Grrrrrrr!  This is what I wrote:

Is this "cheating"?

Cheating on a free game is not of any use unless you cheat yourself. However in this case the game itself asks for hours of repetitive tasks to perform the best XP/cost leveling. Automation here is as natural as any place where IT technology is used and basically for the same purposes.

Which players will use it?

Most players are not interested in reaching higher levels. They are satisfied with a farm and just have fun with the game. Only a small set of player are interested in reaching higher levels or mainly interested in reaching higher levels, most with the purpose of reaching either level 34 (to buy the Villa) or level 36 (to have access to all crops). By the time a player feels the need to automate, he will have already have access to an amount of property and assets because only then these tasks will become too intensive to perform manual. So we expect only a small set of players using this between level 20 and 34/36.

FarmVille XP Levels - There are several goals within the game FarmVille and one of the goals is leveling up. In exchange for certain actions you receive XP. With enough XP you gain a level (see http://fv.leau.net for the list of 70 obtainable levels). Most of these actions cost money. This blog article proposes optimization of XP/cost and automating tasks to bring back hours spend to 1% of the original hours needed.

Other Goals - This does not mean that you will spend all your energy on only this goal. You will hunt achievements called "ribbons", master your crop mastery and of course (the most important) just have fun building a beautiful farm.

However, for the budget you have set aside for "leveling" (some people make it 100% of their budget and some 0%) automation of repetitive tasks is almost the first thing a leveling oriented player thinks of.

So the first thing to know is: what gives the highest XP for the least amount of money? When scrolling through the FarmVille farms I see people using 2 methods:

1. Using hay bales: they buy 1 hay bale for 100 coins and then gain 5 XP. After this they delete it again. So this actually gives 1 XP per 19 coins.

2. Using crops: usually: seed 1 Soybeans and then delete it. This gives 1 XP for every 10 coins, which is the best way to go.

However… only this week special seeds are available called "sweet potato" (see my previous post) which are even better than Soybeans, they give 1.6 XP for every 10 coins. So 50.000 gives you 8000 XP, enough for most levels under 35.

When the goal is to spend 100% of the budget on leveling (this is budget after re-seeding existing property), then a player will harvest his normal crops, sow his normal crops and on one square or nine squares he will keep using the crop XP conversion until his budget runs to 0. In some occasions this happens to be at the same time when new crops are available so that XP conversion is continues.

However this plowing, sowing, deleting is repetitive and since the XP raise is only 4 XP per square, it takes 2000 repetitions before the 8000 XP is reached. This will cost time of the player and time is money. Apart from this a player in general will just perform this action a couple of times to earn a little XP extra but then the time available for playing "a game" runs out. So it is sub optimal.

Automation is a solution for the player hunting for levels.

Automation – We first propose a choice for an automation tool. There are a lot of automation tools "out there". There are professional enterprise solutions (e.g. for testing) and little simple freeware and shareware programs. A good simple free utility is GhostMouse, which you can download almost anywhere (see http://populair.eu/software for a list of freeware collection sites).

With GhostMouse a player can record a set of mouse actions. So a player presses record, plows, sows and deletes a square and then presses play. (note that when "play" is pressed DURING the recording of a session then an endless loop will be started, with the "stop" option only 1 session can be played). The following video gives an example where I reached level 33 and 34 fully almost automated (I even had a night sleep).

This works pretty well for a free utility. A player who has enough coins left can record a session, then go to sleep and when he wakes up he is one level higher. Some tips when using this approach:

• It is possible to save mouse recording sessions. The trick here is then to make sure that the objects are exactly located as where they were previously e.g. put the corner of the field exactly between the middle of the player profiles and have the same full screen browser open. But because the recording is in this case extreme simplistic it is better to record it again to prevent mistakes.
• Pressing CTRL ALT will temporary pause execution. This works very well. A player can check his mail, or… press "OK" when he has leveled up, post it to his wall and then continue the session again to level to the next level.
• Turning off the Chat Window of Facebook will prevent chat sessions that can block the screen on lower resolution screens.
• Sometimes the servers will try to re synchronize the client, this will basically refresh the screen after a while and the mouse cursor will click away in the middle of the screen doing the same process. The solution here is to run it semi unattended (handy when a second laptop is in place on
  which other work can be done), to run it only when there are no known server problems or to just accept the fact that probably some crops in the middle of the screen, on rare occasions will get used for leveling purposes (the costs of this occurring can be calculated in the budget for leveling).
• Sometimes the message will appear "to help a friend". Normally this is ok. But not during automated tasks! So the solution for this is to start the automated task only when a sequential session has been performed to help all neighbors. In this way no neighbor should pop up during the next day.

This solution uses GhostMouse, a simple utility. However there are far more advance software solutions "out there", some of which recognize parts of the screen and which have API's which one can script against. It is just used as the most simple example.