2010: A FarmVille Odyssey

WARNING:  Unlike fan sites, there will be no fond trip down memory lane here.  The opinions here are strictly my own, your results may vary.  It's all based on the past years' worth of compiling opinions, reactions and other various data from several select mega-farmers: those, like myself, who have the Facebook limit of 5,000 friends, all relatively dedicated FarmVille players.  While some choose to orally copulate Zynga for everything they spew forth, here you're only going to get honest reaction and analysis - the good (Fertilize All!), the bad (pigpens), and the ugly (me).Oh - there may also be the occasional 'adult word' in here.  Most of us can't play FarmVille without uttering or at least thinking a few of them anyway.  It may be safe for work (depending on where you work), but it's probably a little too cynical for your kids to read.  Fair warning, right?

So....maybe by this time I should have titled this "FarmVille Remembered".  Is this a Eulogy?  It may be, folks.  If Zynga continues to lose players by the boatload as they've been doing for months now by alienating their strongest advocates - the advanced players - they risk losing not only their gaming crown but the position they've coveted for so long: the premier social gaming producer.

We saw a vast number of milestones and notable 'occurrences' in FarmVille in 2010 - here are just a few of the more notable ones.  They aren't in any particular order.

I'm sure I've either missed some, forgotten some, or intentionally blocked some of them out of my brain in order to maintain my own sanity.  Feel free to remind us of those in the comments section.

Yes, it's a long read, but in retrospect it was a VERY long year.  Get yourself a cup of coffee, or maybe bring the whole pot.  Just be careful, there may be spots here where you'll end up spraying it out of your nose.  You've been warned! Enjoy.

Removing Unwanted Games and Applications on Facebook

If you get infected with a rogue application (i.e., the 'trojans' you get from clicking on scam posts, etc.), this is the way to remove them from your account.  Be sure to bookmark this entry in case you need to refer back to it, and feel free to share it with your friends

- we all need to clean our our apps and remove games we don't play anymore - it helps you and it helps the rest of us so that we can focus our efforts on helping people who actually do play the games!
Sooner or later, we all get tired of playing some of the games on Facebook.  We tire of seeing and ignoring the requests for the games, the posts going past us and cramming up our newsfeed, etc.

Sometimes, we also inadvertently allow a rogue or bad application to do things in our name like make posts while we're not looking, advertise a service or scam, etc.

Note: A lot of people are hesitant to completely remove a game from their account because they don't want to lose all the progress they've made on the game.  Zynga keeps your game intact for at least 6 months after you remove it, in case you change your mind and want to go back to it....but frankly if you go 6 months and don't play it, you probably don't want to go back and play it at all anyway.  6 months is a LIFETIME in the gaming world, so at that point you may as well start over again anyway, and reap the benefits they pass out to new players, no?

Well, it's a new year and it's time to clean up our Facebook applications.  Not only will this make our accounts safer, but it will really help out our fellow gamers, since removing an application removes your name from the players list.  Your friends will thank you for not wasting their precious 'sends' for things like invitations, free gifts, and other game play in which you need to participate.

So...let's remove some games we don't play anymore, and get rid of some annoying applications we don't need or want around.  To do this, start by going to http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=applications

This brings up a screen which looks similar to this:

CityVille: Tips for Levels 10-50 and Beyond

I know, I know.  It's not FarmVille, but that's okay.  

CityVille, Zynga's newest foray into the Social Games Market, has taken Facebook by storm - it was even recently reported that it knocked FarmVille out of the number one spot.

Granted, a sack of flaming dog poo (don't they have that on FrontierVille?!?) could've knocked FarmVille out of first place given ALL the bugs, issues and tomfoolery in FarmVille these days, but still it's an achievement for which Zynga should get credit.

If you're going to play this game, there are some things you should know which will help ALL of us level up more quickly and be a little more efficient in our game play.


These tips assume you've completed at least 10 levels of the game, and are familiar with the concept of goods, crops, businesses, trains and boats. To get those first 10 levels, just follow the in-game tips, complete the quests/missions they direct for you, and pay attention to what you're doing.  Don't be afraid to try different things - I'm pretty sure you can't break anything that can't be fixed later.

How to report and block a rogue application in Facebook

Okay, I get this question a lot, so this ought to be of some help.  Here's the situation:

You see a request from something you know is NOT a normal game application (a/k/a a SCAM!), either in the game feed:

Scam Application request from the game feed.

...or in your game requests:

Scam Application request showing up as a gift request.

Still Can't Load FarmVille...? Here's what you missed this week!

If you're one of the 850,000 others who can't load your farm at all, or can't load it much past the immediate Out of Sync, here's what you didn't miss this week:

• Zynga rolled out the 28x28 expansion, for Farm Cash Only ($120FVC). Coin price has yet to be set, they're still working on it.
• Tuesday's update was bungled.  They put Poinsettias and the Gingerbread house (buildable) in the market and OOS ran rampant until they pulled them off.  They came back within the last day.  Aside from that, there wasn't much rolled out Tuesday at all.
• Thursday night's update was nonexistent.  No word from Zynga on why they skipped a day. Rumor has it that there is a huge upheaval in their Product Studio area, and some are speculating that this is the very first death knell being rung for FarmVille.
• The Winter Workshop has started appearing, although it's unclear as to whether it's a legitimate release or something Uncle Charlie has helped everyone with.  So far, it hasn't broken anything yet.
• CityVille was released this week.  Think FrontierVille, except with a City theme.  So far, it's moderately playable despite requests not working correctly, rampant disconnects, and buggy Flash code that causes spontaneous system reboots for more than a few players after several minutes into the game.
• Facebook changed the way game requests are handled across the board, and as usual it was done with little notice.  As a result, most of the tools used to 'accept all' or 'ignore all' aren't working correctly, and they aren't working at all well with the new CityVille game.

All in all, it was a good week to be Out of Sync - you didn't miss much.  I've actually started removing FV completely between farming sessions to avoid people sending me things, posting pigs, etc., since I'm one of the 850,000 impacted by a time limit of about 3 minutes on my farm before I hit OOS.

Farmer Brown
FarmVille Curmudgeon