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).

Farmville English Countryside is live

So after months of anticipation FV:EC went live this week. Personally, I think the new farm looks great, the exclusive buildings look different to what we've seen before and I like the whole idea of EC.
There's just a few problems I feel Zynga needs to iron out to make this a truly great extension to FarmVille.

Firstly, they need to remove the pause. Many people are refusing to touch EC as they do not want to leave their home farm paused, especially those people who have spent a lot of farmcash on their 'home' farm. People are largely unimpressed with the feature and are extremely disappointed that it got released, the forums may not have erupted in the way they did over the limits and the removal of all cancel buttons but the anger and dissatisfaction is still obvious, the official feedback page on the pause feature reached over 4,000 comments today and this poll shows that there is next to no support for the feature. Many of the people commenting are new members indicating that the people who read the forums silently are now voicing their annoyance. Hopefully Zynga will realise their foolishness in time to remove the pause before it does irreparable damage to EC.

Also they need to have some form of exchange between the two farms, transferring some of your buildings, trees etc. between farms (except maybe the ones exclusive to EC). Because most people have been building their farms for quite a while and have collected a lot of old items that are no longer available. They may think a certain animal or building would go well on their EC but can't transfer it to the farm.

Currently I'm not running to play EC due to the pause, I've stuff on my home farm to finish before I'll properly move to EC. But if they remove the pause feature, I'll be over there in the flash! Zynga also made the mistake of using the union flag instead of the English flag which irritates me as they should know better, but I suppose it's too late now to change it!

Farmville English Countryside

Zynga have been building up anticipation for FV:EC for months now and people were getting quite excited. But for many of us they've been building anticipation for too long and are no longer as excited as we once were. Another problem with it is a feature involving it and your regular farm. The two farms cannot run  simultaneously, when playing one the other is paused. So say you plant strawberries on your 'regular' farm and then spend the next four hours doing things on the English Countryside and return to the regular farm your strawberries will not have experienced any growth! This will cause mayhem with co-ops and many people feel that they've spent too much money on their regular farm to go pausing it.

People are very annoyed at this idea and many are saying that they won't bother with the EC. On the forums two polls ran, one about the pause feature which currently show that 84% of people don't want the pause feature, 5% do and 12% don't care. Hopefully the developers over at Zynga will see this and not introduce this feature. The second poll asks: On a scale of 1-10, How excited are you about FV:EC? Roughly 50% of people say they are one, this is very low and will hopefully get the developers to push the release forward and stop the pause feature from existing as those are the most common problem people have with the idea.