I was supposed to be watching the England game, but to be honest it’s so boring I’ve decided to update my blog instead.
I’ve just been trying to play a few of my Facebook games and am feeling pretty pissed off at how long they take to play. Partially this is due to my crap broadband connection (thanks TalkTalk for being so bloody rubbish) but partially it’s because of the games themselves. Like a majority of gamers on FB I, for my sins, mainly play Zynga games – a good way to feel frustrated really fast.
The game I play most is Farmville and I freely admit that I love it. I’ve invested a hell of a lot of time, and an awful lot of money, upgrading and buying and have a fine collection of animals and water features that I can’t display because I don’t have the room due to wanting to continue to actually farm.
When I first began to play the game about a year ago, there was little to do except plough and plant your fields and reap your harvests. As time has gone on there are so many parts to the game it’s almost impossible to keep track of what you’re doing. Not only can you do collective jobs to gain items (I don’t bother), you can do collective jobs to gain items for your spa/bakery/winery (I don’t bother). Even though they’ve introduced vehicle after vehicle to save you time with planting, ploughing and harvesting (the latest being the all-in-one combine), you still have to remember to fertilize and then use a previously harvested bushel to improve your mastery stats when harvesting. And then you can make things in the spa using all those bushels you’ve harvested. And all the while you’re collecting vehicle parts and building materials to make the latest shed/nursery/botanical garden etc.
Every few weeks there are new limited edition items to tempt you and I am easily tempted – especially when it comes to animals that can be bred (and strange shaped rocks for some reason). However, this is an area that is really beginning to annoy me. I buy a limited edition horse and put it in my stable. A few days/weeks later my horse gives birth to cute little limited edition foals BUT instead of me getting the reward for this, I have to give the foal away to my neighbours. This pattern is followed for limited edition eggs, truffles, and whatever other ideas they’ve come up with this week.
This would be all well and good if I was getting the equivalent type items back in return. But I’m not. I have a rainbow chicken that lays rainbow eggs which I regularly have to give away. I’ve never seen another rainbow egg on offer from any of my neighbours, nor do I ever seem to get the rarer type of eggs – Rhode Island, Cornish, Scots etc. as they’ve all already gone whenever I try to collect. I even have trouble getting the gold or black eggs. How can it be fair that after the amount I’ve invested and shared, that all I get in return is a brown or white egg containing a white chicken?
It would be much fairer if the things I harvest to go to me, with the option to share another with others, as happens with the special offer trade-ins.
Talking of sharing, this is another incredibly frustrating part of farming. Now, almost every click of the mouse brings up a button asking me to share stuff with my neighbours. Whether it be the aforementioned eggs, or fuel that I found whilst ploughing, bushels of goods I’ve just harvested, or collection items, you can’t get away from the bloody messages. And now, every time you level up or gain mastery you can send various people fuel to gloat that you’ve just beaten them too.
Firstly, these pop-ups are really bloody annoying, but especially when I’m in the middle of trying to harvest my crop. I like to have the farm open at full screen and every time the pop up posts it reduces the screen size. I’m sorry Zynga, but it doesn’t matter what I’ve found/am offering, if it happens during my harvest it doesn’t get posted. And stop with taking me to the gift page every time I open my gift box. If I wanted to send a gift I’d be at the gift page not attempting to get into my gift box. And while we’re on the subject, no I don’t want to post one of those crappy “common” collection items to a selection of people. No one wants or needs these items, we all have hundreds. What we need are the rarer items coming out more regularly – I haven’t seen a red feather or a swallowtail butterfly for months!
And now we have the added excitement of truffle farming. The idea is you send your pigs off, they find a truffle and, yep you’ve guessed it, you give it away. Now if your neighbours are decent, they’ll click the button to accept the truffle and send you one back. Unfortunately this doesn’t happen often. Due to successful collecting on my part, most of my pigs collect either gold or white truffles, but it appears that the people I share with have no interest in sharing back. Surely better is that because my pigs collected, I get one automatically and the other goes to the person whose farm it was on. Then we both win.
Also frustrating is that those of us who play who aren’t in the US get to miss out on all sorts of promotions and offers for limited edition items, although we do get the opportunity to take part in the cross-game offers.
This brings me onto another game I play regularly Yoville. I love this game because you can actually do as much or as little as you want. If you have the urge to collect everything in sight you can, or you can buy a house and spend years decorating it to your style. There are incentives for visiting every day, but if you don’t visit for a month you haven’t lost anything apart from the opportunity to buy furniture from whatever limited edition theme was on during the time you were away. There are things you can make with widgets or things you can click on to share with others like animals, keys, drinks etc. but generally you can ignore them if you want.
Zynga, in an attempt to get people playing their new game, are currently doing a cross-promotion with Treasure Isle. If you play that for a few levels you (apparently) get a lotus pond for Yoville. So far I’ve been playing this game for 3 days and got to level 7 and I’ve still seen no sign of the pond. And I can tell you that Treasure Isle is quite possibly one of the most boring gems I’ve ever played. I shall keep going till level 10, after that it will be another complaint to Zynga.
The other Zynga game I play regularly, although not so much since I’ve come back from Spain is Vampire Wars. Before I went away I had a clan of approximately 3,000 vamps who I looked after, helped and voted for regularly. But lack of time has reduced my time to get involved and so currently it’s pretty much on the back burner. I still enter as often as possible to take my spins etc. but everything else has been scaled back for the time being.
Mafia Wars is the one game that has taken a huge hit in my gaming time. Again I originally started playing only as a cross-over for Farmville, but soon became engrossed in the game. However, this really is a complex game and there are so many different things to do to play it properly that I just don’t have time. As a major amount of my free time these days seems to be taken up with accepting and sending gifts for the various games, now everyone can ask for gifts as well as send them the inbox has increased hugely, I’ve found myself visiting Mafia Wars less and less. I usually visit once a day because of the VW/MW cross-over, but no longer accept gifts for the game, nor do I take part in anyone’s crime sprees etc. In fact, I think it would be fair to say it’s a game I no longer play.
I’ve just been trying to play a few of my Facebook games and am feeling pretty pissed off at how long they take to play. Partially this is due to my crap broadband connection (thanks TalkTalk for being so bloody rubbish) but partially it’s because of the games themselves. Like a majority of gamers on FB I, for my sins, mainly play Zynga games – a good way to feel frustrated really fast.
The game I play most is Farmville and I freely admit that I love it. I’ve invested a hell of a lot of time, and an awful lot of money, upgrading and buying and have a fine collection of animals and water features that I can’t display because I don’t have the room due to wanting to continue to actually farm.
When I first began to play the game about a year ago, there was little to do except plough and plant your fields and reap your harvests. As time has gone on there are so many parts to the game it’s almost impossible to keep track of what you’re doing. Not only can you do collective jobs to gain items (I don’t bother), you can do collective jobs to gain items for your spa/bakery/winery (I don’t bother). Even though they’ve introduced vehicle after vehicle to save you time with planting, ploughing and harvesting (the latest being the all-in-one combine), you still have to remember to fertilize and then use a previously harvested bushel to improve your mastery stats when harvesting. And then you can make things in the spa using all those bushels you’ve harvested. And all the while you’re collecting vehicle parts and building materials to make the latest shed/nursery/botanical garden etc.
Every few weeks there are new limited edition items to tempt you and I am easily tempted – especially when it comes to animals that can be bred (and strange shaped rocks for some reason). However, this is an area that is really beginning to annoy me. I buy a limited edition horse and put it in my stable. A few days/weeks later my horse gives birth to cute little limited edition foals BUT instead of me getting the reward for this, I have to give the foal away to my neighbours. This pattern is followed for limited edition eggs, truffles, and whatever other ideas they’ve come up with this week.
This would be all well and good if I was getting the equivalent type items back in return. But I’m not. I have a rainbow chicken that lays rainbow eggs which I regularly have to give away. I’ve never seen another rainbow egg on offer from any of my neighbours, nor do I ever seem to get the rarer type of eggs – Rhode Island, Cornish, Scots etc. as they’ve all already gone whenever I try to collect. I even have trouble getting the gold or black eggs. How can it be fair that after the amount I’ve invested and shared, that all I get in return is a brown or white egg containing a white chicken?
It would be much fairer if the things I harvest to go to me, with the option to share another with others, as happens with the special offer trade-ins.
Talking of sharing, this is another incredibly frustrating part of farming. Now, almost every click of the mouse brings up a button asking me to share stuff with my neighbours. Whether it be the aforementioned eggs, or fuel that I found whilst ploughing, bushels of goods I’ve just harvested, or collection items, you can’t get away from the bloody messages. And now, every time you level up or gain mastery you can send various people fuel to gloat that you’ve just beaten them too.
Firstly, these pop-ups are really bloody annoying, but especially when I’m in the middle of trying to harvest my crop. I like to have the farm open at full screen and every time the pop up posts it reduces the screen size. I’m sorry Zynga, but it doesn’t matter what I’ve found/am offering, if it happens during my harvest it doesn’t get posted. And stop with taking me to the gift page every time I open my gift box. If I wanted to send a gift I’d be at the gift page not attempting to get into my gift box. And while we’re on the subject, no I don’t want to post one of those crappy “common” collection items to a selection of people. No one wants or needs these items, we all have hundreds. What we need are the rarer items coming out more regularly – I haven’t seen a red feather or a swallowtail butterfly for months!
And now we have the added excitement of truffle farming. The idea is you send your pigs off, they find a truffle and, yep you’ve guessed it, you give it away. Now if your neighbours are decent, they’ll click the button to accept the truffle and send you one back. Unfortunately this doesn’t happen often. Due to successful collecting on my part, most of my pigs collect either gold or white truffles, but it appears that the people I share with have no interest in sharing back. Surely better is that because my pigs collected, I get one automatically and the other goes to the person whose farm it was on. Then we both win.
Also frustrating is that those of us who play who aren’t in the US get to miss out on all sorts of promotions and offers for limited edition items, although we do get the opportunity to take part in the cross-game offers.
This brings me onto another game I play regularly Yoville. I love this game because you can actually do as much or as little as you want. If you have the urge to collect everything in sight you can, or you can buy a house and spend years decorating it to your style. There are incentives for visiting every day, but if you don’t visit for a month you haven’t lost anything apart from the opportunity to buy furniture from whatever limited edition theme was on during the time you were away. There are things you can make with widgets or things you can click on to share with others like animals, keys, drinks etc. but generally you can ignore them if you want.
Zynga, in an attempt to get people playing their new game, are currently doing a cross-promotion with Treasure Isle. If you play that for a few levels you (apparently) get a lotus pond for Yoville. So far I’ve been playing this game for 3 days and got to level 7 and I’ve still seen no sign of the pond. And I can tell you that Treasure Isle is quite possibly one of the most boring gems I’ve ever played. I shall keep going till level 10, after that it will be another complaint to Zynga.
The other Zynga game I play regularly, although not so much since I’ve come back from Spain is Vampire Wars. Before I went away I had a clan of approximately 3,000 vamps who I looked after, helped and voted for regularly. But lack of time has reduced my time to get involved and so currently it’s pretty much on the back burner. I still enter as often as possible to take my spins etc. but everything else has been scaled back for the time being.
Mafia Wars is the one game that has taken a huge hit in my gaming time. Again I originally started playing only as a cross-over for Farmville, but soon became engrossed in the game. However, this really is a complex game and there are so many different things to do to play it properly that I just don’t have time. As a major amount of my free time these days seems to be taken up with accepting and sending gifts for the various games, now everyone can ask for gifts as well as send them the inbox has increased hugely, I’ve found myself visiting Mafia Wars less and less. I usually visit once a day because of the VW/MW cross-over, but no longer accept gifts for the game, nor do I take part in anyone’s crime sprees etc. In fact, I think it would be fair to say it’s a game I no longer play.
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