Farmville Stable Expansion - nasty surprises

Farmville's stable expansion is here. It's not very generous. You need to accumulate 10 each of the five stable parts to add 5 (five) horses. And then you can expand again, so save the extras. Farmville doesn't tell anyone in advance that you can only add five horses at a time. If I find out what the limit is, I'll let you know. For the number of horses I have, I may be accumulating parts for the next two years.

 

Warning - people are complaining that they have suddently lost things like Provencal gates, apparently related to the stable expansion.  Mine is still there, but my virtual dogs stopped doing tricks. They just blink for a split second when they are supposed to roll over or play dead or shake. Real dogs are harder to train, but they stay trained. Doggone.

 

 

Getting the most out of Farmville Co-op jobs

I have quite a few gripes about Farmville Co-op jobs, but they are the best way for people with small farms to get ahead quickly and get bonus points. How else can someone with a hundred or 200 plots regularly get 1000 XP in a day or so without a lot of planting and harvesting?  

 

The biggest problem initially was that many neighbors and friends could not join jobs of other neighbors and friends. This seems to have been improved.  

 

Some tips:

 

1- All the jobs use crops that do not have a high point value. If you plant your whole field with grapes (2 XP per day) to do a Co-Op job, you can lose, say, 400 XP that you would have gotten had you planted peas (3 XP). But if you have enough partners, you don't need to plant a lot of grapes or anything else. Everyone gets the same XP bonus for a job, no matter what their contribution was, as long as they harvest before the job is done. The best sort of job management allows as many people as possible to join. If you are leading a long job (4 days 21 hrs)  and have enough neighbors, you can afford to plant only part of your field for the job, and then wait a few hours to allow others to join. Meanwhile, plant a fast crop like blackberries on the rest of the fields. If there are not enough people joining, you can always plant up the rest of your fields for the job, allowing enough time to get the gold medal.

 

2- Don't start a job if you don't have a lot of Facebook friends who play Farmville. Only friends of the group leader can join your job.

 

3- Don't join a job that is very late unless you can add enough to finish it. Chances are, if nobody joined after a day, nobody is going to join - the leader hasn't got enough neighbors and friends who play farmville.

 

4- There is always the possibility that someone will not harvest in time, which can sabotage the job. To get insurance against this, each person can plant more than is required, even if it doesn't register as seeded. If your job requires grapes, all the grapes harvested while you are in the job will be counted, regardless of whether or not they were registered as seeded, up until the maximum. Of course, this means that those who do not harvest in time may be shut out. And you can plant, for example, grapes, and then join a job afterwards. Seed more grapes, and then you can harvest the ones you planted and the harvested grapes count for the job. The seeded ones will not be counted when they are harvested, but still, it means you can actually (in theory) finish a job in an hour, if everyone joins the job after their grape (or tulip or whatever) crop is ready.  

 

5- If you can coordinate a team of people who do jobs together, you will all start together and finish quickly, minimizing the wait between jobs.

 

6- Not everyone in the job is necessarily listed on the main job page display, because the space is limited. Click the "Friends" tab to see all the people in the job.

 

And remember - it really is only a game. :-)

 

Ami Isseroff

Fixing the Farmville Feed

The Farmville game feed has become useless, and the wall posts of Farmville in Facebook are usually swallowed and appear under "Show XXX Similar Posts". This makes it difficult to find rewards and calls for help etc.

 

You can supposedly fix the problem by going to your wall and changing the "Combine posts" setting.

Here's how: Just beneath the input field ("What's on your mind") at right, click on Options.

 

Then click on Settings.

 

Look for "Combine Posts" and uncheck the option.

 

 

Of course, that doesn't uncombine everyone's posts, so assuming it works, we would have to get everyone to do it.

 

Here's the full explanation in Facebook.

 

Ami Isseroff

 

Farmville Bonus Package

There's a great Farmville bonus package - while they last - you get 3 Cash and a choice of other goodies.

Only one per day.

 

http://farmville.com/stimulus.php 

 

 

More Gripes about Cooperative Farming

The bugs are what make Farmville challenging. Without all those "Your game is out of sync with the server" messages, lost gifts and lost neighbors, it just wouldn't be the same would it?

 

But the annoyances are just annoying. The Farmville Cooperative Farming feature has bugs aplenty, but it also has designed-in annoyances. When you are done seeding and everyone is just waiting for the crops to come up, you can't join another project. You don't really know how long it is going to be before you can join a project either, so you have a wasted period of up to a day.

 

That's a minor problem. But what happens if someone forgets to harvest their crop or can't do it. There are, let's face it, higher priorities in life than playing Farmville and it is just barely imaginable, isn't it, that someone will be called away on urgent business, or get sick or meet the love of their life and forget about Farmville. The crops they seeded are never harvested. There is no way for anyone to make up the loss, and the project goes under.

 

C'est la vie.

 

 

Farmville: Dog-gone

Farmville is selling puppies. Very cute puppies. Even my Philistine heart could not resist this new gadget. The only one that didn't cost a lot of cash was the Border Collie, which cost 300,000 coins.

 

Dogs are expensive, be they real or virtual.

 

Trixie arrived and was duly named after her real-life name sake, but didn't behave like her. Trixie the virtual dog ran and hid just like it was programmed to do. The problem with that was that I could not find it to feed it. If you do not feed the puppy every day, it runs away, Farmville warns. After a day Farmville put up a notice that I had to pay 3 Cash to get the dog out of the pound. They were going to get that cash out of me one way or the other. So I paid the 3 cash, but the dog was still hidden. Turned out it was behind my Irish castle, which I placed so as to hide my Avatar, which is fenced in so it doesn't cause trouble and waste time. The back of that castle is now lined with bales of hay so no dog can go there, but there are lots of other places for Trixie to hide. It has been fenced in with some hay bales in a corner of the farm though, and will stay there for 14 days. If it gets out and hides in the trees, Farmville can have it.

 

If you get a puppy, prepare an enclosure for it beforehand and keep it there.

 

Wasn't there a racket like this in the depression (the 1930s one) where derelicts would "find" your dog?  

Farmville Cooperative Farming and Coop bugs

FarmVille has a new feature - cooperative farming. It's a great idea.: Join a co-operative of farmers to complete a job. But beware! Because of bugs (defects, or "issues" as FarmVille calls them) in this feature, you may not complete the job, even if you think you have a lot of neighbors to invite. FarmVille is not telling people about the bugs:

 

1- You cannot invite most of your neighbors to the job right now. They may see the announcement in their feed (or they may not) but if they click on it, they see only a different job displayed in the cooperative jobs display or they may get a message that says "Failed to find Job" OR they may FIND the job in the display AND try to join it, but then get a message that says something like "Failed to join job. Job is full or no longer exists.

 

2 - As soon as you start a job, one hour is deducted from the finish time, so if you had "4 days," you really have 3 days and 23 hours. There's a problem here anyhow. In 4 days, you probably can't do 4 days of 1 day crops, because of the time it takes to plant and seed (and the time to recover from inevitable crashes).

 

Cooperative farming provides three levels of rewards - gold for the first level gives the most XP. Silver allows more time to finish but gives less XP and coins. Bronze is the lowest level. Because of the bugs, it is probably impossible or near impossible to get a Gold finish.

 

If you join the job and it fails, there is probably nothing lost (I don't know yet). But right now it is probably best to start a job or join one only if you have a large number of free plots (like 300-400) so you are pretty sure you can finish on your own or with only a few partners.

 

Jobs that involve 8 hour crops like pumpkins should probably recruit people from several time zones.

 

Ami Isseroff