A Current Review of FarmVille

Once upon a time, Zynga created a game they christened FarmVille.  There have been some accusations to the effect that they stole Farm Town's concepts and more, but one way or another, FarmVille became a great success.  Facebook was fairly new then and FarmVille and Farm Town were two of the primary farming simulation games on the platform.  The graphics of FarmVille were far more sophisticated than those of Farm Town, although Farm Town offered some very sophisticated options to players who had stayed fiathful enough to reach high levels.

I never played Farm Town to that extent but I did play FarmVille through the years as more and more new Farms were opened, each with a different theme.  There was an Hawaiian theme, a Christmas theme, a spooky Hallowe'en theme, a New England theme, a British theme and so on and so forth.  Five years later, FarmVille continues to release new Farms every few months but what is the bloody point?  The game is too huge.  It take at least 20 minutes to LOAD the newest farm, and making the trip to an old farm is as dangerous as taking a propeller plane to Nepal.  The page is inundated with streaming advertisements, all of which slow the loading process.  Furthermore, the actual gameplay is far too complicated now.  Every day, it appears that new crafting options and challenges are thrown at the player.  Some of us simply want to FARM but that is near impossible now.  All of the missions involve crafting which requires endless bushels of crops of different types.

Most of my old Neighbours do not even play the game any longer.  Many of them cannot load it.  Others are simply fed up.  What a great pity!  Zynga continues to brag about the number of users, but I suspect that once 'Liked', few bother to 'Unlike' the game and many of the numbers consist of players who haven't looked at the game for years.

Zynga's stock became almost worthless for a time.  Now it is up in value, but that probably has more to do with other games than FarmVille.  Why not make FarmVille viable again though?  Why not clean up the loading page for a start?  We don't need to be hit with reminders endlessly about crafting, shipping licences, eternal double points and the Terms of use.  Simply let us access our farms and I think you might find that actual gameplay will increase.  Zynga has the capacity to load games quickly.  I have seen it on the mobile device games like Castleville Legends and FarmVille 2 Country Escape.  Why not bring FarmVille back to a place where it can load within five minutes???  We are not idiots nor are we robots.  We do not need to be told what to do every five seconds.  The gameplay is interrupted constantly by prompts to send all Neighbours Special Delivery Boxes or buy the latest Items or use the most recent crafting option or WHATEVER.  We can choose ourselves whether or not we wish to perform these actions.  It is frustrating, irritating and in all honesty, quite counterproductive to inundate players with so many stupid pop-ups and arrows that we cannot plant a single crop on a single plot or harvest a tree or animal.

And here's a thought: instead of creating NEW farms, why not increase the capacity of our Gift Box to accommodate all the items the game practically FORCES upon us?  Thank you for adjusting the number of clicks needed to receive the daily stamp item, but it is rather frustrating when one has to spend hours to sell or otherwise use items from the Gift Box in response to a declaration that no new items can be received until one seriously diminishes the total.  THAT is your responsibility, Zynga, to increase capacity for something we actually NEED.  We do not need multiple Hallowe'en farms, Alien Farms, Emerald City Farms, Jungle Farms, Australia Farms or anythiing else under the sun.  Give us a chance to work on the multiple farms we have accrued over the past five years!  You offer sales from time to time on land and items on old farms, but when our games crash or freeze due to the fact that the myriad prompts and pop-ups require us to be on the NEWEST Farm, what is the point???