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SUPER crops: Sweet Potatoes for Haiti in FarmVille

FarmVilleDate 104 (Friday, October 2, 2009) one comment

This week players in FarmVille can buy Sweet Seeds for Haiti, a sort of super crops for a good cause.

Players can acquire a license to grow sweet potatoes for a week (plus a unique gift: the Sweet Seeds Flag!) that never wither, meaning: players will be able to have a field of sweet potatoes as part of their decoration "forever" (or when they decide to delete it).

The seeds cost $5 (or in FarmVille terms 25 FV) for which 50% goes to Haiti to support "sustainable and healthy meals for children and their families".

The potatoes cost 10 coins and take a day to ripe (so 23 real hours). They also give 3 XP when planting.

So… these are SUPER crops.

Super XP

In terms of XP they are massive: they have a 0.16 ratio XP/COST while the 2nd best, soya only has 0.10 (normally used for coins to XP conversion). So using this seeds for a week you could 1.6 times faster level up using coins to XP conversion

On the special website for this action can be read:

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and the 7th poorest in the world. Zynga's mission of connecting the world through games is enhanced by our opportunity to support the health and education of these children and their families. For additional information on the recipient organizations, please see www.FATEM.org and www.FONKOZE.org.

FATEM is a non-profit organization based in Mirebalais, Haiti, and originally organized to bring information technology to the people in the region, thus helping with the economic advancement of the area. More recently, however, FATEM recognized the need for a sustainable means by which to support the general education of Haitian children and to ensure that these children have the necessary meals that will permit their young bodies and brains to learn and grow.

FONKOZE, based in Port-au-Prince, is an alternative bank for the poor. It is Haiti's largest micro-finance institution and is committed to the economic and social improvement of the people and communities of Haiti and to the reduction of poverty in the country.

So…

I have my flag already on my property as you can see on the left. I have planted 2 field of the potatoes next to my mansion and I will probably leave them there for a while, they are a "sweet" decoration.

Furthermore I will probably use them for some XP conversion this week, must be nice.

over and out – if you want to join me as a neighbor on FarmVille click here (but notice that I will seldom send you gifts and it can take some days before I add you) (too many neighbors and too much time).

New FarmVille goodies: baby elephant and and Crop Mastery!

FarmVilleDate 102 (Wednesday, September 30, 2009) no comments

There were some new goodies in FarmvVille today:

image276 New FarmVille goodies: baby elephant and and Crop Mastery!

1. Elephant madness!

When I arrived home there were a whole bunch of Baby Elephants available in my gift box. I first thought "huh?" but it seems the Zynga FarmVille Team has added the Baby Elephant as a 76 hours exclusive "because the circus is in town".

Anyone over level 9 can gift the Elephants which has a selling value of $ 125 and needs 4 days to grow.

I had to delete some crop space for it… (but I really like elephants :) ) (though I deleted all brown cows) … and the elephants keep coming in so I probably have to delete some more farmland for it.

It is the third special item for the game. The first were a sort of supercrop, the berries, the second was the ball image277 New FarmVille goodies: baby elephant and and Crop Mastery! oon and this is a special "animal". Probably the next special item will turn out to be a building.

Not everyone is that enthousiastic about elephants though, as can be read in the forums, and well.. it does make a point lol:

"Ah now this is getting really stupid. ELEPHANTS this is not a safari game PLEASE....
Elephants are NOT FARM ANIMALS... I swear they are on something... What a mess. I got one and promptly sold deleted. Trashed.
HEY GUYS over there it is called FARMVILLE> Get a dictionary."

Though the counter answer is:

"To: The What's An Elephant Doing On A Farm People.
One of the largest Elelphant Sanctuaries in North America is located in Arkansas. And guess what?, it's located on a farm. I think the people of Zynga are doing an outstanding job of bringing different, unique items to us all for FREE."

and "the developers DID listen": http://forums.zynga.com/showthread.php?p=1791554#post1791554

image278 New FarmVille goodies: baby elephant and and Crop Mastery!

So I think either it transforms or it will produce paper.

Since the only other animals that takes 4 days is a rabbit, which a profit of 60. I think this will turn out then to be a profit of $ 120 (since the selling cost is twice that as from a rabbit) so with an hourly profit of $ 1.30.

But who knows…

They produce circus peanuts for 150 coins.

2. Crop Mastery

Starting from 30th of september a new mastery level has been added: "Crop Mastery".

Each time you harvest a crop you will earn a level to that specific crop mastery level.

And ofcourse that is brilliant because now… all players need to refocus on all crops again instead of focussing on the crops that produces the most value.

Brilliant!

So as you can see with each crop there are now 3 stars that indicate your mastely level. If you achieve the 3 crops then you get a special bonus :)

I think that each star means that a certain amount of crops have to be harvested, how many, and if it is the same amount for all crops, that remains the question for now.

See comments (thanks!):

This is a comment on the author missing the hover over pop-up of the crop mastery.
If you hover over the bar below the stars it tells you how many (harvests you have done)/(how many are needed)

Right now 198/300 harvests for grapes. This is for the first grapes star. The status bar is filled i would say almost 2/3 so they are meaning the same thing. If I remember I will post back when my grapes are done and will share what reward if any I received at 1 star.

image280 New FarmVille goodies: baby elephant and and Crop Mastery!

over and out - If you want to add me as a farmville neighbor click here
For my FarmVille strategy sheet click here.

2 FarmVille Cheats that do not work

FarmVilleDate 100 (Monday, September 28, 2009) no comments

"Out there" there are several FarmVille cheats that actual do change the number of XP and money in your client. However as soon as you reenter the system you will notice that they didnt work since… they did not change anything on the server :)

I investigated 2 of these "cheats" because I'm curious if players are actually using it.

1. The CheatEngine version 5.5.

With the CheatEngine you can look up the memory addresses of game variables such as your XP. (I did not provide the link but you can find it via Google).

	In the example on the left you can see my current XP of 33094.
	In the cheat engine I attach to the firefox process and look for 33904
	I then change it to uhm… 35000 (let's not do a jump to level 70 at once grin)
	and presto I am at level 28 ! The game even lets me build Green Tea and such.
	People even congratulate me!
	However… returning to the game my green tea is gone and my XP back to the original score.

2. The "quickly click visit Farm Trick"

This works like this:

	You click "visit farm" (of a friend)
	You then quickly REPRESS the visit Farm. It now lets you click this indefinetely.
	when you finally decide to press the ACCEPT you can press it for hundreds of times and each time gain XP and money. You see me here ending up with 33102 XP (for the example). However… after reloading the game…
	You see that I am back on my old score.

Thank you for listening,

If you want to be my neighbor visit my profile and add me and visit http://fv.leau.net/ for an overview spreadsheet of the game.

Level 70 in the game FarmVille in 1.6 days

FarmVilleDate 99 (Sunday, September 27, 2009) 2 comments

FarmVille is the most #1 fan-ned game application inside the Facebook social network. The growth of it is stunning as are the amount of players. on 11/08 it had 7 million visitors a day, on 18/08 it had 9 million visitors a day and on 24/08 it had 10 million visitors a day. More than 1 million Facebook users are being a member of the fan community around the game and

image295 Level 70 in the game FarmVille in 1.6 days

In this game, players build a farm, grow crops and build all kinds of nice buildings. One of the aspects is "experience levels". For a lot of activities players gain experience. On each experience level new game objects are available e.g. a new building a user can place on their farm. Level 37 is the ultimate game content level since on that level all content is available. Level 70 is the highest level known to be reached.

Since + 10 million players a day are spending some (or a lot) of their free time building their farms and leveling up (for months), some more serious than others, I wondered how far someone would get by just spending money on it. ( let's say a Bill Gates kind of person). Of course it would rather be pointless to achieve level 70 like this, then again, it gives a feeling on how relative it is.

I found out that a rich guy could actually get to level 70 in 1.6 days using $2480 and up to level 37 using $600. In the steps below I use the € sign for the in-game money and the $ sign for real money.

start a new game
spend $2480 in the game shop to buy € 4.370.000 (game money)
plow 1 land, plant a a soya and delete the land (you gain 3 XP and it costs you € 30)
repeat step 2 145667 times (approx. 1.6 day fulltime)
you now have 437.000 XP points which is the required amount to be on level 70 with an empty farm

image296 Level 70 in the game FarmVille in 1.6 days For level 37: (the one which is the actual end, all game content unlocked, you can now grow asparagus…), you only need $600 and 10 hours.

So… playing this game out of competition is pointless, since a player will spend months trying to achieve level 37 or even level 70 while in that same amount of time he would have been able to earn a lot more than those $600 (niet lullen maar poetsen).

conclusion: playing the game with the enjoyment of having a nice farm is better than a quick road to level 70 :) If you however want to enjoy a 1.000.000 villa and immediate access to all game content to create the perfect Farm at once without spending months of work, you need to spend $600. This will still leave some challenges because the game also uses the concept of "achievements" which they name "medals". I will post about these another time.

For some interesting links to FarmVille and some overview tables of the game content see http://fv.leau.net/
The actual within-Facebook game can be found here: http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm/index.php
And if you want to become my "farmVille neighbor" click here to add me as a friend and then add me as neighbor … I will send you a nice goat in return :)