Farmville English Countryside is live

So after months of anticipation FV:EC went live this week. Personally, I think the new farm looks great, the exclusive buildings look different to what we've seen before and I like the whole idea of EC.
There's just a few problems I feel Zynga needs to iron out to make this a truly great extension to FarmVille.

Firstly, they need to remove the pause. Many people are refusing to touch EC as they do not want to leave their home farm paused, especially those people who have spent a lot of farmcash on their 'home' farm. People are largely unimpressed with the feature and are extremely disappointed that it got released, the forums may not have erupted in the way they did over the limits and the removal of all cancel buttons but the anger and dissatisfaction is still obvious, the official feedback page on the pause feature reached over 4,000 comments today and this poll shows that there is next to no support for the feature. Many of the people commenting are new members indicating that the people who read the forums silently are now voicing their annoyance. Hopefully Zynga will realise their foolishness in time to remove the pause before it does irreparable damage to EC.

Also they need to have some form of exchange between the two farms, transferring some of your buildings, trees etc. between farms (except maybe the ones exclusive to EC). Because most people have been building their farms for quite a while and have collected a lot of old items that are no longer available. They may think a certain animal or building would go well on their EC but can't transfer it to the farm.

Currently I'm not running to play EC due to the pause, I've stuff on my home farm to finish before I'll properly move to EC. But if they remove the pause feature, I'll be over there in the flash! Zynga also made the mistake of using the union flag instead of the English flag which irritates me as they should know better, but I suppose it's too late now to change it!

Scam... scam... more scam...

It seems that recently there has been a great increase in the amount of scams that use Farmville as a way to get personal information. The scammers seem to be working their asses of in an attempt to trick people into giving away personal information. They're getting good at it too! It used to be that you could spot a scam a mile away and the only people who would fall for it were just ignorant! But now the scams look identical to real farmville posts and the only way to tell is if the app is not "onthefarm" when you check the link. But when you see a candy cane egg you're not going to wait, you're just going to click it the hope that you're the lucky person. One factor also is sometimes these scams use unreleased content so look out for that!

The easiest way to tell that you've clicked on a scam is that it asks you for permission to access you personal information etc. At this point simply close your tab or go back and block the app so it won't bother you again!

This is one of the newer scams, note the "onEthefarm" instead of "onthefarm". I always find www.fvnation.com a good site for finding out what the latest scam is so I can avoid clicking them. :)

Farmville English Countryside

Zynga have been building up anticipation for FV:EC for months now and people were getting quite excited. But for many of us they've been building anticipation for too long and are no longer as excited as we once were. Another problem with it is a feature involving it and your regular farm. The two farms cannot run  simultaneously, when playing one the other is paused. So say you plant strawberries on your 'regular' farm and then spend the next four hours doing things on the English Countryside and return to the regular farm your strawberries will not have experienced any growth! This will cause mayhem with co-ops and many people feel that they've spent too much money on their regular farm to go pausing it.

People are very annoyed at this idea and many are saying that they won't bother with the EC. On the forums two polls ran, one about the pause feature which currently show that 84% of people don't want the pause feature, 5% do and 12% don't care. Hopefully the developers over at Zynga will see this and not introduce this feature. The second poll asks: On a scale of 1-10, How excited are you about FV:EC? Roughly 50% of people say they are one, this is very low and will hopefully get the developers to push the release forward and stop the pause feature from existing as those are the most common problem people have with the idea.

Japanese Earthquake Relief

Well done Zynga! They reacted extremely quickly to the earthquake and I'm impressed, Zynga has introduced a new Daikon crop which costs a minimum of 25 farmcash and 100% of the proceeds go to helping the people of Japan.  The purchaser gets a license to plant Daikon for one week, it will never wither and you get a Japanese relief flag which is the Japanese flag except the red circle is a heart.

Zynga has really impressed me with this and I think the people of Japan will be grateful! 

But unfortunately charity like this brings out the worst in some people (the minority thankfully). Over on the forums people have the nerve to complain about the crop. One poster said they weren't going to give because they don't want money going out of the US because it's Japan. How disgraceful is this? People need to wake up and realise that we're all human and Japan needs all our help to recover from this grave, grave tragedy.

Chronic Lack of Creativity

The Giant trees were originally a glitch with orchards. On the Zynga Community Forums people commented on this glitch saying it was 'funny' and 'cool'. Someone at Zynga obviously saw this and realised it would be a great way to get away with less work by making the level two trees simply giant versions of the level ones. Yet it's backfired, most people are angry at this and feel betrayed by Zynga. In a recent poll on the forums  60% of people saying they did not like the giant trees, 27% do like them and 12% say they don't care. Does this not suggest  to Zynga that they need to stop it?

But it's not the only lack of creativity that is the problem with Farmville, most cows and horses are simply re-coloured versions of previous model. I love FarmVille but I am disheartened by Zynga's lack of creativity in many areas!

The new candy fiasco?

At Hallowe'en last year Zynga got us farmvillians to build the haunted house from which we could collect candy from as well as from the ones on our neighbours farm. They then proceeded to (foolishly) allow is to collect the candy before we had anywhere to put it. High level players had their giftboxes fill up swiftly and many items were lost. This is what cause the developers for FarmVille to increase the giftbox limit from 300 to it's current position at 500.

Well they don't seem to learn anything at Zynga as they've done it again. Now you can harvest gold from the Leprechaun's Cottage on both your and your neighbours' farms! And guess what? There's nowhere to put it? Sometimes I wonder do Zynga ever learn from their mistakes?

Also, don't you think the cottage is a bit big for the tiny Leprechauns? :p