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!

Truffle Hunting is Replaced

Zynga has seen the success that sheep breeding has become and decided to extend the breeding to pigs. They’ve replaced the old truffle hunting feature , which was a complete failure, with the ability to breed. Upon looking inside your pig pen (if you actually still have it) you’ll get the following pop-up:

When you go to your giftbox you should find your remaining slop. When you click use the following pop-up will appear. Obviously the number of potions you receive depends on how many slop you have in your giftbox.

After clicking TRADE you'll get this pop-up and the potions will be in your giftbox.

I'm glad that truffle hunting has been changed as it was a complete failure. Now I’ve given myself a few days to think about this before posting and my opinion is that it's pretty uncreative, it's just a copy of sheep breeding. But I suppose it is better than the truffle hunting!

Nails, bricks, boards and love potions now crafts.

In the words of a friend "either I'm really drunk or someone at Zynga is". And I have to admit, it does seem a bit odd, the love potion makes some form of sense but I've never heard of a nail made from rice and grapes! Nonetheless I suppose it's one way to help with the love potion drought that's been going on recently. On the forums people have been complaining  about the lack of potions and at least Zynga has listened. But in my opinion it probably would have been a better idea for Zynga to make a love potion a reward for trading in a good instead of fuel being the only option!

Unfortunately these are only temporary and they're masterable... so you may have to rush to master them!

Giftbox Organisation is here!

Finally! I have been campaigning for Zynga to introduce this for months now and am delighted to see it. They have finally organised gift box!  I found the gift box very irritating as when it filled up with lots of items it became difficult to find them, now they all fit into the handy tabs ‘consumables’, ‘decorations’, ‘animals’ and ‘buildings’. You can also sell in bulk, which is great for when the SBDs produce useless items or you end up with 100 seedlings from your junk orchards! Zynga have also introduced a ‘search’ function. Which is great for finding a specific item that is at the back page!

Yet there is something that hasn’t been resolved though, the giftbox still returns to the first page when you use/sell/re-gift an item. But that’s about it, it looks better and works better! Which I think is fantastic, now if only they’d hurry up and organise the storage I’d love them as storage is in a far worse situation that the giftbox.

All I can say is good work Zynga, you’ve been trying hard recently in terms of user friendliness and for that I thank you!

The Flower Basket is Boring

I've given the new collection a time to grow on me and I can say that I'm not particularly impressed. The duck and cow are a sickly yellow colour and I'm only redeeming them for collections sake. The sheep is even less impressive, it is practically the same as last years "Sunny Ewe" except with a different head piece. I would've thought, with the release of sheep breeding, that they would have made more of an effort and made the sheep completely different to previous sheep released. Yet instead they just give out the exact same babies as the sunny ewe. Both the duck and the cow are simply re-paints of older versions, the spring arch is very similar to hedge arches before, the fountain is ghastly and the tower looks amazingly similar to the princess tower.

I reported on this trend in my "Chronic Lack of Creativity" post. Recently Zynga has been impressing me, with the repeal of the throttle in recent letter from the producers, the farmcash available in quests and the increasing friendliness and helpfulness of their Customer Support agents. I want farmville to be more enjoyable and for that they need to show more effort when releasing new collections and redeemables.

Changes to how you use building materials

Zynga introduced a change to how you can accept or use building materials. It's much faster than the old method, especially if you have multiple buildings. The new interface is much more user friendly and I'm glad that Zynga is starting to introduce features that the farming community want to see and have been requesting for a long length of time.

When you use a building material, the following will pop up (only on the first occasion).

It's pretty easy to use, when you select a building material a cursor with the building material (as shown above) will pop up with the number of that material you have in your gift box. The buildings that still require this material will be highlighted by a light blue border, you then simply need to click the building/seedling until it requires no more of that material or you run out. It's a small change for Zynga but is a very important change for users. All I can say is well done and thankyou Zynga!

It's been slowly rolled out since yesterday and by now ever user should have it.

A new Dawn for Farmville

There was big news announced last night by the community manager on the farmville forums, Lexilicious. In the Producers Letter - April 2011 a number of important changes were made.

Here's a copy of the letter:

Happy Spring, farmers!

The sun is back out (here in San Francisco, anyway) and the FarmVille Team is reinvigorated with the energy of the warmer weather, the English Countryside expansion and the fact that we have the best player base on the planet in all of you! Speaking of all of you, we have, as always, been listening to a great deal of your feedback and suggestions. We hope you’ll echo our sentiment when we say that the past three months or so have brought many improvements to FarmVille. Let’s take this moment to reflect on a few of the things we’ve accomplished together over the last quarter of a year…

English Countryside: FarmVille players everywhere are discovering an all-new land with new adventures and benefits in FarmVille English Countryside! This has certainly been our largest feature effort since FarmVille first launched and it wouldn’t have been possible without your ideas and imagination. We hope you’re all enjoying it and are looking forward to the possibilities it brings as much as we are!

Farm Switching and Pausing: We want to thank you all for expressing your opinions on this matter so articulately and persistently. As a result, we’re recently implemented the ability to choose whether or not you want the farm you are not active on to pause while you are away. You will be prompted with this option each time to switch from one farm to another. We think this is a great addition to FarmVille and we hope it leads to your further enjoyment of having multiple farms!

Bug Fix Output and Memory Issues: The development team has been extremely focused and dedicated to making FarmVille better. In addition to increasing our bug fix output significantly, we’ve also made a recent breakthrough on our memory usage and implemented changes that resulted in many players with heavily populated farms able to run FarmVille smoothly again. This isn’t perfect yet, we’re still diligently pursuing ways to keep up with your endlessly imaginative ways of beautifying and personalizing your farms, but we hope many of you are already seeing the benefits.

Feed Reward Throttling: After extensive research and experimentation, we have decided to repeal the throttling of rewards collected through feeds. We want to thank you all for being so vocal throughout the process as it really helped us to pinpoint problem areas and react accordingly. For now, the throttling has been removed and we are enforcing a cap on the amount of rewards each player can claim per day. We are continuing to explore alternative means of keeping the FarmVille playing field even for all.

Japan Relief: In yet another incredible example of humanitarianism and compassion, FarmVille players were one of the first groups worldwide to spring into action to help Japan in their hour of need. Words cannot express how fortunate the FarmVille Team feels to be involved with such a giving and helpful group of players. It adds an overwhelming sense of worth to the work we do here to know that the players who make our game great also strive at making the world a better place.

The Beta Tag: You may have noticed that we removed the “Beta” tag from our logo with the release of the English Countryside. We felt this was the right time to remove that tag but we also want to be sure that this is not taken as a claim to a “bug-free” game. The internet is alive with changes stemming from every direction and FarmVille introduces new content multiple times per week. No game can avoid all of the growing pains that are inevitable with new content - especially on such a large platform, with so many players interacting with each other, in so many different ways. Rest assured that we are dedicated, now more than ever, to continuing to create new ways to ensure your game experience is everything it can and should be.


We’re thankful for the strides you’ve helped us make this past quarter and are eager to share whatever the future brings with all of you. We have all sorts of surprises up our sleeves and the fact that we get to bring them to all of you drives us onward. Thank you for always being willing to share your ideas and opinions with us and for being the best player base in the world!

-The FarmVille Team


So what does this all mean for farmers?


Well the only real announcements were the removal of the throttle and beta tag. So I'll start with the throttle, as most of you probably know the throttle was intended to stop bots working to their full extent. What the throttle did was it stopped people from claiming items from the feed quickly. Of course, if didn't work (the explanation for this is in my second ever post). So after months of people complaining about the throttle, Zynga has finally given in and removed it. Permanently. This will mean that you can claim things as fast as you like. Win!


The beta tag is more of a subtle difference, for starts we're no longer classed as 'testers' but proper 'gamers' and the game is now released. But other than that there's no great difference between beta and now that I can see but in the coming months there may be changes.


We already knew about Zynga making the pause optional and it shows another way in which Zynga needs to react quicker to players opinions. The Japanese Earthquake appeal was a huge success and I would personally like to thank everyone who donated to help the Japanese, whether it was through FarmVille or other means. The crisis also made me respect Zynga more as the FV team reacted extremely fast to the crisis to help out fellow humans.


Well hopefully Zynga has learnt it's lesson and started to listen to players more often, after all they are losing thousands of players daily!

The pause is now optional!

After an overwhelming amount of negative feedback, Zynga has made the pause feature when moving between the English Countryside and your home farm optional. It's been released slowly over the next day and will see users finally get their way.

No doubt Zynga's going to pretend that they have good communication with their players, when in reality they don't. The simple fact is U-turns like this only happen when a huge amount of customers/players give extreme negative feedback, and when they do Zynga is still slow at giving their customers what they want! It's not achieved that often, maybe four or five times in FarmVille's history!

This is a copy of Lexilicous, the community manager over on the zynga community forums, post in discussions:

Since the launch of English Countryside, many players have asked for the option to keep both their farms active at once.

Well Farmers, we’ve listened and we’re excited to announce that you can now choose to keep both your Home and English Countryside farms active at the same time. When traveling between your farms, choose to ‘play both farms’ or pause the farm you’re leaving. But don’t forget, if you turn ‘pause’ off, your crops can wither while you’re on your other Farm.

Let us know how you enjoy this new option and thank you for your continued feedback regarding the English Countryside release.

Please note: To ensure the health and stability of the application, this feature is currently only available to a randomly selected group of users. We will be slowly releasing this feature to everyone in the near future. 

For more information on how to toggle Pause, please check out our guide here:http://forums.zynga.com/showthread.php?t=

Also, this is the new pop-up when moving between farms (yes it comes up EVERY time).