Podcast Transcript 2010-05-17

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= Official FarmVille Podcast – May 17th Transcript =

Hey Farmers, and welcome to this week’s installment of the Official FarmVille Podcast. My name is Lexilicious and I am here to give you all the latest news and information about FarmVille from Zynga. As per usual, we are going to be going over our latest releases, I will be answering some questions submitted by members of the FarmVille community, and last but certainly not least, you guys will all be getting a very special sneak peek of things coming to FarmVille in the near future.

This week proved to be another very exciting week for FarmVille, with numerous new Limited Edition items making their way to the Market, along with some exciting new features.

Early in the week, we released new Southwestern Limited Edition items, including the new Adobe Mansion, appaloosa horse and Cowboy Gnome, all of which have been a very big hit with the community. On top of these great items, a new “Best of “Mystery box was released. This new and improved Mystery Box is absolutely jam packed with some of your favorite items from previous boxes, including the highly requested return of the White Stallion. Now remember folks, all of our Mystery Boxes are Limited Edition, which means they won’t be around for very long. If you are interested in picking up our new “Best of” mystery box, it can be purchased from the Market for 16 Farm Cash.

Now some of you may recall a few weeks ago that we asked our community for your opinions on what type of Hay bale you guys would like to see introduced to FarmVille. Out of 10 different options, star shaped hay bales won our poll by a landslide. Because of this, we were more than happy to heed the requests of our community, and 5 different colored star shaped hay bales are now available on the free gifts page.

We also had another highly requested addition make its way to Farmville this week. For awhile now, we have heard the suggestions and feedback from players that the contents of the Mystery Eggs have been getting a bit stale. Well, I am very happy to let everyone know that we actually added three NEW types of mystery eggs and three new types of chicken to FarmVille. Rhode Island Red, Scots Grey and Cornish Chickens can now be purchased from the Market for 25 Farm Cash each, and their corresponding Mystery Eggs can now be found when collecting from a coop that is housing these new chickens.

Now, before I go ahead and get into answering some questions from the FarmVille community, I want to let you guys know about our latest event! Now, we here on the FarmVille Team want to see what our most talented farmers are capable of with nothing more than Hay Bales and a little bit of imagination. From May 13th to May 20th, we want you to submit photos of your Hay bale Art for a chance to win 1000 Farm Cash and 1,000,000 coins. Now this time around, there is no particular theme you guys have to adhere to. Just make sure to wow us with some creative, detailed art. And, for the first time ever, we will be allowing our community to vote for our winners. So get out there, show us what you’ve got and you could be walking away with 1000 Farm Cash. For more details on this event please visit the official FarmVille forums or www.farmville.com for more information.

Alright, so thousands of people submit questions to the FarmVille team every week, and the best ones from our community get answered here. It’s time for this week’s user submitted questions segment of the podcast!

Our first question is from bychance, and they are wondering if there will be any new Co-ops added in the future. Well, I am very happy to let you know that the FarmVille team is planning on adding even more co-op missions added to the game in the future. We understand how much you guys are liking this new feature, so we are doing our best to keep things new and exciting for you. Unfortunately, I can’t give you guys exact dates on when new co-ops will be released, but they are in our plan for the near future.

Our next question is from Christmasman1, who wants to know what happened to the old “tip of the week” segment of the podcast. The “tip of the week” for anyone who may be a new listener, was an old segment we had in the podcast that gave a quick tip to new users on how to play FarmVille more effectively. This segment was actually replaced with the user submitted questions segment of the podcast. While ideally, we would like to have both, we do need to keep in mind the length of the podcast. With all of the content we currently cover, having both the user submitted questions and the tip of the week would make for a lengthier podcast, which we do try to keep a reasonable length, because we don’t want to bore anyone too much. But because this was something done in you guys’s interest, if you would prefer a longer podcast for the sake of bringing back the tip of the week segment, leave a comment on this video, or head on over to the FarmVille forums and let us know.

And finally, our last question comes to us from Saint Isidore, and they would like to know how long it takes to implement a new feature or item into FarmVille. Well to be perfectly honest, it really depends on the feature or item. If we are going to implement a more complicated feature that involves new game mechanics, it will take significantly longer than if we were creating a new animal or tree. Now, all of our market items need to pass through our creative director, who I discussed last week. She collaborates closely with our artists to get ideas into something viable. This process combined with creating the assets, the animations, development time and testing can take anywhere from days to weeks. Our more complicated features typically take much longer, as there is more development time and other resources required to make the feature run smoothly. Simply brainstorming and getting the ideas for features fleshed out to a point where we can being working on them is a process in and of itself, and requires the creative minds of many people on the FarmVille team.

And remember guys, if you have a question you would like answered in the Podcast, please make sure to visit our official forums and let us know what you have to say.

And last but certainly not least, let’s go ahead and get into our coming soon segment of this week’s podcast!

Now, I know last week was a little bit bare, but I do have some news this week that will hopefully make up for that.

I am very excited to let you guys know that in the very near future, every building we have ever released, will become rotatable (with the exception of the animal buildings like the dairy barn and chicken coop)! Now I know our decorators out there will be very happy about this announcement, as this is a feature you guys have all been requesting for a long time.

A new the new Wild Mustang feature will also make an appearance soon, which will allow you to get a new mustang for your farm, if you can wrangle it with the help of your friends and Neighbors.

The level 5 trick for your pet will ready soon, which I am sure will make all of the dog owners out there very happy. Now remember guys, the level 5 trick for your pet is breed specific and each breeds trick will help you around your farm in a different way.

A new Move tool will be coming to Farmville in the coming weeks, which is a dedicated tool that will allow people to enter “decorator mode”. This mode will allow you to click and object, move it anywhere and then click again to drop the object. This is also in addition to a quick delete option, which will let you opt out of the “delete confirmation” pop-up for 5 minutes for certain items.

And lastly, we have a beautiful new Limited Edition “Tuscan” theme being released in the near future.

Alright folks, well that’s it from me this week. Again, my name is Lexilicious and I will be back this coming Friday with all of the latest news from around the Farm. Thank you guys so much for listening, and I will see you soon. Happy Farming everybody.

= See Also =
 * Official FarmVille Podcasts
 * FarmVille Updates