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".

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.