Zynga

FarmVille has gotten a bit more interesting. They have events with achievements that can be completed quickly, and they have interesting themed stuff. Like they had Valentine’s Day mission during February, Spring missions during March and so on. They had a special Donate to Japan event thing which if you spent 25 Farm Cash (Their premium currency), they’d donate it all to Japanese Relief Groups, and you got a special crop. Don’t worry, they give you 1 free Farm Cash every time you level up, so I didn’t have to actually spend any of my own money to donate. But yeah, Zynga, their parent company, got yelled at last year for not donating the amount they promised to donate to Haiti, so I was kind of suspicious of donating, but since I wasn’t really spending the money, I thought ‘hey, why not’.

They have a new English Farm feature which gives you a second farm in ‘England’. But you need at least 4 friends to activate it and I have like 2 friends that actually play FarmVille, so yeah. I’m not gonna make fake accounts because that’s just sad, and I have a feeling FarmVille will change it in a few months so anyone above a certain level can play.

And YoVille has gotten increasingly worse. The items are more and more expensive and it’s never been popular. The graphics kind of suck. It’s like if the Sims was online. I remember how there used to be a social aspect to YoVille but now it’s just ‘go to the factory, get paycheck, log off’.

Zynga in general has a new reward feature which if you play a lot, you can get specific rewards via reward points. So far, the YoVille section of the website looks lacking, but the FarmVille one is promising. It’s still in BETA mode, though, so it’s probably gonna get revamped over time.