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.