Monday, August 23, 2010

Fear's Off The Diving Board Again In Farmville!



Fear talks mainly about Farmville's storage new limitations/capacity, and the changes to the Winery crafting cottage.

Kid safe language, comedy and sarcasm may be kid safe, it depends on the parent.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

More on Farmville, Video Style!



More with Fear on the new video blog and all about current Farmville issues.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Video Blog, Take 1...

The picture is too dark, the sound is okay, and it's all me... Back from the dead doing a little commentary about Farmville...

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjm1UDud27E

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzcoRn6J2cg

Just for giggles, I have a new blog up with much better lighting...

Video Blog for August 13, 2010...

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

No Parkin' On Zygna's Dance Floor...

So, Zygna has fixed a couple of issues that I thought worthy of mention. First off they made it so you don't get asked to publish fuel found while plowing until you stop plowing which is a big plus. They have also started to implement a "screen" or a way of shutting off all the timers and graphics when you publish so things do move a bit faster... Kudos to the team for coming up with some workable solutions to our FarmVille blues... They are still popping up a bunch of other messages about gems and stuff, that are totally being skipped by I am sure just about everyone. We still need some sort of fix there Zygna!

Now for the dark side of things... The garages are pretty messed up. Most of the problems are coming from the fact that they don't bring up the list of vehicles in any particular order when you "look inside" the garage structure. When upgrading, you may add some parts to your vehicle of choice, but the next time you add a part, you may see the garage say that the vehicle is fully upgraded when it is not. This happens most often when the vehicle you are upgrading ends up on page 2 or 3 of the list of vehicles. Once it says it is fully upgraded, you can't add more parts until you reload your farm.

I ran an experiment, and found that if you just remove all of the other vehicles down to 3 or less, then the garage is less likely to become confused and you can upgrade you vehicle as per normal. Once you are finished upgrading, you can put your vehicles back in the garage, and use them. Some of the pop-ups for finishing a vehicle are saying the wrong vehicle was upgraded, or it says the wrong number of plots you can now farm. Some of that may be due to the lag and they haven't fully streamlined how the garage mini-game works so it doesn't impact the rest of the system as much. The last "Official FarmVille PodCast" said that the maximum level you could take vehicles to is Level 4. I have not been able to test this on coin paid vehicles, but the "Hot Rod" collection can all be upgraded to Level 5, which is 4 X 4 Plots. Hopefully Zygna is already working on this stuff.

Not much else to complain about except that they seriously need to get the market stuff in order. There is still major lag and confusion while trying to tend to your spa, bakery, or winery. There is also a problem when you get the error message while trying to buy bushels/goods where it is supposed to give you back your coins. It says try again, but if you have purchased your limit, then you can't try again until the timer runs out. You need to refund the time as well as the coins guys!

Anyway, that's all I got for now... Happy Farming!

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Noooo... Please Don't "Fix" that...

Zygna sent us a message about fixing something that was broken in the first place. The interruptions and pop-ups they throw at us while we are farming are crippiling most computers. Now that is is broke, we have actually been able to farm without wanting to slit our own wrists...

Here is the message... "Farmers, you may notice that when using a Vehicle to Plow, Seed or Harvest, you aren't getting any messages for Collection items, Bushels and the like. Don't fret, you're still receiving your stuff, just no notification. This will affect your ability to share with friends, unfortunately. We're working on fixin' it soon as we can. "

Zygna, for the love of all that is holy, don't fix it...

That's all I got.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

So, How About A Preferred Friends List For Farmville?

Well, as you know, getting gifts from your real friends that play the game normally is almost impossible if that friend has a lot of neighbors. Much of that is due to all of the gift grabbers and game scrubbers, but I came up with an idea, that may or may not help out the cause of getting your gifts to the people you really want them to go to regardless of how many friends you have. This is the suggestion I sent to Zygna...

Perhaps there may be a way to limit how many people can receive gifts using "game scrubbers" by allowing us to set up 5 and 10 people "preferred friends" lists that we can use to make sure that the people we want to get prizes can get them.

Currently, you can change who gets them in the Facebook publish system, but that is fairly tedious and doesn't let us know if the next 5 or 10 people will get such an item. If there was an option to have a preferred friends list for the top 5 to 10 friends, and then allowing the overage depending on how many preferred friends you choose to be gifted to the general public. That would help greatly for people with a lot of neighbors, that don't want their true friends being left out of the loop.

Hey, I just woke up and it sounded good to me...

In other news, Farmville must be doing more updates. We have had our usual one or two days of normal farming, and now all hell is breaking loose again. The biggest issue for me to do is receiving my mystery gifts which presents a blank screen when I try to collect them from Facebook.

I almost feel bad about bitching about how crappy updates were on World Of Warcraft. At least we would get a break once in awhile. Maybe even get to play 2 weeks before they decided to wreck everything for a few days. I dunno, I think Zygna is having some serious growing pains, but since they keep making the game harder to play and too complicated for the average farmer, those numbers should come down here fairly soon.

That's all I got...