Another Zynga Holiday Debacle

Hiya, Zynga!

How's it hanging?  Got a question for you......

How many times, Zynga?  How many times do you have to make the same epic mistake over and over again before somebody in your brain trust realizes you're doing something wrong?

It's a nice thought - it truly is.  Many people in our community look forward to long Holiday weekends.  They get to spend some time with the family, further traditions of food, fellowship and the inevitable family drama that seems to occur sometime during the festivities (Aunt Bootsy just can't hold her liquor, folks), and then spend some extra, quality time playing their favorite game.  It's just a bonus that Zynga chooses these long weekends to make them 'Double Mastery' weekends, so we get rewarded even more for our hard work and effort.

The only problem with this formula is that two times ZERO equals...yep.  Zero.  That's how many XP many of our neighbors have been able to gain since Tuesday or Wednesday of last week, because either their farm won't load, or because it goes Out of Sync the moment it *does* load. The complaints have flooded the forums, as usual, and all we hear are crickets chirping in response.


Now, one would think that if this had happened before, the good people at Zynga would have learned their lesson.  Not so. I've run out of fingers counting the number of times they TRY to roll out something like Double Mastery (which really should involve changing about two bits of code) on a long weekend (anyone remember Memorial Day weekend or any of the others?  I do!) and then fail the effort in epic proportions just because they try and tack on many other ambitious features at the same time - right before they pack up the Beemer and head out of town for the weekend.

Here's a tip you may not hear on Monday's post-mortem, Pincus:  You can't roll out a major system change right before you expect a significant INCREASE in the number of users unless you have proven that you know how to execute something like that correctly and smoothly...and even then it's a suicidal concept where your customer relations are concerned.  Rolling out the chicken coop expansions right before you roll out of town was the most idiotic move you folks have made since you offered Valentine's Day redeemables in the marketplace for assloads of Farm Cash.  Funny how you at least had support available during that fiasco...and even funnier that it lead to about 7 days of downtime for most of us.

Now, granted, there seem to have been SOME Zynga folks working this weekend - even on Thanksgiving day itself, but what's that tell you about a Corporate culture who requires this amount of clean-up and extra effort on a major holiday weekend like this?  Good grief, people!  This isn't some slave organization like Hot Topic that depends on the holiday sheeple to go out and buy this weekend in order to make their inflated sales numbers...or is it?

There's not even a good trade-off for all this tomfoolery.  Did anyone REALLY have an extra 40 chickens laying around that they just had to stuff into a coop somewhere? Was the gain of about 3 plots of land so important to a small segment of the FV community that you chose to completely bungle what could've otherwise been a decent holiday weekend event?  Are we producing MORE chickens with this increase? No.  Are we producing more eggs?  No. The extra 3,000 coins a day just don't seem to justify keeping thousands of people from getting to their farms.

The other aspect of this that baffles me is that this was done right on top of changing servers for thousands of us.  Those of us who notice little things like that will notice that at some point in the last week or two, we've gotten migrated to different servers - not just different NAMES, like some pseudo-experts are reporting, but actual new hardware.  Lastly, in the midst of all this, you're making preparations to roll out land expansions.

Bravo.  I can use the extra space, even though the addition of 112 plot spaces is NOT going to make up for all the garbage you keep throwing at us to put on the farms (garage, pigpen, halloween basket, turkey coop, thanksgiving table, orchards, etc.). You know full well that most will want to add the other holiday offerings that you'll undoubtedly roll out the next time you all plan a long weekend out of town...and an extra 2x2 is 2 little by 2 late.

The point Zynga never fails to miss is this:  Change is fine, but only when it's executed properly, and you can ONLY execute it properly if you do it a little bit at a time.  You promised us MONTHS ago that you would work on FIXING things before you rolled out more features (everyone enjoying their Mustangs? how long does it take to fix these things, anyway?) - we all heard it directly from Lexi's mouth.  That lasted about two weeks and you were back on the train to nowhere once again.

So....many of us spend this weekend wondering, once again, WHY we even play this game.  If you've interacted with me at all, you know MY take on this - it's not the game, but the people who play it, and we've had a blast making fun of each and every one of you down in Zyngaville.  At least you're getting a smidgen better at communicating with us when there's a problem.  Even now you've let us know via the little banner at the top of the game (which, ironically, can only be seen by people who can LOAD the game) that there are issues with loading the game.  

Golly.  Slow loading or not loading at all? I wonder why?  Could it be........

Maybe you shouldn't force this in our face before the game even loads completely.  We know others have been working on their farms - we can tell from the game feed.  We know people want free gifts - god knows we see them begging for crap on the feed, in comments, in chat, etc.  We'll get to it.  Honest.  We didn't fire up FV *just* to pass out nails.

Maybe this is the slow-loading culprit.  It's not like anyone actually USES this or anything.  Seriously.  The only thing this is even remotely good for is telling who the good game hackers are - they level up 30 times a day and it's right here for all of us to enjoy.  Otherwise, this is a completely useless feature since we already have the game feed.

Seriously?  You're going to bug me about sending gifts AGAIN? In certain situations these can be very useful, but the majority of active players dread seeing these things.  They contain nothing they really need, and when they've built every building, watered every tree, upgraded every vehicle and buzzed every bee, they spit out Mystery Gift garbage.  Nice.

HEY!  I'm trying to harvest here! Once, MAYBE, is enough, not every time I pause. Seriously.

Yeah, okay, thanks.  Again, not necessary to update me on every bushel.  When I go to use them I'll see how many I got.  Really.  Information overload, and, again, I wasn't finished.  The phone rang.  Cool your heels, willya?

Thanks.  Nice to know I overplanted again. THAT you could've told me.
Still not necessary to interrupt what I'm doing to tell me all this.  I'd have found out eventually.

Are you f*cking KIDDING ME?  Dude, I don't even know who 'Kenneth' is.  I'm sure he's a great guy and all that, but I'm not busting out of my full-screen mode to gloat about my FarmVille prowess...and certainly not to give him three dribbles of fuel which may or may not let him plow 5 plots.  If he needs fuel, let him go buy pumpkin bread like the rest of us.

*sigh* All I want to do is get this harvested.  Really.  Okay, fine, I'll share the damn scarf, but do you HAVE to stack yet another pop-up underneath the damned thing?  I haven't finished with this one yet!

Really?  A bull? I sure am glad I took care of that scarf so quickly, I'd have hated to miss passing this along to the 5 people playing who need it.  It's second in uselessness only to the Queen Bee posts.  First there weren't enough, and now it's like I've run over a frigging bee hive every time I plow my fields now.

Aieeeeeeee! I was over in my bakery and this pops up finally? Seriously?  I'm NOT keeping records, I promise. I don't need to know this quite so incrementally, really.  Thanks for busting up the little high I had going for having actually finished planting and being done with the pop-ups.  Ugh.

I give up.  Really.  I know it's complete, I completed the thing and my oven shows as empty.
Must this game be played as if we were ALL short-bus riders?

Maybe the slowness, the lag and the overall reason the game won't load is that you've added in so many 'moron gauges' that the real core functions won't even execute properly anymore! It's entirely possible, mind you, that this game has just followed the natural life cycle of all software - overgrown, bloated and slow despite the hardware that's thrown at it.  

Given all that, I think we all consider ourselves lucky and fortunate to even get into our farms and perform the basics...which is kinda sad.  Personally I can't wait to see what they screw up for Christmas The Winter Holiday.

Happy Farming!

Farmer Brown
Admin, Sharing Foals and Calves Group

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