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!