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!

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.