Thursday, July 29, 2010

Scrub Farmers Must Die...

Farmville is my game of choice lately and it is not free from unattended macroing. In Farmville's case it comes in the form of people running programs that constantly scan for posts about Farmville, and then automatically accepts gifts that people put on line for the general public or all of their friends.

The problem I have with this is that when I go through and see that my friend has posted a link to an egg or some other item I can not get them even if I click on it within 15 seconds of seeing the post. There are a limited number of people that can collect certian items from other people, and since I choose not to run these programs, I often miss out on stuff that I would like to have on my farm.

I don't breed animals, and I don't really care for the new crafting system. I do like to have a few rares on my farm, and I do like to decorate. I don't mind farming, but it costs me some cash since I don't want to manually click on over 400 plots of ground. I don't take stuff I don't need just to sell for coins and I don't collect things I won't ever put on my farm. Point is that when I want something, I actually want to use it and not just to take up space or collect some coin. The scrub farmers make it almost impossible to get anything.

I really don't mind if they use a bonus checker, because you actually have to interact and choose what you want from the list of all available gifts you can receive. The scrubers can be set up to accept "all" gifts as they come up and that's the part that irritates me.

Farmville is progressing with new stuff rather quickly, and that is good except for the fact they are getting to the point things won't run on older computers anymore. You have no choice to opt out of certian checks and you have no way to slow down or stop the flow of crap they are throwing at you. I understand why they may want to ask you to add a friend or tell you that you have found something, but when it stops you from playing the game then I have a problem with it. Zygna needs to go back and take out some of the suck while playing. There is no reason to have so many checks and so much going on all the time that even my 4gig laptop cringes every time they want to stop me from plowing my ground.

The new Lightning round stuff is just about the biggest pain in the ass I have ever had to deal with. Some of the gems require that you send them to a select list except for the rare items, which get picked off by the scrub farmers. I was lucky enough to have some friends that don't have scrubbers as neighbors so I could complete my gems collection. I don't really see much of the point in what they are doing with this. It is mostly just irritating.

The bee-hives are a joke. I have had one crop fertilized out of about 20, and I don't see why I want to take up the space for something we really didn't need. There are some rules to the bee-hive that aren't consistent with the rest of the game, like losing bees for not being there and harvesting every two days, plus there is supposedly something about having either bunches of flowers or flowers planted to keep all of your bees. Any way you slice it, that system has left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

The crafting sytem needs a ton of work, and now it is a pain to get bushels to use for your own crafted items. I can see this system getting used until everyone levels it to the max, but I don't know that it is truly useful except for getting fast fuel. Eventually no one will buy my level 1 or 2 items because the fuel yield will be too low. Zygna needs to make sure those lower level items will still be viable down the road. It is also only available to your neighbors, so that limits the field of who may even purchase the lower end items. Zygna needs to open this part of the game up to everyone even if they aren't neighbors to keep this system from being a complete failure. The system is still very complicated as well. It is confusing for the general public now to see what they have in inventory for their own bushels versus what is on sale to their friends. They just raised the number of bushels you can have in your inventory, but I don't think there is a clear line for people to see what can and can't be bought or removed from the personal inventory by other people.

Basically, I think Zygna needs to slow it down and streamline all of these new systems before they alienate their entire user base... Zygna has taken a pretty much mindless time waster and turned it into a lagging nightmare for most of us...

That's all I got for now.