New Release -- December 22nd, 2009

[ricomamushka]

I believe you have altered the game in a bad way. Instead of helping the people that were losing the xp which by the way never happened to me, you slowed down the people that were just getting the hang of the game like me. I could not even finish my job I was hired to do for lack of time. Not to mention how long it now takes two to do my field. This change was a mistake the game is no fun.

[Muckaroundalot]

I Have two full size farms,I will not be able to play & have fun now.It is just far too slow now when I hire,always One farmer and they reap the benift of my crop & plow,who is going to want to do it square by square now.

Please restore it back to what it was like yesterday.

[theoxman]

Originally Posted by MandyW

OMG! You're like.. one of maybe five?

I've only seen 3 so far.

[Brez]

I seriously think they need to start conducting surveys on issues to see what the consensus is.

I have not been experiencing the XP/Coin loss issues myself for about a month now and If my opinion mattered (like the rest of the players affected with issues) and were given the opportunity to provide feedback I would have said that I was experiencing the issue no longer.

Yet they don't have such simple little radio button survey's in place to gather feedback and compile metrics on the bigger issues.

If this upgrade is an attempt to further fix the XP/Coin loss issue then for me they fixed something that is no longer broken.

Well they fixed it making 8 minutes of work last 12-16 minutes.

Not fun.

[diana_ lynn]

I am not crazy about the slowness of this game now but I do respect the problems and issues about loosing coins/xp points as I have lost many, however if you could speed it up just a bit instead of one plot at a time period maybe 5 plots at a time. I like the fact that people can't bounce all over the place anymore that was very frustrating to me as a farmer and as a fellow worker.

[Tool-Man32]

I think I'm gonna take a long vacation from this game and see what happens. As it currently is I just can't devote half my day to do what previously took 30 minutes. I guess for those who don't work and spend their days on their pc, this won't affect them but it's ruined my farming experience. Hi Ho Hi Ho off to Farmville I go!

[wrm]

I'm just waiting to see if the farntown games goes back the way it was! If not I'm out!

[lanesnana]

Originally Posted by Cow Cavrone

Folks (SlashKey.)

The new release 'speed' is just plain god-awful. Let me clarify: The bigger the farm is, the exponentially larger the time factor becomes. I love your game, don't get me wrong...but users (especially those with dual farms) can't be wasting an hour of their time trying to get their farms harvested, plowed and seeded. (especially when it took @15 minutes before.)

To be fair, I understand the reason 'why' you made the changes. The collisions were annoying to be sure. However the current solution, while seemingly effective, may not have been the most optimal approach.

TECHNICAL SUGGESTIONS:
1) Consider limiting the number of hires per harvest /plow events. Keep in mind, each hire is an entire 'dedicated thread' on the server, which has to reconcile an independent instance of your farm's display and updated data status. So, 5 hires Plus you.. equals 6 instances of your farm to appease the working group's sense of status and progress during the job. The LESS threads you burden the server (especially at presentation layer) , the BETTER the traffic responses (I.e Server requests for updates) If I am wrong about this , please accept my apologies.

2) The random order of clicks on a field might impact the arrays that index the events. To be sure, more than one hire on the farm will cause havoc regarding collisions, Note: the bug is a symptom of the server trying to decide precedence between two simultaneous inputs (i.e two plow events in the same space and/or at the same time. Hint (You would never have that problem if you only had one hire on the job) . SO you can see why your current release doesn't necessarily rank efficient in resolving this bug.

3) Granted, what fun is only one hire...and since the time duration of farming is driven by amount of labor...were back to the "Black hole" of user time. In that respect, your new release does indeed maintain the benefit of multiple hires...thus sustains the fun. So here is my suggestion:

Like you did for the farm owner's harvesting, plowing and seeding... Consider increasing a hire's harvest and plow tool to 4 or greater plots per click event. Therein lies your balance and the reduction of collisions. The manner in which you have currently designed your cursor's highlight feature (when hovered over a set of plots), appears to inherently help the players avoid collisions. (You 'have' to hover precisely over a section and wait for the yellow to light up) This method 'controls' the player's 'click ahead' and yet affords the 'click ahead' to be used.

Just my 2 bytes

Grant (Cow Cavrone) Lvl 60

Wow you have some great ideas...hope they listen. I have ofter wondered why we couldn't harv. like 4 plots at a time and plow 4 plots for other people like we can on our farms. love the ideas...

[totalriffraff]

today i was doin my farm town thing as usual cept for one thing i cant plow or harvest the old way was fine i never had a problem with the coins and points but have one now i used to be able to farm and talk to friends now the only thing i have time for is "click" pause "click" it took me an hour to do a friends farm i didnt have time to talk to them as far as im concerned im goin to farmville or county life to farm

[jericamom]

I completely agree. it takes absolutely FOREVER to harvest/plow, and I still get plots hogged by other people. i can understand why it's being worked on because I hated losing coins/xp points, but geez....there has to be a happy medium. It literally takes me 3 times as long to harvest/plow as it did before.