revenue is through the use of default settings that encourage - and even cause - players to spend farmcash they don't intend to spend.

The first example was a huge fiasco, and a heart-breaker for those people who had carefully tended limited edition crops. Some ~brilliant~ person came up with turbo charges which can be used to harvest, plow and seed an entire farm in one fell swoop. They gave everyone 3 free ones - no warning about the fact that they would harvest, plow and seed everything in one fell swoop, and sure enough, anyone that tried it had their LE crops wiped out in - of course - one fell swoop.

But hey... that's not enough damage. The NEXT ~brilliant~ idea was to have the tickbox for the turbo charges set to ON. So if they haven't yet got you, now they will. And sure enough ...

How many people are going to remember to go and remove the tickbox every single time they use a plow, tractor, seeder, combine - every single time! And of course, you can't delete them. Why would you want to delete this ~brilliant~ new thing? Of course you wouldn't... here... run run run over to the market and you can buy more - and yeah, because the default is set to on, you will use them way more often than you intended and have to buy still more and....

AND if that's not bad enough .... now if you go into look at how much it would cost you to use the biplane to grow your crops, trees and animals ... here again, the defaults are all set to ON.

Hit the wrong button and zoom .... the biplane takes off with your cash.

And, for that matter, it seems that several of us have had the ~dubious pleasure~ of hitting cancel and having the biplane take off with our farmcash anyway.

Once in a while, if you are REALLY quick, you can close the browser down immediately and it will stop before it does everything... but basically, if you're in full screen at the time, or if you don't notice RIGHT away, you're beat. Wave bye-bye to your farmcash.

But hey, no worries - you know you can always get more, right? There ya go...head off to the market again and Zynga will gladly sell you more FV$ to replace what they basically stole from you through sheer bad programming? greed? malicious intent?

Suggestion #2

Defaults should be set to do the LEAST amount of damage, not the MOST.