Idiots cut of feed & water supply

Official Discussion: Posting Watering Can and Animal Feed Change

Howdy Farmers,


Beginning this afternoon we are rolling out a change to how many times you will be prompted to post Watering Cans and Animal Feed.


The Feeds we are changing are:

• Posting Watering Cans when you harvest an Orchard
• Posting Watering Cans when you grow a Mystery Seedling half-way to the full tree state.
• Posting Animal Feed when you harvest an Animal Pen

But we're leaving all the totally useless feeds that do nothing to improve your game play - Trading post pop-up; your market is full (because we are too stingy to give you more room to store a reasonable amount of bushels for the # of crafting buildings you now have), you mastered this whatever, and my personal favourite, you planted a seedling, why not beg for water now!

What changes are we making?
In each of the three changes, you will be prompted to post one shared item per day. One Watering Can when you harvest an Orchard, one Watering Can as you grow a seedling, and one Animal Feed when you harvest an Animal Pen. 


Harvesting subsequent Orchards or Pens, or watering more than one seedling will result in no further prompts to share these items into your feed.

This change also means that you will get NO feedback when you harvest orchards or feed pens. None. Isn't that ~fun~?  

Why are we making this change?
You may have noticed that many Farmers report issues posting items to their feeds. They get messages such as "An error has occurred, please try again later." and the feed never posts. 


A leading cause of this is posting a great number of feeds in a day. The platform begins to limit the number of feeds you can post, and locks you out of it after you cross a certain threshold. After that, feeds stop posting and your animals, trees, etc. can't be shared with friends.


We studied the feeds that FarmVille posts, as well as the feeds Farmers claim, and believe that these feeds are an ideal candidate to consider for reduction. A great number of Watering Cans and Animal Feed gets posted every day by generous Farmers, but the bulk of it is not claimed, and triggers the platform limit without providing a benefit to Farmers.

And if you believe any of this line of BS, have we got a special deal on FC for you!  The truth is we are doing this because several of us here at Zynga are only here because we got picked up in a merger and we really think all of you players are idiots. Oh, and we think it's pretty funny to destroy Zynga's biggest money maker from inside cuz, well, you know... it just is. If Zynga's dumb enough to let us, and the players are dumb enough to keep playing, why not have our fun? And guess what?! We get paid to screw with y'all!  

Things to Note:
This does not change or limit the number of Watering Cans or Animal Feed posts you can click to receive from your friends. It reduces the number of times you will be prompted to post, but not how much you can claim.

Well, except for the minor little detail that once it rolls out fully, there will only be two watering cans and two feeds posted per player each day so there won't BE any to claim, really. Details, shmetails. Who cares?  

This will not impact your ability to share Mystery Seedlings, Animals, or fully-grown Trees.

...although of course, since people won't have water or feed, they won't be able to grow those mystery seedlings or animals.  

This will reduce interruptions to your game-play while harvesting orchards and pens, or watering seedlings. For those of us with dozens of pens and orchards, this means we can harvest and get to our rewards all that much faster!

but you'll still have all the rest of the useless pop ups and other assorted crap you don't need, not to worry. It's just the stuff you DO need to play effectively that will be gone. Isn't that ~fun~?!  

This is going to roll out slowly over the next week. Not every Farmer will see a reduction in prompts to post up front. 

As usual, we'll punish the players we don't like - you know, the loyal ones that buy farmcash regularly -  and reward the ones we do ...the ones that MIGHT buy farmcash someday if we just keep offering them extra special this and thats.

After your one prompted post for the day, when you harvest an Orchard or Pen and would normally receive a Watering Can or Animal Feed, you will still receive it (in your Gift Box) even though you are not prompted to post a feed to share with your friends.


Please share your feedback with us, and your results if you see this change on your Farm....so that we can ignore it for weeks like we did with the throttle, feed limits, and pretty much every other change we make. It amuses us.


Thanks!

Last edited by Grimwell; Yesterday at 04:12 PM.

Again with the price-gouging

More new trees this week - and again, different players, for no discernable rhyme nor reason, have different prices.

The bur oak is - for me, 8 FC. But other players can buy it for 4, 10, or even 12FC.

So - this test is what? To see exactly how stupid/addicted to our trees we are?

Newsflash - for those of us who are serious collectors, pulling this crap only results in people walking away.

If I can't (won't) be able to keep collecting the trees, I won't bother to continue playing - and I am far from the only one. Check out the forums, why don't you?

How is this good business? How does it support your IPO?

The fact that you are so intent on shooting yourselves in the foot (how many feet DO you have?) is not likely to impress investors (speaking as a potential purchaser of stock).

Ridiculous!

A few updates ... orchard text; live chat vs email support; ~super~ orchards

Orchard text has been (FINALLY) fixed! That makes me very happy, as it means that I am once again able to waste altogether too much time mastering trees and growing seedlings to share with my friends.

Had occasion to use Zynga's support yet again this week. I bought two of the new magic peach trees which are very cool, (but I am still waiting impatiently to get my hands on an as yet unrealeased except for in feedlings which I have no luck with, mossy trees) - and the first time I attempted to move them, one disappeared!

I had no luck getting Live Chat then, so eventually got frustrated and sent in an email request for support. They responded in less than a day - BUT the trees and farmcash the email said they had given me were not in the account. I eventually discovered that - even though I had made sure to contact them from the problem account, the fix had gone into another also played on this computer. Second time they've done that; I have no idea how it happens... I guess sometimes they just don't look at the UID in the form.

Anyway, I was going to just gift a replacement tree from that account to the correct one, but then I decided to try again to get live chat. Took about 20 reloads, but did eventually got through.

As always, Live Chat was great - even though I told her that they had actually given me 2 extra trees & 25 FV$ (but in the wrong account) she cheerfully fixed it in the correct one as well. In fact, she surprised me! She had told me that she was replacing the tree and putting in 50FV$ - but when I went to move the tree from the gift box I found not one, but ten! A very nice surprise.

I still haven't bought any ~super~ orchards, and probably never will - but they have dropped the price (for everyone, as far as I know) to 30 FV$ to upgrade them.

Unfortunately, though, they still have not apparently got the message that those of us who are never offered the low prices (and/or the good deals on FV$ and bounty packs and so on) are becoming increasingly irked and insulted. Has been quite a lot of frustration in the forums about the price spread on some of the new fairy critters.

Those defending Zynga (who are no doubt at least some of the time among the favoured players) often point to these sort of pricing experiments as being akin to in-store pricing experiences - but to me, that is a ridiculous argument.

First of all, I highly doubt that most stores do pricing experiments where an item is priced at such broad variances. I should pay > 3x as much as my kid for this item?! Seriously?

And second, if I go into a store and pay $1 for a bottle of pop, and you go into your store and pay $0.75, the chance that either of us is ever going to know and have occasion to be insulted and irked about it is pretty slim. We do not have the same sort of relationship with the store OR with each other as we players do with Zynga. They REALLY need to rethink their approach, as they ARE seriously damaging customer loyalty and trust.

Which should be painfully obvious to them - if only they actually paid attention to the forum discussions and to the cranky people that contact customer service when they discover they have been ripped off.

It is nice that they fix it for those of us cranky people who do contact CS whenever we discover that we have yet again been ripped off - but how many people do not actually bother and just stayed irked?

Given the ongoing loss of Farmville players (and presumably, income) - and all the talk of IPO offerings - you would think that such feedback would be considered a little more important - and a lot more quickly - than it is! Every time I see anything about the IPO I shake my head. What company in their right mind shoots itself in the foot over & over (throttle? limits? price gouging?), loses millions & millions of customers, and THEN tries to go public?

I must be missing something - me, when I research a stock, I'm looking to get in when they are growing, not tanking.

New Graphics for Farmville

Well...what do you think of the new graphics for Farmville? New backgrounds, new button images....

my reaction? Meh.

SO many issues that affect game play are not being fixed..... why are people at Zynga spending time on new (and childish) graphics?

The one that is aggravating me no end right now is a missing/broken bit of code to clear the text from over the orchards and buildings. If you are holding a tree or critter and mouseover an object it could go into, the text that is supposed to come up comes up - and there it stays.

The only reason I keep playing Farmville is for the trees ... if I can't harvest them, why bother playing?

I could care less about the area around my farm - at least not until my FARM actually works so that I can play. So unreasonable, eh?

If the game worked properly, bugs were being dealt with, and prices were reasonable (50FV$?! You have GOT to be joking!) I STILL wouldn't like the new look much.

First of all, there wasn't anything wrong with the old buttons and so on. And secondly, the ugly green treelike blogs annoy me in the green one; the mountains in the snowy one are hideous, and so on...

yeah... no.