Podcast Transcript 2011-01-07

Hey Farmers and welcome to this week’s installment of the Official FarmVille Podcast. My name is Lexilicious, and I am here to bring you all the latest news and information about FarmVille from Zynga. This week, we will be discussing our latest releases and you will all be getting a sneak peek of things coming to FarmVille in the near future.

Now, due to the holiday season it’s been a few weeks since our last podcast and we have a lot to talk about today. But before we get into discussing all of our latest releases, I would like to give a quick thank you to all of the players who participated in our Winter Holiday Decorating Contest and Greeting Card contest. Not only did our players show off their ability to decorate a farm this year, they also showed us their skills with paper, coloring pencils and a whole lot of clichés. All of the winners of both of these events have been selected and can be seen in the Discussions section of the FarmVille Forums. Congratulations again to all of our winners, and make sure to enter our next contest for your chance to win big.

So this week, our major releases were Pig Pen expansion and the long awaited “open all” feature for Special Delivery Boxes. Now, the open All feature was only just released, so I would like to give a quick explanation of how it works for our listeners.

You now have the ability to open multiple Special Delivery Boxes at the same time, see the results of what you get, and have all of them inserted back into your Gift Box. No more massive amounts of clicking to see what’s inside!

For example. If you have 47 Special Delivery Boxes in your Gift Box and you click on the “use” button, you will see a new window open up asking how many SDB’s you want to open at once. The default is all of them; however, let’s just say you want to open just forty. Clicking on the up and down arrows will adjust how many you want to use.

Now all you need to do is click on “Use” to open up all those SDBs. Please note that you can click on “Cancel” to stop this process before you get started opening. Once you click on “Use” there’s no going back.

Once you choose to use the SDB’s you will see a message that lets you know that FarmVille is working diligently to open your boxes.

As a word of warning though, please wait until you see this message close before doing anything else (like refresh your browser). Opening up large quantities of SDBs can take a little bit of time, so you may have to wait up to a few minutes for the message to disappear. Please know that this is totally normal.

When FarmVille is finished opening up all the SDBs another window will pop up showing what you got. If there are more than six items you’ll need to use the arrows on the right (or left) to scroll through everything. Click on “Okay” and you’ll be sent to the Gift Box where all of your newly opened goodies will be waiting for you.

Pigpen expansion was also released on Tuesday, increasing the number of pigs that can be stored in your pigpen at any given time. You can expand your Pigpen twice and each expansion will increase the number of pigs you can store by ten and the total amount of Pig Slop by five.

You can start expanding the Pigpen by clicking on it and selecting “Look Inside”. At the top of the Pigpen window you’ll see an option to “Expand”.

Click on “Expand” and you will see how many parts you will need, (and how many you’ve already spent) on that current expansion. The first expansion will require thirty-six total parts and the second expansion will require sixty total parts.

Like other expansions, you can acquire these parts via Farm Cash, Neighbor Requests and Special Delivery Boxes.

As I said earlier, each expansion increases the Pigpen storage capacity by ten, and the amount of Pig Slop by five, so after all expansions the total amount of pigs you can hold is forty and Pig Slop is twenty.

Now both the SDB Open All feature and Pig Pen expansion are big releases, so as per usual, we are looking for your feedback. Please make sure to visit the official FarmVille forums if you have an opinion about our latest updates that you would like to share.

Alright! On that note, let’s go ahead and get into the coming soon segment of this week’s podcast. First up on our list this week is Duck Ponds. Duck pods will be a constructible item that you can use to store your ducks and swans. Similar to orchards, it will display up to 5 ducks or swans of your choice when being used. You will be able to collect from the Duck pond once per day. When doing so, you will have a chance to find a yellow or brown duckling. The type of duckling you receive will depend on the types of ducks in your pond. Once you produce a duckling, you will need your friends help to raise it. The faster your friends help you raise the duckling, the better your reward will be.

And similar to our haunted house feature, we will soon be releasing a new buildable Valentine’s Day item. I’ll have more details for you on the Valentine ’s Day feature as we get a little bit closer to February.

Alright folks, that’s it from me this week. Everyone on the FarmVille team hopes that all of our listeners had a safe and happy holiday season, and I will be back on January 21st with all of the latest news from around the Farm. Happy Farming everybody!