New Release -- December 22nd, 2009

[CynthiaSue]

Great, I really believe I didn't get all my points this morning. I should have gone up a level. I have 1500 plots and I only went up 3400 points and I had them all harvested and plowed this morning and then I reseeded. This way is definitely out now for me. I even plowed some on someones field this morning.

[evangail49]

I am one those that lost thousands of points & coins and I don't like it. It is slow
and cumbersome . I just finished harvesting & plowing a neighbor's farm and it took me three times longer to do the work than it did yesterday. I have decided
to harvest & plow my farms and wait for some sanity to return to Farm Town.

For those who will send me email and complain about my post: go jump in a lake and take the horse you came in with too. I dislike the foolish and inept way of handling these problems.
You don't listen and you don't care and never have listened to the concerns of the people who play the game.
Do you or have you ever played the game you developed? it is a considerable difference in building something and never even playing the game to see if is easier one way or another.

[babybumblebee]

As a follow up - I hired two people to harvest and plow my farm this morning - 1 harvester, 1 plower - worked beautifully and they were done in about 3 or 4 minutes. So now I'm even more confused as to what the fuss is about - where is this 10 minutes? 45 minutes?

Also I'll admit that I work in IT as a developer myself and I know what it's like to try to improve upon things and get immediate kicking and screaming from my users. It's usually because people won't allow themselves a chance to do things in a different way. Once they do they usually find things better than they were before. Fortunately, in my world, we RARELY roll things back to the way they were - people just have to get on board and used to it.

[carond]

I've read all the EXCUSES (not reasons) for the changes and I have to say it was a ridiculous move. All of us have to suffer because some greedy ppl want to grab what they can when hired. There are so many better ways to handle this than to ruin everyone's game play. Like allowing the farmer to hiire ppl for a certain section of their farm so they can't overlap....or limit how many can be hired for a farm.

If we all have to have poor game performance because some ppl have no courtesy then it isn't a game my family and I want to play. I think a more important fix would be to allow a farmer to FIRE someone they have hired so that when I get some guy who wants to make improper suggestions or if I get a worker who is ruining it for others, I can get rid of them.

My family and I are going to harvest and plow up our farms and leave them for a while to see if the "fix" gets corrected and if that doesn't happen in the near future, we will be playing elsewhere for other game developers. We should not all have to pay for some ppl's greed.

[reaser]

Originally Posted by Raul

****[UPDATE]**** Please see the new created thread for latest information

Hi There,

First, the Bert account was hacked recently and there were some posts made on his behalf, we are researching this issue now.

Second, we just released a new version of FarmTown a while ago. As stated before, we were going to focus mainly on the lost XP/Coins issues which are critical at this point. However, in order to minimize the lost XP/Coins issues, we had to make some changes to the way harvesting/plowing works when you are hired.

Before, when multiple people were hired on a farm, everybody starts clicking randomly on every field, and there are a lot of collisions, people harvesting/plowing on the same fields, as you don't see clearly where other people are working.

The new way is this, if you harvest fields that are close to where your avatar is, then your avatar will be teletransported and will be a very quick transition, it should be as quick or comparable to what it was before, however if you click on a field that is farther away, then you will have to wait until your avatar gets to that field to continue working.

This change will make that on some instances you work slower, on the other hand people get more dispersed while working on a farm, you can actually see them where they are working, and there will be much less collisions between them. This will also add another component to the game, now it's not just blindly clicking on the fields, you have to also consider the position of other players and your chances to avoid collisions and to get more work done. Now, when you click on a field that another player did before you, then you will see a message saying "already done", before, there was no feedback at all.

Of course, we know this release will cause a lot of complains as well, because in order to improve one area we had to change the behaivor on another area which some users will not like it, but compared to the issue of frequent losing more XP and coins, we just decided this was the way to go.

So far we have detected that there are 70% less issues with lost XP/coins that before, and it should improve with time even more.

As a separate note, the cursors on the game have been made larger and they don't get overlapped by other items on the game.

Thanks

--Raul

i love this finaly someone has thought this out it makes game play a lot better

[ragboat]

I quickly got back into the old routine I used to use. I also noticed a lot more "Wait I'm Busy" and "Saving" warnings. I even got the dreaded "Connection to server timed out", which pulled me away from a harvest I was hired to do. One step forward, one step back. I'll withhold judgment on the improvement until I play a few more days.
Dave

[reaser]

you guys are doing a great job i used it last night and loved it

[pattybowra]

i cant finish a farm . get timed out on every job

[reaser]

you baby try it out i love it because now i can see whos stealing all land in front of me instead of hiding in a field the greedy punks

[reaser]

work faster