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!
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