Hallowe’en Items Review 2

So it's been over a week since my last review (sorry about that).

Anyway I'm back now with another review for Hallowe'en (and there's a lot to go over!)

OK Firstly this past week and a half saw the release of a new set of quests, which have great prizes but sometimes require a few too many harvests (300 pumpkins being a bit excessive!) but the prizes are all super spooky and worth the work!

Favourite Tree: "Halloween Tree" this is the one that looks like the fruit is a ghost and pumpkin basket. It looks freaky and I have bought a load of them 'cause they really add to the spookiness of your farm!
Favourite Building: Haunted Mansion, it wins this weeks favourite building award and is well worth the 35 farmcash price tag!
Favourite Animal: There were many contenders this week but my favourite came out as the black ponytail, super awesome!

Also released this week is the super cool Count Duckula's Castle and once complete is huge and really adds to a Hallowe'en themed farm, even better you can harvest it for treats and even harvest your neighbour's castles for up to six treats as a reward! You can also build multiples which means more treats and more spookiness. The only annoying thing is it requires 306 building materials to complete, which is a bit much for small time players but we do get plenty of time to complete it!

Another "free" release this week is the huge Jack-O'Lantern which, other than looking cool, also is where you put your treats and trade these in for a number of really awesome items! You need 400 treats though to buy one of each item, but it could be worse!
All the items available are really cool, especially the Nightmare Stallion for 170 treats and the Big Candy Pumpkin [a tree] for 75.

Rewards in the Huge Jack-O'Lantern

OK onto the other releases! There were numerous animals released this week, including a few for coins such as the Kermode Bear and Cat-O'Lantern. The Nightmare Chicken (20 farmcash) looks really cool and fiery! The Pumpkin Tree House (25 farmcash) and the Eyeball Lake (18 farmcash) are both really awesome, looking although not the best.

Overall I feel the release has lots of cool items and this years Hallowe'en is easily the best yet!

Count Duckula's Castle (complete)

Hallowe’en Items Review

This is my first review of items that I hope will become a regular feature.

My favourite building currently available is the Black Pumpkin, available for a modest 15 farmcash. It isn’t the most complex building released but I feel it looks really great on a Hallowe’en themed farm.

The best tree is the spider tree, the spider and spiders’ webs making the tree look super spooky and just perfect for a creepy looking farm!

The Batwing horse makes it as my top animal! It looks like something straight out of a scary Hollywood movie and it’s worth its 26 farmcash price tag!

Let’s review some of the other items out with the Hallowe’en theme; OK firstly the Kraken Lake, I think it does look quite cool but I’m disappointed with how un-scary it is so I won’t be buying it, especially at 20 farmcash. The haunted house is currently the most expensive Hallowe’en item available (35 farmcash) and I do think it looks really well but not quite fantastic. One of my favourite animals is the Nightmare Unicorn but I would say its 30 farmcash price tag is pushing at the upper limit of its value.

There are also some pretty neat coin items available, the dreadful fence returning for the third time, a couple of cool looking pumpkins (or Jack O Lanterns if you prefer) and even a coined animal, the blue oxen. These items won’t make a spooky looking farm on its own, you really need to spend some farmcash if you’re planning on a really awesome Hallowe’en farm but they do add to the overall effect!

My three favourites lined up together (both trees are included for size comparison)

Oh and in case you’re wondering, Hallowe’en is actually spelt with an apostrophe it’s just that most people don’t know and therefore leave it out!

Hallowe’en is huge this year

Zynga is really going all out on Hallowe’en this year, I’ve counted and so far there are 17 animals, 16 trees, 21 deocrations, 8 buildings, 13 costumes and two crops, this is a huge amount, especially when you consider that it’s only the 10^th of October and there is going to be much more to come!

But all these pretty items do come at a very high price, I’ve counted and all these items together cost a staggering 1,003 farmcash (and that’s if you buy only one of each)! I’ve excluded mystery game items and level two trees from this! The vast majority of players, even high spenders, aren’t going to be buying everything as the cost is huge! But I must say with this load of cash items there are a few reprieves, there are a number of coins items with the Hallowe’en theme, and they’re not just fences and other small decorations, there’s a number of coined animals. I suspect this 1003 total will increase dramatically by the time Hallowe’en actually occurs but hopefully not too much.

Trees are one of my own personal favourites in the game. So far there are eight level one trees released and they all (unfortunately) cost eight cash, and there’s more to come and I will buy them all. This is going to be a costly theme but I must say, most of the items are awesome looking enough in my books to warrant the high price tag!

I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of the month if the 1003 price tag were to double!

MASSIVE Giftbox Increase

Well I am absolutely flabbergasted (yes that is a word) by Zynga. Previously your giftbox could hold 500 items, if you went over this limit the game would enter "the eviction process" and some more common items would be deleted to try to keep the giftbox under 500. Now you need to reach 5000 before the game will do this. The reason for having such a limit is for a couple of reasons:

1. Having huge amounts of items slows the game down.
2. Zynga needs to save all the into

This forum post by TerriHelper explains everything you need to know: http://forums.zynga.com/showthread.php?p=10354702#post10354702

And I remember when the limit was only 50.

Lighthouse Cove Review 4 (Quests)

I know the Lighthouse Cove is now a few weeks old but because the quests aren’t all released together that’s why this is late.

With the third set of quests for the Lighthouse Cove almost over it is pretty obvious that it’s going to become impossible not to have spent at least some cash to actually complete them all. Some of the requirements are to plant 90 of a specific crop, this is more than the 18x18 expansion can provide (it gives you 75 plots) and upgrading to 18x18 costs you 120 cash! This is a lot just to complete a few quests, with the current theme you seem to get three normal and three “bonus” quests to complete and each give you a few nice prizes.

Although the quests require a lot of cash to complete at least the prizes are significantly better than what they used to be when quests first hit farmville. Trees are one of the most common prizes, and being someone who collects all the trees they are really great rewards! Personally I haven’t bought one expansion yet, I’ve gotten the first three expansions for free as Customer Service has given them to me when I contacted them about grievances (I am a paying customer so they are usually co-operative). Otherwise there is no way I’d be able to complete the quests and get the prizes.

Zynga deliberately gives us barely any time because they know that people are much more likely to spend money on farmcash than if they gave more time. 

A place for Mastery Signs

When animal mastery was released a month ago it drastically increased the amount of available mastery signs, and with calf and foal mastery coming soon it’s going to increase hugely again. I would say that the day when there are more than 1,000 mastery signs available isn’t in the too distant future!

The issue is that the people who have the most mastery signs also have the most items in general on their farms because they’re the ones prepared to pay lots of money for farmcash items. So these people will likely get to the stage where they have over 1,000 signs that they don’t want to sell. In reality they won’t be able to fit them all on their farms and because they have so many farmcash items in storage they can’t afford to put all the signs in storage. Releasing the Lighthouse Cove provides an extra 1,000 storage has significantly delayed the need for a place for mastery signs. But I feel that it’s going to have to happen eventually.

Placing mastery signs in the place would be optional of course as some people use mastery signs for decorations. The place could be a field where you have lots of different options for how you display the stored signs. You could have one whereby they were organised alphabetically, you could have the option of displaying an example of what you mastered in front or behind the sign, you could have the option of displaying unmastered items where they are greyed out.

The following are ideas for headings:

·         Crops

·         Trees

·         Animals

·         Crafts

·         English Countryside

·         English Countryside crops

·         English Countryside trees

·         English Countryside animals

·         English Countryside crafts

·         Home farm

·         Home farm crops

·         Home farm trees

·         Home farm animals

·         Home farm crafts

·         Lighthouse Cove

·         Lighthouse Cove crops

·         Lighthouse Cove trees

·         Lighthouse Cove animals.

·         Lighthouse Cove crafts.

Lighthouse Cove Review 3 (crops)

Along with the long list of trees released in the wake of the Lighthouse Cove, Zynga has also released a lot of crops that are exclusive to the Lighthouse Cove. There is 12 in total and here’s a quick rundown of their times.

Two day: Cauliflower

One day: Red Clover

               Kennebec Potato

               Hay

               Cove Cranberry

16 hour: Daylily

12 hour: Butter & Sugar corn

              Dill

10 hour: Tarragon

8 hour: Chandler Blueberry

            Lady slipper

4 hour: Darrow blackberry

This is all fine until you remember that your plot amount is limited depending on your farm size, 35 on a basic farm. This means you’ll have to pay a lot, 990 farmcash, to fully expand your farm to a significant plot amount. I don’t know what it is as I don’t pay for expansions so the Lighthouse Cove crop mastery is going to take a long time for me! But I know that Zynga is planning on releasing the first three expansions for coins "soon".

Lighthouse Cove review 2 (trees)

With the release of the Lighthouse Cove Zynga has also released a lot of trees, 22 in fact, which is a bit much in my opinion. If you wish to buy one of every level one tree it will cost you 65 farmcash and 5,000 coins which is quite a lot! Yet I am really happy with a coin tree, something that hasn’t been released in a long time!

One of the things that I’m delighted with is the variety of the colours of the trees, previously the majority of trees released are either green or fake trees (such as the ice-cream tree), which the Lighthouse Cove has come a lot of reds and beiges and all the colours you would associate with autumn so it’s great if you want to decorate your farm like it’s autumn, especially since it’s currently autumn and Zynga will no doubt release many autumn themed items! I would love them to release the trees that are in the background of the Lighthouse Cove, I know that they’re just re-colours of older trees but they’re really pretty and at least they look real!

Lighthouse Cove Review 1

I'll be honest, I love the idea of the Lighthouse Cove, it's different to both the English Countryside and the Home farm as the sea has now been included!

But there's just one major problem with it. The building materials required.

To complete the cove it requires a ridiculous 293 stones, 293 steel beams and 239 logs which is 879 materials in total, this doesn't include everything you have to build in the whole LC. To make it a basic farm (for me that's  one orchard, a horse stable, a fully upgraded combine & garage) and complete all the quests (the wildlife habitat) it requires 139 vehicle parts, 70 wooden boards, 70 bricks, 70 nails, 10 grazing grass, 10 fence posts and 10 shrubs. This means that you have to collect a breath taking 1,258 materials, and this doesn't include cellars or any other building! Astonishing really.

Now this is no real problem for a farmer like me, I get about 100 gifts daily and I've enough neighbours posting to the feed that I can collect a lot. But the big problem is for the people who have a low neighbour count (let's say seven), there is no way that they will complete the Lighthouse Cove for a long time!

With the release of the Lighthouse Cove I've seen Zynga do something I've not seen for a long time. They have intentionally released coin animals (not farmcash ones released early by accident)! And not just one, three! Which is three more than usual! But these animals don't come cheap, it'll cost you 400,000 if you wish to buy only one of each. But for high level farmers like me, that's not a problem!

I was rather excited when I saw a Pine Martin and was prepared to pay cash for it as those animals come from where I live and are quite rare nowadays.

Farms being returned slowly

At the start of this week there as a hack in the farmville iPod/iPhone app whereby people could get almost unlimited farmcash without paying for it. Now this wasn't a simple glitch, to get the cash you had to have a jailbroken iPod/iPhone and use the software to hack in, so the people knew what they were doing was illegal.

The people who got this cash subsequently had their accounts locked and were unable to access their farms until today. Many of these players had farmcash on their accounts before the hack and people are reporting that some or all of that cash is missing, but they are lucky as any items/expansions bought with cash from the hack are saying that everything is intact.

Now these people are lucky, Zynga could easily have banned their accounts permanently and they would have had every legal right to do so.

The lesson: If you're going to illegally hack, don't do it on your main account!

$1 White Unicorn

Zynga has taken the "$1 item" too far this time.

Tension has been mounting over the past month or so between paying players and Zynga. The release of four new homes for animals that can give away old farmcash items for free has really angered a lot of players who paid literally hundreds of dollars/pounds/yen/euros or whatever currency they used on the items. I know a number of players personally who have spent literally $1000s of dollars on this game and half the stuff they bought is now freely available to everyone without payment.

The other issue of contention is the animals that are free with any farmcash purchases means that people could pay as little as $1 for a very expensive animal. Or if they earn facebook credits by completing surveys they could get the item with no cost to their wallet and completely legitimately. This was has just boiled over with the White Unicorn being the latest animal given away for $1, being the first unicorn many players spent literally 100s of farmcash getting it, including myself and I don't usually buy farmcash!

The most worrying thing about this is that there are numerous other very exclusive and expensive items out there that now seem like they could end up only costing $1. Many players are now worried that nothing is safe from being sold off cheaply and they've stopped buying the large quantities of farmcash. Zynga needs to stop this practice or risk losing all their big paying players!

Another Pointless Change

Zynga has introduced another pointless change when it could have been fixing some of the numerous in game bugs instead of wasting resources this:

This is the new pop-up you get when you initially load your farm for sending special delivery boxes to "active" neighbours. It replaces the old menu where there was the SDB icon on the left and a list of names on the right. But don't worry farmers the names do appear beside the pictures, I simply removed them in respect for my neighbours' privacy.

Indeed I find this menu more aesthetically pleasing but the time could've been better spent fixing the glitches such as the one where random plots don't get seeded when you use the combine.

Third Farm Coming "Soon"

It appears our third farm will be called "Lighthouse Cove" if you believe this:

Further hints have been coming from the fan sites, remember to check fvnation for updates! The seem to be a number of cool things on the way, it appears that you may be able to harvest fish! I have felt, right from when I started playing on the 7th of September 2009 (yes I remember the date) that fish were the one thing that farmville was missing, and now almost two years on it appears that Zynga may finally grant my wish for fish. Just take a look at this post in fvnation {link}.

The third farm hints just continue with a globe appearing in the travel bar rather than a British flag/home sign.

I think the idea of a third farm is fantastic, especially if there is some plot space (i.e. not all fish) as well as storage abilities. I would imagine that there'll be plenty of quests for people to complete with hopefully good prizes! Also I hope that the new farm isn't too farmcash orientated as Zynga would really alienate its free players if it did!

The new Habitats

The habitats are a great idea as it allows you to make multiples of animals you already had and get ones that you always wanted but never got!

When you harvest any of the habitats you can get three things, a common baby, a rare baby or feed. When posting any of these to the facebook feed three people can take one of the posted item. To grow a common baby it requires 10 feed to grow up, to grow a rare baby it requires 30 feed.

Now, the ones you get from your own habitats will be a duplicate of any animal that's inside your habitat. Whereas the ones that you get from the feed can be any animal that Zynga has designated to a certain list. To find out what animals are available from the feed visit here for the habitat or here for the pet run.

There is just one, quite large, problem I have with them. Both the habitat and the pet run take up 48 squares of space yet you can only store 20 animals, this is a problem as some animals take up only one space. This is very annoying for people who are tight on space, even though doubling the space to 40 would still leave a deficit if you only put in the tiny animals but it would at least be an improvement.

Customer Service – Live Chat Issues

In case you don't know Live Chat is a section of customer support whereby you could chat to an Zynga agent  'live' to resolve an issue such as missing items on your forum or payment problems.

Over the past few days I have heard many reports of people being unable to get Live Chat. Others have had much worse experiences, a number of people who had patiently waited to get live chat were told that they were not “paid customers” before they had a chance to explain their issue.

First of all this is terrible English as “paid customer” implies that the customer is the one receiving the money rather than the company. “Paying customer” would be the phrase they are probably looking for.

Secondly this term “paid/paying customer” has no clarity whatsoever, the friends that have been cut off from CS have spent quite a bit of money on the game. According to one moderator on the Zynga Community Forums to be classed as a paying customer you have to have spent at least $1 on Farmville which doesn’t appear to be true. There doesn’t seem to be even a consensus among Zynga employees as Lexilicious, a Farmville community manager, claimed Live Chat was available to all, which is clearly bogus.

Oh and don’t make a post about this on the forums as all posts are quickly removed without warning or reason. 

I have returned!

My apologies to everyone for not posting during the summer months but I'm back now and will re-start posting! Over the next while I will post about the following things;

• Costumer Service - Live Chat issues
• The wildlife habitat/pet run
• A guide to eggs

And many more things that I'm sure you'll find useful :)

Mystery Game Stategising

This was shared to be by a good friend from the Farmville forums, her name is Moonchildmadness and she has figured out a pattern of activity to the Mystery Game. To people who like to play this may be very useful and it’s well worth a read if you do.

This will only work for someone who has played it many times and can detect their personal pattern. The pattern seems to be unique to account and that's why you don't always match the same person.

The location of the... rare seems to go in a 3-8 week cycle with the same spots in succession, that start over after weeks. The cycle is always the same number of weeks for each person, but the number of weeks varies by person. I have a 6 week cycle. This week was a pain because of course I wanted the pony and got the pegasus first dart. There may be a pattern for 2nd rare, haven't gone after enough to be sure.

For example I will find mine in

C3R3, then C2R2, then C3R4, Then C1R5, C1R3, C1R1 then back to C3R3 and it starts again., been working for a while now. Seems to repeat those locations in succession every time for me. I think people don't figure that out, because for some it repeats the same spot 2 weeks in a row to throw us off.

So before you throw, if you look at your old boards and can figure out your spots and which week you are in, you may be able to get it in one dart

Remember, this isn’t my own work. 

Birthday Cake Crop Failure

I’m disappointed but not remotely surprised that Zynga has introduced the second Farmcash only crop that’s not for charity.  It’s really unfair on people who love to have crop mastery but aren’t prepared to fork over real money for bits and bytes on a screen!

And to me, someone who has spent farmcash this is a bit of an imaginary line that Zynga are crossing. The trees were fine (as long as they stay at five farmcash), the horses and cows were OK at the start until they got far too expensive. But crops are at the very beating heart of old Farmville, before trees or animals were even harvestable, before there was mastery. It is what helps to draw people into the game. Collecting is something most farmvillians like doing, that’s the reason for mastery. But as soon as Zynga start asking people to pay for that privilege on the only area of gameplay where farm cash does not dominate? It’s going to alienate Zynga’s ordinary players and many may well leave the game if they continue with this trend. This would also worry Zynga because they actually make more money from in game clicks (they can charge more for advertising), so they need to keep all farmers happy.

My advice to people, especially the mastery addicts; do not buy this crop. If you do you are telling Zynga that crops like this are OK and that we like them – which we don’t. So please, send a message to Zynga and boycott this crop.

Breeding and Stuffing Explained

When I say breeding, I’m not talking about the sheep and the pigs. I’m talking about how to breed horses and cows; it’s a pretty simple procedure in which you can make calves/foals for your friends or lots of money for yourself!

Cow Breeding: To do this you’ll need: one dairy barn, the cow you wish to make a calf from and some seeders (seeders can be any cow or bull, they must be fully grown for this to work).

Firstly place your chosen cow and a bull into the dairy barn and wait until it’s ready, then harvest it. If you don’t get a calf then you’ll need to try again. To do this you need to place a ready cow or  bull inside the cow barn by using the move tool. This should make the dairy barn ready for harvesting (If your seeder is a bull you will need to remove the bull you have from inside your dairy barn as Zynga only allows one bull per barn). Repeat this until you have your desired calf. Unfortunately Zynga only allows each farm to have one calf per day so after you get the calf you’ll have to wait until the next day before trying again. There are ten calves available per post for your friends.

Yet breeding for calves isn’t the only thing you can do by this method. If you are level 75 or above you can use this method to make you a lot of money! You need to be level 75 because this requires belted cows which cost 1,000,000 coins and give you 3,000 per harvest. Instead of the “cow and bull” combination you need for breeding replace them with as many belted cows as you can afford. Then using the previous method of placing seeders in your barn harvest the barn numerous times until all are exhausted, if you do not have a lot of money at the start it can be quite slow but after a while it begins to pick up, if you use your earnings to buy more belted cows. By the end you can make an awful lot of money in just one day, for example, say you have a fully expanded barn and it’s filled with 39 belted cows (leaving one space for a seeder) and you have, say, 20 belted cows outside you can make 2,397,000 coins in the one day. Each cow also gives you 10,000 XP which means that you will also level up fast and can make you some farmcash (1 fc per level up, until level 250).

Horse breeding is pretty much the same as cow breeding except you need a stallion, which are much harder to come across than bulls if you don’t spend farmcash. If you don’t and you don’t have 1000 gifts left over from the 2010 “holiday” tree you could as a friend who does, otherwise this can’t be done. Other than that it’s pretty much the same method with the exception that you can get as many foals as you like, unlike the limit of one calf and that instead of needing the horses to be ready they will work at 33%

Just a small piece of advice to anyone who might be on the forums, don’t say “breeding” on the forums in reference to cows or horses as it’s technically not allowed (even though Zynga make lots of money from cow and horses sales from it) instead you have to call it “stuffing” and you aren’t allowed to explain it to someone. So if someone asks how you do it, send them a personal message.

You can also “stuff” orchards to produce seedlings of a specific tree; this is how people make lots of specific level two trees.

Unlike with the barns and stables putting a new tree in will not affect how long until the orchard is ready to harvest, i.e. If you have a ready tree and place it in a 45% ready orchard, the orchard will remain at 45%.  For this to give you lots of seedlings you’ll need plenty of orchards as it will only work once every two days. So build, let’s say 10 orchards and place a tree in each of them and wait two days until they are all ready, then place the trees you want in the orchards and harvest it, if it produces watering cans, carry on until a seedling is produced. At this point my advice would be to grow that tree so that you can use it in the remaining orchards. But don’t forget that whatever you use as the original tree can also be the one that decides the seedling, so the more trees you put into the orchard the less likely an unwanted seedling is produced. 

Farmcash trees – the Never Ending Feature

Prior to tree mastery being introduced there was a grand total of 43 trees, including limited edition ones. Since then the number has skyrocketed to over 250! This shows just how greedy Zynga can get, trying to squeeze all the money they can from those people that feel the need to master every tree that comes out. During ten day Gagaville promotion there were twelve trees released, almost as many as existed when the game first appeared in 2009!  And as soon as the promotion was over two new trees, the Irish and Chinese strawberries, were released.

Zynga also seems to be testing player’s reactions to seven farmcash trees by introducing them periodically, it’s likely that if Zynga makes more money from the seven farmcash trees they will introduce them as a permanent feature, like the price hikes for the cows and horses. If you like to master trees my advice would be to spend less farmcash on the seven farmcash trees as it will mean Zynga will make less money! So say you normally buy five tree, costing you 25 farmcash buy three of the seven farmcash trees, costing you 21 farmcash. This will hopefully send a simple message to Zynga and a permanent price hike will not happen, I know it will mean mastering trees slower but at least you may save real money in the long term!

The one thing I do love about the trees though is that they are rarely re-colours of previous versions (like the horses and cows) but I am disappointed that a lot of the level two trees are simply “giant” or “big” level one trees.

Gagaville Promotion is Over

With the last of the quests over for a couple of days, all that is left is a few market items as well as the LE crafts and crops. It's doubtful that people will forget this 10-day long promotion, the theme was new and exciting bringing Gaga lovers and Gaga haters together in the quirky theme. I thoroughly enjoyed it as I adored the trees that were released (they're definitely my favourite trees) and the prizes for the quests were just phenomenal (well most).

Yet for some, the promotion just trailed off. I would have loved to have seen some grand finale on the last day, such as a big prize for the quest rather than the 'pond', which looked more like a puddle.

But alas, no sooner than is this promotion over than the next theme has begun, this time it's Ireland.

Zynga Glitch is good for us

Quickly! While it lasts!

There is currently a horse in the free gifts page called the 'Irish Hunter Horse'. It was meant to be in the market and cost 26 fc but someone at Zynga messed up so it's in the gifts page, but only for a short while.

 So go buy it, some people reporting that it works better if you use the 'make a wish' button in your giftbox! Others reporting that not all the horses that they accepted are in their giftbox.

Ability to store trees and animals on Super slow roll-out

I first heard reports of this two days ago and it seems to be rolling out very slowly as I still have not got it. I suspect it may be as slow as the Zynga Messaging Centre which took months from when my first friend got the ZMC until I finally got it (she was one of the first and I was one of the last). I think this is a great thing as it means that people don't have to sell their precious farmcash animals that currently don't have a barn or coop etc. already.

The only problem is most farmcash buyers have already maxed out the storage on their home farm and so this isn't useful until they increase storage capability. A far more sensible maximum would be 1000 as this allows Zynga's most valuable users to store their items, but at least they're moving in the right direction.

Gagaville, so far a Success!

This is the fourth day of Gagaville and so far most people seem to be pleased as this forum poll shows. Yet the vote is still quite split 29% of people currently rate Gagaville 1-3, 52% rate it 8-10 and 19% are in-between.

People’s favourite parts of the theme are the ‘amazing’ decorations, the quest prizes (especially the horse and 5 FC) and, for Gaga fans, free listens to songs from her latest album.

The parts that people dislike the most are the 7 FC trees and for some people the free unicorn with a game card costs 25 of your currency which means some people pay more, it costs $25 in the US but to a euro user it costs $35.68 and to a British person it costs $40.44. And since a lot of farmers come from this area a lot of people are annoyed.

So the majority of people think that Gagaville is great but there are some downsides. Yet this is only day four and the promotion lasts for another week so there’s plenty of time for Zynga to either mess up or do fantastically!

Farmville Goes Gaga!

In the biggest promotion in Farmville to date, Zynga has teamed up with pop sensation Lady Gaga to promote her new album "Born This Way", we've been getting teasers of this for a few weeks and now it's finally arrived in full Gaga force! Upon entering Farmville today you will get the following pop-up:

"Welcome to a special Lady Gaga experience in Farmville! Play EVERY DAY through May 26^th to unlock exclusive prizes & UNRELEASED MUSIC from Lady Gaga’s upcoming album. Born this way.”

So that means nine days of prizes and songs for free! Not bad if you like Lady Gaga.

Today they released the first, of what is probably many, Lady Gaga quests. The quest today is super easy [details at fvnation] and the rewards are a VIP ticket, free listens of “Marry the Night”, an odd looking fountain and 2,500 coins. You will notice  a timer on your quest option so hurry up and complete it before it runs out! Upon visiting the Gagaville farm you get a Chrome Daisy Bed.

In case you can't find the music player: 

More proof of this being the biggest promotion in Farmville’s almost two years of existence is the extent of Lady Gaga exclusive releases. Along with the quests, free songs and a special farm other releases include an update to the free gifts page which includes four old items and three completely new ones. The mystery game seems distinctly Lady Gaga, there are three LE crops and LE crafts for every building, two new sheep, three horses (one in the mystery game, one free when you purchase a $25 gift car and one is in the market for 26 farmcash) along with dozens of other decorations and buildings.

From the looks of the Gagaville farm not everything has been released and I suspect that some of the cool items may be released in the coming week or be a prize for quests, I’ve heard from a reliable fan site that a horse may be the award of a quest!

This is what the Gagaville farm currently looks like:

Use all Feature released

Zynga has finally hit the pulse of their farmers recently and in their wave of success they have released the 'Use All' feature. This can seriously speed up players that have lots of neighbours when accepting holiday items. If you had any flowers left in your gift box you would have been asked did you want to use them all upon entering your giftbox. I said yes and all 128 flowers went straight to my basket with just one click, instead of 128! Which I think is just fantastic as it saves me a lot of time in clearing out my gift box!

Upon entering your farm you should have got the following pop-up.

Farmcash for After Level 100

In a kind gesture Zynga has extended how long you can receive farmcash when you level up for. The limit has now been increased to level 250 and if you are about level 100 you get the message below to give you the cash you would have received had they introduced this earlier!

Well enjoy this random, unexpected gift from Zynga... Well it only gives you a maximum of 150 more farmcash over a looooong period of time to get!

Organisation of Storage is HERE!

FINALLY! My friends and I have been asking for this for as long as there's been serious storage capabilities. Previously the storage was a complete mess and impossible to look through, effectively meaning that once something went into storage it would never come out.

Now it's super easy to find and use stuff, the search button is definitely the best improvement as it allows you to search for a specific item that you know the name of! There are also five different tabs, "All", "Trees", "Animals", "Buildings" and "Decorations" within the "Buildings" and "Decoration" tabs there are sub-categories, for "Buildings" there's "Decorative" and "Home" and within "Decorations" there's "Nature", "Landscaping", "Ornaments" and for some reason "Buildings"... odd. Note "trees" and "animals", neither of which can be stored*, when you click on those tabs it says 'coming soon', I'm not holding out any hope for it actually coming soon as with Zynga's track record we'll be lucky to see if before 2012! I'd imagine that when they do make this available the trees and animals won't be harvestable in storage. I think it is a good idea to make them storable but I do feel for this to be a viable alternative to selling, they need to increase the maximum storage on each farm, say double it to 1,000 on each farm as people are already having problems with a lack of storage.

I think the idea of storing animals and trees a good idea, I have would probably use it as I hate selling animals that are no longer available.

Unfortunately you still cannot transfer between farms or storages, which is something I'd love to see. As you can see from the picture it simply comes up as "locked". Also, the expand storage button is nicely placed at the bottom which includes all other buildings that are expandable by requesting for help from friends.

*Apparently farmgineers (the reward for the crossover project with CityVille a while ago) are showing in the "Animals" tab but any attempt to use them throws your farm out of sync and they go back to storage.

Why your Sheep don't work - The Truth!

OK this is by "Ivan Always" from the farmville forums, it's not my own work but it's very interesting (if a bit complicated). The post is here, although I doubt the post will last long once the moderators find it!

So here's a copy of the post from Ivan Always.

First we need to understand how they work and then how they got broken. Each sheep is made up of what is called a 'Metadata' string, basically this is it's 

DNA! This must fall between 0 and ff when counting in Hexadecimal (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 20 etc...)

these are examples of working Metadata strings, and the reasons why they work:

Brutus the Ram:
{"B":{"V":["a","a"],"H":["a1","a1"],"S":["c","c"]},"P":{"H":["b7","b7"],"S":["c","c"],"V":["d","d"],"T":["c"]},"N":"sheeppen_ram_quest0203","G":"M"}

Green Ewe with Yellow Camoflague Pattern:
{"B":{"H":["55","55"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["10","10"]},"P":{"H":["2d","2d"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["10","10"],"T":["d"]},"N":"Green with Yellow Camo","G":"F"}

Red with Colour Changing Stars:
{"B":{"H":["e6","e6"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["c","c"]},"P":{"H":["f0","b4"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["c","c"],"T":["e"]},"N":"Red with CC Stars","G":"F"}

The reason the last one has colour changing stars, is because it contains a hexadecimal number from f0 to ff in the pattern part of its Metadata 

("P":{"H":["f0","b4"]


these next three are the same sheep with invalid sections of their Metadata string, they will look identical, but will now not produce anything other than 

white or black sheep:

Brutus the Ram:
{"B":{"H":["a1","a174"],"S":["c","c"],"V":["a","669f"]},"P":{"H":["b7","b7"],"S":["c","c14"],"V":["d","d1101101a"],"T":["c"]},"N":"sheeppen_ram_quest0203","G

":"M"}

Green Ewe with Yellow Camoflague Pattern:
{"B":{"H":["55","515"],"S":["10","100"],"V":["10","10"]},"P":{"H":["2d","2ad7"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["10","f10"],"T":["d"]},"N":"Green with Yellow 

Camo","G":"F"}

Red with Colour Changing Stars:
{"B":{"H":["e6","e6"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["c","c"]},"P":{"H":["f1a10","bbb4"],"S":["10","10"],"V":["c","c"],"T":["e"]},"N":"Red with CC Stars","G":"F"}


These are only basic examples, now how does the Metadata string work?
Zynga have used the Unix colour system, based around hexadecimal values, therefore any value from 0 to ff is acceptable:

Plain White Ram:
{"B":{"H":["0","0"],"S":["0","0"],"V":["10","10"]},"P":{"H":["0","0"],"S":["0","0"],"V":["10","10"],"T":["a"]},"N":"White Ram","G":"M"}

Where you see the "B" this is the Body part of the Sheep, made up of three sets of values:
"H" Hue
"S" Saturation
"V" Vibrance (or Intensity)

Where you see the "P" this is the pattern section, made up of the same three sets of values as the body
where you see the "T" this is the Type of pattern, either:
a = Plain
b = Spots
c = Hooded
d = Camoflague
e = Stars
f = Stripe

the "N" section is the Name of the sheep
and the "G" is the Gender, "M" Male, "F" Female

Here is an extreme example of a 'Hacked' sheep:
{"B":{"H":["c2c","c2c"],"S":["100aaaaaaaaab000000000000000","100aaaaaaaaab000000000000000"],"V":["fff0f21","fff0f21"]},"P":{"H":["d5f","d5f"],"S":["c","c"],"

V":["d","d"],"T":["f"]},"N":"Flashing Mask with Flashing Electric Stripe","G":"M"}

as you can see, out of the six sets of values comprising this sheep, only two seem to fall within Zyngas parameters.

The way the system works now, is that whenever you try to breed with a ram and a ewe, if any of the sets of values fall outside of Zyngas parameters, the 

system will default to White, and will then breed as a normal pure white sheep, provided it is placed with another sheep whose parameters fall within those 

outlined by Zynga.

So as you can see, any of your colour changing sheep, which you claimed from the wall or were gifted by a friend, will more than likely contain a different string than those now permitted, a usual colour changing string used by those that followed the hackers was... {"H":["78e","179f"]

Which was in itself stupid because all they had to do was change the first section of the "H" part of either the body or pattern (or both) to a value of f0, f1, f2 etc...

How did it become so widespread? Click the link below and see for yourself, originally the hackers kept it to themselves, designing it to be to dangerous for the average player to mess around inside the coding in this way, but after a few weeks this became public.

http://farm.hackers.am/sheepdesigner/

simply click on a sheep from the gallery, select fork and you are presented with the sheep and its metadata, move the sliders around, select Max Range, see how easy it is to generate the craziness we all saw.

Okay how is this Metadata entered into the game?

With the 'Charles Web Debugging Proxy' a tool used by many software companies to see how and why there programs work or don't work, this program when used can interupt any command, the hackers simply placed a sheep inside their sheep pen, activated Charles, removed the sheep from the pen, Charles would then 'pop-up' a simple search though the displayed data, revealed the metadata string, which could then be changed.

After changing as many sheep as they wished, they simply closed Charles, deleted their sheep pen, built a new one and started breeding their 'illicit' sheep.

Why do the official Zynga ones not work?

This is really simple, through the 'hacked' sheep, the vast majority of players unknowingly gained sheep that should have taken them months to create, thus losing a lot of revenue for Zynga, they have now released the patterns and the colour changing ability, through four new market sheep (at a cost of 110FV for 

the lot), but they have blocked the passing of the f0 from either of these two colour changing Market sheep, onto any offspring and made the chance of 

passing on the patterns much more improbable.... Why?

Because they can cover their tracks of course, these 'hacks' are not found, they are released to certain individuals who examine them before then passing them on to the players, either directly in some cases, or through other means as in this case, remember Zyngas designers use Charles also.

So in conclusion, your sheep that sit on your farm that you obtained through 'legitimate' means, can continue to be 

'pastel/neon/flashers/poppers/masks/electic' or whatever you have, but they will not breed, all Zynga has done is allowed you to see what might be possible, 

then taken it away, yes they will lose customers, many customers it seems, but it also seems they are willing to suffer those loses, at the expense of those 

die-hard players who will continue to hand over their hard earned cash.

I hope this thread stays up, and I hope it helps some people.

Thanks for reading!