New Release -- May 27th, 2011

[Farmer_Susan]

Whew! I think the last time we had an uproar like this was when they first released the glowy thing on fertilized crops but we couldn't turn it off. WOW, we didn't like that! And WOW! They changed it. So maybe this will be the same?

Anyway, here's my 2 cents. I don't like all the popups, either, but I actually DO like being able to click on people's posts on my feed to help them and me both. That's very cool and could be another way to get some of a crop you need but didn't have. However, what I DON'T like about that is clicking on someone's feed, only to be given the message that I can only give that friend something every 3 hours. I have my FT friends in 5 different FB friend groups. So I send to a group of friends and mostly don't pay attention to which friends were in that batch. I also look through my feed for those posts where someone wants ingredients for their factories. I like those so I click on 'em. But again, I mostly don't pay much attention to whose name I'm clicking on. Getting the "every 3 hours" post feels almost like getting my hand slapped - and typically I had no clue I had already given that person something or I wouldn't have bothered clicking.

BUT . . . by far, the most disappointing thing to me is that it's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay waaaaay WAY too easy to get black belts! I was so excited about having a whole new kind of goal to work for in FT. It renewed my energy for the game. But the way it's structured now, the belt system is just sort of this annoying thing you have to put up with and then it'll be over because you've earned all the black belts. This is probably a bigger deal to those of us who reached maximum XP's months or even a year ago. Those of us die-hard fans who keep playing anyway don't even get that goal back with Levels updates because we stay too far ahead of the game. So I was SO excited about getting all new goals - but now I'm not.

One more whine and then I actually have some suggestions: this whine is that it takes too long for the mouseover popups to appear telling us how many we have left before the next belt. There's already a pretty big slowdown with screens that have a lot of items (such as the store and also the facilities tool). I get REALLY tired of waiting for things to load and the addition of these hover items is making the load time even slower.

On to suggestions! The belt thing: please, please, PLEASE make them MUCH harder to obtain. Probably the levels should incrementally get harder to obtain so that newbie farmers can enjoy earning them, too. But for us oldie farmers, we want goals, too! The belt system is just fine as a new goal - but make it more of a challenge. Now, the beauty of my suggestion is that it ALSO deals with the popup issue because if you don't earn things so quickly, you also don't have as many popups. Voila. Two birds with one stone.

And some presentation suggestions: get rid of the hover thing. We don't want to have the game slow down just so we can hover and find out how many crops we still have to harvest. BUT . . . you're right, that we DO want to know what that number is. How about just writing it in text inside the seed box? And if you write it with ActionScript instead of creating the text as an image, it'll load more quickly.

And a presentation suggestion for the popups: if people click "No", the other window should NOT appear. No point in annoying people twice. BUT, if people click YES, then the other window needs to appear in full screen as well as regular screen. Otherwise, for those of us full-screeners, it's just sort of a mess when you finally quit playing and find all of these little windows you have to deal with.

OK. I'm done. I really sorta hope this helps. This started out as one of FT's better ideas, IMHO, but it took some major wrong turns somewhere between inspiration and deploy.