Is it too late for Farmville? Part 2

Okay... so onward.

Another thing that I - and many, many others - have clearly stated is that we want less tedium.

We do not WANT to have to click to close useless pop-ups telling us how many totally useless trowels we have, or that we've harvested an organic bushel that we hate, or that we have found mulch but have nothing to do with it, or ... well, you get the idea, right?

We also don't want to be scooted off to places we don't want to go against our will.

And we are BEYOND tired of having to click hundreds of times to accomplish nothing.

This one leads to inadvertent bushel purchases if your timing is wrong
 - do you think we are too stupid to notice?

Totally useless - and while we're at it, why can't I sell
more than one of these at a time if I want to? Trust me, I want to. Regularly.
Stupid useless things.

> 2 years we've been asking for you to make this one GO AWAY.  

Seriously? You think I want to click 769 times to move each 'good' to my fuel tank?
WHY would I want to do that?
You do know that if I'm busy doing THAT, I'm NOT busy spending FC, right?

We have also asked - hundreds and hundreds of times - for the gift box to re-open  after we place mystery seedlings and mastery signs.

We've asked for USE ALL buttons to be consistently provided.

PAY ATTENTION and reduce the tedium. PLEASE!

Most of these fixes should take your developers SECONDS - not minutes - SECONDS.

Doesn't seem so much to ask for significant improvements in gameplay.

Zynga avoids addressing problems yet again

Zynga slashes work force by a fifth, warns on bookings...

according to this article, Zynga has been struggling to retain players ...and because they can't, they are slashing their costs by letting 20% of their workforce go.

Such a crock, that.

Zynga has, for more than a year, been doing NOT ONE THING to retain players.

In fact, they have been basically kicking us in the arse and telling us not to let the door slam behind us on the way out.

In every game that I have every played of Zynga's, they persist in making the same errors over and over.

They have absolutely NO interest in listening to players or in understanding the reasons certain people play certain games and accommodating these various players.

And as of the last several months, they have trashed their one remaining strength area: customer service, adding it to the very long list of things that "we once did well but now can't be bothered."

People are NOT leaving Zynga's online games in favour of mobile games or multi-platform games the way Mr. Pincus would have the media and stockholders believe.

Mr. Pincus, apparently, also has no interest in actually paying attention to feedback from players.

We WANT to keep playing your games. A whole lot of us have invested a whole lot of time & money in our stupid farms or kitchens or frontiers or whatever... and we would like to keep right on playing.

But you've hired a whole bunch of developers that do not play the games and do not have respect for those who play the games they work on. And you've hired a whole bunch of managers, it seems, who also do not play the games and do not have respect for players. And hey, guess what? You've hired a bunch of customer service reps who do not play the games and do not have any respect for those who do...

surprise, surprise!!  It doesn't work.

This, I believe, is the single biggest reason for Zynga's failure to thrive.

Used to be that the people that worked there played the games (and therefore, had respect for players).

Zynga got too big for their britches. They got rid of the people that loved the games, and replaced them with people that didn't even WANT to work for Zynga - they picked up a lot of their ~talent~ through takeovers and buyouts.... and they didn't bother to make sure that those people were adequately supervised, and they didn't bother to listen to any of their players any more cuz hey, if you don't have respect for us, why bother to listen?

Critical errors that all trace back to poor management, NOT to mobile/multi-platform games. Pincus should quit lying to himself and actually read some customer feedback once in awhile. And he should REALLY quit lying to the stockholders stuck with Zynga stock.

Although I really don't feel all THAT sorry for y'all, actually .... got to research and see what people who actually use the product are saying before you jump on those IPOs, guys!!!  I could have told you it was a bad investment .... oh hey... I did, actually.

Class Action Lawsuit Filed against Zynga

Pomerantz Law Firm Has Filed a Class Action Against Zynga Inc. -- ZNGA

So many so very lousy decisions that have been made at Zynga over the past more than a year now... I, like many many others, am beyond frustrated with how persistently they have been focussed on nothing but shooting themselves in the foot (they apparently have a LOT of feet!) .... but seriously?


If you read the article about the class action lawsuit, you will see that they are basing their action on the notion that
 (i) the Company was experiencing a rapid decline in the number of users for its existing web based games;
(ii) the Company was experiencing substantial delays in launching new web based games;
(iii) the Company was failing to take advantage of the changes on Facebook's web platform;
(iv) the Company was unable to effectively monetize revenues from mobile devices through its web based games; and
(v) as a result of the above, the Company's financial statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.


Ludicrous! It takes seconds to use Google to find out how well (or not) Zynga has been ~retaining~ players. (It's not, btw - they've been leaving in droves and for very good reasons).


The forums for each and every Zynga game are wide open - you don't even have to play a single game or create an account to wander through and have a read. And of course, there are plenty of other blogs and wikis and fan sites and news articles and....   give me a break!


If potential investors couldn't be bothered to spend 10 minutes having a look, they deserve what they got.


If they didn't, well ...as my brother would say .... "wah".  So now you've figured out that you blew it and want to do something about it? How 'bout instead of wasting your time & energy on lawsuits that reveal that you didn't take any time at all to research anything before you jumped, you spend a few minutes demanding that Zynga smarten the hell up and listen to its players? Far more productive.


They do have, among their many offerings, some winners... or would-be-winners if they could just stop with the foot-shooting thing for awhile.


Fortunately, there is, finally, a tiny glimmer of hope that things might be about to improve at Zynga!


Apparently this John Schappert dude has been there about a year - and that is about how long things have been going really REALLY badly  - if he WAS the sabateur that has been so intently driving Farmville and other games in to the ground, perhaps things might get better now?


I'd be happier if they had not just demoted him, but got rid of him entirely  - and I think that they really do need some new blood in there, or at the very least, an advisory board of players for each of the games (that they actually LISTEN to)....


but maybe, just maybe......

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. 

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.

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.

Farmer Appreciation Week

So .... Zynga has decided to have a week long double mastery event - with daily surprises, even.

I'm so excited.....NOT

Unless the surprises include some of the following, there really is very little point to the whole thing, in my opinion. If you actually appreciate your farmers, Zynga, how about:

1. fixing quest requests so that when people post a request it actually shows up! Or at the very least, adjust the deadlines to account for your glitches. And speaking of quests (and other new features), how about you assign someone to test them BEFORE you release them?


2. slow down! There is a fine line between offering enough new things to maintain interest and overwhelming - and you've clearly crossed it. Farmville appeals to a lot of collectors - trees, horses, water features, masteries, whatever... most of us collect something - but when you swamp us with too many somethings - or when you do really dumb things that prevent us from getting one or more of what we collect - our collections get ~ruined~ and then we stop collecting. How's that working out for you?


3. get real re: Lighthouse Cove expansions. Even those of us who can afford to buy FC are for the most part not willing to pay ridiculous prices for a measly 10 more plots


4. while you're at it, fix prices to be a/ reasonable and b/ fair. It is neither reasonable or fair to expect some players to pay 4x as much as others for the same damn thing. They are PIXELS, y'know.


5. removing EC access, and the EC quests so that some players can't get there at all, and others have no way to ever earn shared storage between farms was STUPID. Fix it. Now. And while you're at it, give us shared storage with LC as well


6. Customer support. This is the one area you show a great deal of potential - sometimes - but the no live chat for nonpaying customers - especially when many of the players who get that BS message before being rudely kicked from the service actually are paying customers - is ridiculous! It is also aggravating when everyone who contacts CS for the same issue gets told something different depending on who they happen to get. Do you people not talk to each other?


7. Stop by the forum once in awhile. Read the feedback that is right there available for you and pay attention! The players who bother to post are a small minority - but they are reflective of the majority and if you actually bothered to ~appreciate~ them and hey, here's a thought - how 'bout you actually talk to them once in awhile too! - you would not have lost MILLIONS of players already. (did y'all miss the class where they explain that it's easier to keep a customer than to keep getting new ones or to get the already pissed off ones back?)

7 days, 7 suggestions - tackling those would go a lot further towards showing some appreciation for your customers than a week of double mastery will, in my opinion.

Did I miss anything? Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.

Price Testing - again

Seriously ...that's what Mr. Live Chat called it when I contacted them to complain that I was unable to buy a candy corn tree in my market.

How is it price testing if some people can pay the stOOpid exorbitant price of 8FC while others like me can not buy it at all? SO IRKED!!!

That does not even make sense!

If it is not available to buy I am not going to buy it - there... are we done ~testing~ now?

Can I pretty please with sugar and a cherry on top have a candy corn tree now?

HOW many flipping feet do you HAVE, Zynga? Are you almost done shooting each and every one of them? How 'bout you hurry it up, already?

In other news, they have started to offer an expansion in Lighthouse Cove for coins. Of course, everyone that paid actual FC for it is now irked. I did not so am not - but it does irritate me no end that there is no consistency - once again - in how many neighbours one must have to expand for coin.

Some people in the forum are reporting that they need to add more than 30 neighbours to expand ... others, not a one ... and there seems to be no rhyme nor reason for the difference. Me, I only need to add 1 - from 165 neighbours to 166. But I am not inclined to go so much as one itsy bitsy teeny tiny bit out of my way for Zynga any more.

I am IRKED...and then some.

Still steaming over the 4x increase for biplaning orchards.... and now no candy cane tree in my orchard (I am, once again, not worthy).

Know what you can do with your expansion, Zynga? And your quests? And even your 40% off FC offer?

Same thing you can do with your game.

You obviously do not value your players' loyalty - so why should I have any?

Live Chat - For premium players only?!

Well - that is disturbing!

Apparently as of today people are being kicked off Live Chat (without being helped) for not having spent enough on farm cash? Or not buying recently? Or....? The criteria is not yet clear - but oy!

Way to go Zynga!! The ONE THING that you were doing so well and now you're turning THAT into yet another way of pissing off players?

Unbelievable.

I guess they have SO many customers, they don't need to worry about keeping them.

I seriously hope any potential investors are doing their due diligence. This company is seriously intent on self-destruction.

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.

Customer Service

Well, while I often find things aggravating in Farmville, I certainly cannot fault them for their customer service - especially not when it comes to Live Chat support.

It is not always available - and sometimes it can take many refreshes of the support page before you will see the link - but every time I have used it, they have solved my problem quickly, with a minimum of fuss - and usually thrown in a bonus for my aggravation.

Several times I have had FV$ magically disappear - which worries me somewhat, as I am not confident that I would always notice it. But when I have noticed and contacted them through Live Chat, they replaced it and then some.

Yesterday, I happened to notice that my coin tree had disappeared. Trees do that, occassionally - if I happen to have an error while in the middle of moving a tree - poof! But every other time (that I have noticed; I wouldn't notice unless they are level 1 trees I can't replace) they have turned up... usually in my storage. But this time, it was just gone. And since coin trees were a quest prize and (don't get me started!!!! ) non-reproducable (even though they SAY they are) and non-purchase-able, I was irked.

I spent altogether too much time searching for my poor lost coin tree... went through every single orchard, moved them all around, etc etc. No luck. The next step was to start moving everything around, checking to see if it was hiding behind something or other - still no luck - and using an aborist didn't change the mastery level either... so it seemed it was gone, not just misplaced.

Nothing worked - the silly thing was gone.

So...after another search this morning, I contacted Live Chat support, and was given not only a replacement, but also 4 more (so they could stay together and not get lost).

Excellent customer service.

Zynga's email support tends to be rather more hit & miss - although most of us diehards know that if you don't succeed, you can always reply to the message, get a different rep, and keep at it until you get resolution - and that CS representatives are not always provided with good information (that applies to Live Chat reps as well) - but on the whole, this is something Zynga does do very well.

Suggestion #3

Keep up the good work in the customer service department, Zynga. (But you might want to look at communication between CS & the developers; that could be improved)