Zynga's Customer Service

Used to be, once upon a time, that when Zynga somehow messed up and negatively impacted one's game, CS not only would fix it for you without a hassle, but also typically gave some compensation.

Wow, has the pendulum ever swung the other way.

Now, when you have a problem, you only get access to Customer Service if you happen to have done whatever needs doing to trip the switch so that you will have it.

The suggestion is that only paying players have access - but the reality is that many paying players do not.

Now, we're supposed to use spam central and tell our Farmville problems to other players who can't do a blessed thing about them. The only response most posts get there is sorry, can't help you .... and/or hey, log in here and I'll steal your username and password (posts which Zynga mostly ignores and allows to remain now that they have a notice at the top telling all us really stupid people how to use the support site safely... i.e. not to get suckered into such lame spam attempts).

In any case, some of us - me included - do actually continue to have access to Zynga's CS agents. Unfortunately, they don't actually  HAVE any any more. Now what they have are "Player Advocates" - and their role seems to be to piss off players by refusing to fix anything; refuse to refund the FC Zynga developers have, in their infinite stupidity, set the game to steal from players at every turn; and for added measure, call paying customers liars and cheats.

Even going through the BBB doesn't help - they just keep sending emails asking for more information until the BBB process expires and it tells you you just refused "their final offer" and no further action is required. Except, of course, that they don't actually MAKE any offers at all - they just keep asking for the same information you've given them over and over.

Whole thing is a joke.... Zynga is a company that is determined to fail and if you have any stock in them, you REALLY should sell.

There is no hope whatsoever for a company that is willing to lose a long standing loyal paying player by first stealing, then refusing to return 32 FC.  For about $6 - even if I had bought it at full price, which I have not done since they started to steal FC from players every time I blink - they have lost my $10/month subscription plus whatever I would typically spend every time they offer a 40% off sale.... an average of about $50/month.

Wise business decision, eh? 

Sell a product ... then steal it back... and when the customer complains, call her a liar and make her jump through stupid hoops for a couple of weeks then tell her again that she's a liar and a cheat and you're just fine without her business.  

Hell of a business model you've got there, Zynga.

How many feet DO you have to shoot yourself in? Time for a new logo...a millipede, I think.

Too Late for Farmville? Part 3

Other things we want less of:  stOOpid control-freakish rules, limits & requirements...oh, and clutter! Unless it's our clutter, then it's okay - yours is not.  
 
Rules
 
I have - had - a system for my trees. Other players have - had - systems for their horses... or other critters, or whatever.... 
 
sure... go ahead and lock trees, horses, pathways, pens, whatever.... to a particular farm ... it's your game... if you want to piss off more players and make us leave because now you've decided it would be a good idea to break our collections AND our systems - if that's your goal, well done... you're doing an excellent job.
 
If, on the other hand, you'd like us to stick around, play, and give you money ... perhaps you could quit with things that really just don't matter?
 
Limits 
 

Seriously...I buy expansions using actual FC and you fill them with ugly crap I can't move that needs 28 or 42 ugly stupid parts to get rid of each one and THEN you set a limit on how many I can collect for each post?

You want I should collect daily collections stamps and then you limit each post as to the number I can get from the (very) few friends I have who are still playing?

And while I'm on the topic, why IS it that in your other games the gift box actually works and lets me access whatever gifts people have sent me, but in Farmville, the max is 50 and anything over that seems to disappear into the ether? Does anybody even bother sending/receiving gifts in Farmville any more? I don't ... too tedious to flip through pages of crap I don't want to send to get  to the few things I might ... and then the vast majority disappears anyway.


And the safety deposit box and bushel limits? Hello? We've been whining about the bushel thing for eons ... ever since you started throwing new farms at us for no good reason.

You've broken the gift exchange thing ... so we are left trying to craft the things we need ... but we are CONSTANTLY having to dump bushels that we COULD use for crafting things we need if only we didn't need so much fuel to keep trying to grow the bushels we need to craft the things we need to... well, you get the idea, right?

We're not nearly as stupid as you think we are, by the way... we know you changed the settings on the bushels that we get from farming to try to push us toward buying what we need to craft things... what, exactly, ARE you people trying to do with Farmville, kill it entirely?

Now that the farms don't load/play properly with too much (any?) stuff on them, I've been trying to clear out my junk into my safety deposit box .... not enough room there either. Which means that I have to either sell off all my old stuff, or stop buying/growing new stuff. Guess which one most of us are choosing?

I invested time and money into my trees back when Farmville was fun .... not likely to dump all that in favour of new stuff now that it isn't.

Requirements

Stop already!

I know, I know... someone went to the trouble of making the fishing hole... the yarn barn... the dairy .... whatever...  but honestly, if we don't like it, we don't like it - and constantly forcing us to do stuff like "craft 12 yarn" in the yarn barn is NOT going to change anyone's mind.

What, you thought that somewhere around #10 or 11, they were going to say "gee, this is fun after all!"?

Not happening.

Ever noticed that you had millions more players BEFORE you started shoving quests down our throats? Billions, even, by some accounts.

Less trees, less horses, less crops, less buildables, less farms - but you had many, many times more players than you do now.

I know, I know ... y'all are convinced that people started leaving in droves because they preferred other games on other platforms... they got bored, right?

Except that that is NOT what happened.

What happened is that they got frustrated, fed up and over whelmed.

Zynga lost sight of the fact that some sorts of players prefer this type of game and some prefer that...

some people like quests and demands and challenges and competition ...

but those of us that played Farmville? That was not why we played.

We liked working together with our friends.... collecting whatever we happened to be into .... mastering what we wanted to master.... and lots and lots of us LOVED decorating our farms the way we wanted them to be .... whether we were good at it or not (I'm not, but I enjoyed it anyway).

There were lots of other games that included quests and challenges and competition... if we'd wanted to be engaged in those, we would have played them.

Farmville appealed to people that liked to do things their own way - but is now being run by a whole lot of people that demand we do them their way. It's sad.

We came to Farmville...and stayed...and paid money ... for a different gaming experience - and Zynga has, over the last couple of years, completely and utterly BLOWN IT.

And yes, we know that we don't have to do the quests - but doing them is the only way to get the blasted ugly icons off our screen - so we often do them even though we'd rather not. The icons all over our screen - and stuff like the fishing hole and summer camp adventure and lost animals and... it is all clutter and every last bit of it annoys people like me no end.

Even if the farms weren't so bogged down with bad programming, unnecessary pop-ups, and other issues, I still wouldn't bother doing any all out decorating the way I used to - between the "new" hideous facebook and the sheer number of idiotic ugly icons your devs scatter all over my screen and around my farms, why bother wasting my time?

I don't know if Farmville can even be fixed any more... it may well be too late...

but I do know that it won't get better if someone up there in Zynga-land doesn't smarten up and start paying attention soon.

Spending money on Facebook

Do you? 

I do...well, I have done....   up until this week, I have loved doing the tree farming thing on Zynga's Farmville....  had to have the trees, therefore had to have farmcash.

I won't make that mistake again.

It's quite possible to spend a LOT of money on facebook games - they make it easy for you ... but what they do NOT make easy is maintaining your account.

If you somehow breech their terms & conditions by having too many friends, or sending too many messages, or posting something they don't like, or ...well, whatever.... when they disable your account, you lose everything and they DO NOT TELL YOU WHY.

Nor do they give you any sort of explanation when you ask.

Nor do they respond to your queries.

They just shut you down, wipe you (and all your stuff) out and there you are... no pictures, no contact info for the people you were connected to, no past posts, and no access to anything you spend real money on.

IF it were true that only spammers or people who harrass others or whatever were subjected to this sort of treatment, that would be one thing...

but it's not...

it's all sorts of people who never deliberately did anything to deserve it.  Google it... you'll see that in far too many cases, it's people like my friend, who never did anything against the site's T & Cs as far as she knows...not once.

After it happened to my friend, I did google it.... and it makes me sick to think that all the time, energy and money I have invested on Facebook could be wiped out in an instant and I would be left hanging just as my friend is.....    no recourse .... just canned responses and lies.

Invest in Facebook? Or Zynga?  Are you out of your freaking mind?

I am done. 

Unfreaking Believable

Today, because one of my facebook friends has had her account disabled for no good reason, I have been googling ....


and getting more and more angry.


How is it possible that companies like Facebook and Zynga can just keep taking our money and then - without warning, without explanation, and without recourse, just wipe out our accounts, games, farms, whatever?


How long would YOU keep buying clothes, a car, furniture, whatever - if the people you buy it from retained the right to come and take it back for no reason whenever the hell they wanted - and you wouldn't have any way to argue it?


Any company that worked that way wouldn't be in business long, would they?


Would you buy stock in them?


Nope, me either....


and I'll no longer be spending any money on FC, either.....    so once my current cash is gone, I will be done with the trees.


Not a huge loss, anyway ... now that they are swamping us with 20 or more trees a week - some of which we can NOT buy ... it's impossible to keep up and impossible to maintain a complete collection anyway.


It is too bad no one at Zynga can be bothered to spend an hour thinking about how and why their players play.


It is too bad no one at Zynga can be bothered to spend an hour thinking about how to keep their loyal players loyal.


And it is too bad no one at Facebook can be bothered to redesign their warning/disabling system so that it is FAIR. Clarity around the cause of being kicked from the site would be a damn good place to start - but they also need a fair review process.


Both of these companies IPOs make me laugh - they ain't worth a pinch of coon shit given their current (lack of fair) business practices.


Who the hell is buying these stocks?

You have GOT to be kidding me - Lighthouse Cove quest

Every time I think that Zynga can't get any more RIDICULOUS they prove me wrong.

We tell them we DON'T LIKE THEIR FLIPPING QUESTS so they give us more and more and more...

and now - even though they've moved on to Hawaii and supposedly left Lighthouse Cove - they've started yet another on LC ....AND it is ridiculously STUPID.

There are multiple versions of the quest - mine requires that I harvest 4 horse paddocks - and ONLY THOSE ON LC count.

You know what you can do with your quests, Zynga?

And your farms too, for that matter.

Greedy bastards that don't have a flipping CLUE about their customers.... ridiculous!

2 days in a row

For the second evening in a row, Farmville is unplayable... can harvest and seed - but anything that requires posting to the feed, forgettaboutit...

2 different problems too - last night, could post, but Farmville was out of the facebook feed altogether, so no one could see/respond to anyone's posts... tonight, we just can't post.

Given all the time limits that require that one posts to the feed and gets friends to send them ~stuff~ this really SUCKS, Zynga.

If you can't support your games, you have no business putting them out there and taking people's money .. from players OR investors.

Zynga stock prices

Oh look.... what a surprise... Zynga's stock is dropping in value and is now down to $8/share.

Duh.

The only surprise to me is that anyone actually invested in the first place. I mean, come on? Who looks at a company, sees that it has already burned through millions of customers and is now on a consistantly downward trend in every way that counts - daily users? monthly users? profits? .... and thinks "hey...I wanna get in on that" ?

I'll tell you who - other people that missed school on the same day that the Zynga folks did... the one where the teacher explained that it is easier (and cheaper) to keep the customers you have than it is to get new ones all the time. S/he probably also mentioned, I would think, that it is also easier (and cheaper) to get new ones that it is to get the old ones that you irked into leaving back.

I don't play any Zynga games but Farmville so I can't talk (much) about those - I have tried a fair number of them though, and in every case, left for similar reasons... the same reasons that people talk about all the time in the forums, on their facebook walls, and so on ... too many quests, too much tedium, too much begging required. The reasons we say to hell with it and shut down our cafes or fishtanks or pioneer village or cities or whatever are not secrets - but they might as well be, cuz Zynga certainly doesn't have a clue.

The ~funny~ thing is that the very same (obnoxious) things that caused so many of us to quit all of Zynga's other games are now being ported right into Farmville..... We stayed with Farmville because it was different - it allowed us to do things our way, to make our own decisions about where to put what, what to plant, etc etc...

Now....? Not so much.

Now we have quests - complete with obnoxious icons on the side of our farms that won't go away unless and until the quests are completed. So we all end up being told what to grow, in what order, and how many of each we need... what critters to harvest... what crafts to make... what to collect.... hello....? Zynga...? We loved Farmville because it allowed us to decide.... not you.

And we have buildables. Each with their own myriad of stupid building materials required. It wasn't bad enough that our boards, nails and bricks are no longer good enough to build all the crap they demand that we build (and if you try to bypass it, they'll remind you over & over & over) - now they change the building materials half way through, also. So you wind up with bunches of totally useless building parts halfway through each building project.

It really isn't rocket science. All that is required is a basic understanding of how farmville players are different from other game players.

And again ... no secrets... the forums are FILLED with discussions that clearly state what is needed, what annoys us, and what is causing so many to first, stop coughing up real money for farmcash and ultimately to stop playing altogether....

We want shared storage. WE want to decide what theme(s) we want to use on each farm, and what items belong there. It irks us to have a whole bunch of ice, snow, Christmas items that we can't move into Winter Wonderland. It irks us to have had to place things on Winter Wonderland (for the stupid quests we didn't really want to do in the first place) and now not to be able to move them to the farm where we DO want them. My jingle bell horse belongs on my main farm with my other horses. That is where my horses belong. MY choice, dammit... and the fact that you won't let me do it my way is a constant irritant.

We want rotatable buildings (and pens). We are control freaks, okay? We like to decorate and to have choices. That's why we play Farmville. A building that can't be turned restricts our decorating options and annoys the hell out of us.

We like pretty, we Farmville players.... we gripe about things like foals that are as big as or bigger than their parents, gaps that can't be filled caused by a lack of attention to footprints around things like ponds and so on, and moats, tracks & fences that can't be properly lined up.

We are collectors.... we like to have ALL of....whatever.... for me it is trees; others like mastery signs, horses, sheep...what the hell ever.... you have created a game that appeals to collectors ... and a great many choices of things one might collect .... what would then possess you to destroy people's collections? How many times do we have to tell you that once you break a collection (by wiping out people's limited edition crop gardens with your stupid turbo boost and refusing to fix it, for example, or by making a tree available only to those able & willing to donate to a particular cause; or by putting horses into the mystery game, or... how many ways HAVE you found to break our collections, Zynga? How does it benefit you?) ...anyway ... once the collection is incomplete, it is no fun any more and people find it much much easier to walk away .... to stop buying ....and again... to stop playing.

And hey...did I mention that we are control freaks? We do not care to be ignored, lied to, disrespected, or treated like naughty children for having opinions.... not in the game, and not in the forum either.

Zynga had a good thing going... but they spent most of 2011 shooting themselves in the foot .... over and over and over again.... and refusing to listen to their customers.

At least in Farmville... I'm guessing, though, after looking at the stats for a few other games, that this lack of respect, concern and basic understanding of what motivates us goes far further than just FV.

No surprise at all to me that their stock price is heading in the wrong direction... in fact, I think it is exactly the RIGHT direction.