Podcast Transcript 2010-05-28

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= Official FarmVille Podcast – May 28th Transcript =

Hey Farmers and welcome to the Official FarmVille Podcast! My name is Lexilicious and I am in charge of all things community over here on the FarmVille team. As per usual, I am here to bring you all of the latest news and information about FarmVille from Zynga. This week, we will be discussing our latest releases, I will be answering some user submitted questions from members of the FarmVille community and you guys will all get a sneak peek of things coming to FarmVille in the near future. I am also happy to announce that our Tip of the Week segment has returned due to popular demand, and will be hosted from here on out by our very own Channel Zero!

So this week turned out to be jam packed with both new features and tons of Limited Edition items for everyone to enjoy.

Our most exciting release was the appearance of the long awaited Farmers Market!

At level 15 or higher, the Farmer’s Market allows you to collect bushels from harvested crops that can be used to get bonuses for yourself, or given to neighbors!

Collecting bushels is simply done by harvesting your regular crops. In much the same way that you can harvest Perfect Bunches from Flower crops, you’ll be able collect bushels from all permanent crops available in the Market. When you find your first bushel, you will get a Market Stall.

Alternatively, if you do not wish to wait, you can also purchase a Market Stall in the Buildings section of the Market for either coins or Farm Cash.

Please remember that you are limited to 5 Market Stalls on your farm in total. Each Market Stall you have can sell one type of crop. Once you’ve got your Market Stall in place, you can start collecting bushels to use yourself, or to let neighbors collect by harvesting your crops.

You can access your Market Stall’s menu by selecting “Farmer’s Market” from its pull down menu. Inside, you can see what bushels you’ve collected from your neighbors in the My Bushels section, what bushels your neighbors have available in the Get Bushels section and what bushels your stall is offering in the My Stall section.

Clicking the Get Bushels button will show you all of the bushels that your neighbors are currently offering. From here you can select any available bushels, and it will display a list of each neighbor that has the crop available, and how long their Stall is open for. Selecting a specific neighbor will take you to their Stall.

Bushels taken from your friend’s Stall are added to your inventory, which can be seen in the My Bushels section of your Stall. Once you’ve collected bushels, either from finding them on your own farm or taking them from your neighbors, they’re all displayed in your inventory. You can hold up to 50 bushels in your inventory, and each bushel can be shared or used. Clicking the Share button on any bushel will allow you to offer up a number of bushels of your choosing to your friends, via a feed.

Clicking the Use button consumes one of the selected bushels and gives you a bonus. The type of bonus depends on whether you have access to the crop or not. If the bushel used is for a crop you can plant, you receive a bonus of +1 Mastery whenever that crop is harvested on your farm for two hours. If you have already mastered this crop, the bonus is +1 experience point per harvest.

If you use a bushel of a crop that you are not high enough of a level to plant, you’ll receive a license to plant that crop that lasts for two hours. Along with being able to collect and use bushels from Market Stalls, you can receive a reward of your choice whenever neighbors use your Stall!

The next time you return to your farm, if your neighbors have used your Market Stall an arrow will point to the appropriate Stall. Viewing the interior of the Stall will show you the three rewards that you can choose from. Coins, Fuel and Experience Points.

Now the Farmer’s Market is a big addition to FarmVille. Because of this, we want to hear your feedback. If you have any opinions you would like to share with us regarding this new feature, please make sure to visit the “Feedback” section of the Official FarmVille forums and let us know what you have to say. The ability to grow up your baby animals in your Nursery Barn was also released this week, allowing players to raise their foals and calves into an all new adult animals that you can keep!

Depending on what animals are in your Nursery Barn, you have a chance of them growing up into a new Chocolate Cow, Holstein Cow, Black Horse, Cream Draft Horse and a Light Blue Pony when tending to your Nursery Barn.

Now, I have seen lots of questions from people already, who are unhappy that the baby animals do not grow up into their exact adult counterpart. For example, a Kelly green calf will not grow up into a Kelly green cow, it will grow up into one of the new animals I mentioned above. We made the feature the way it is, because many of the cows and horses that produce foals and calves can only be purchased with Farm Cash. It would be highly unfair to the people who purchased these animals for cash to have their friends and neighbors be able to grow their foals and calves up into the same animals for free.

Hopefully that clears things up a little bit for you guys. If you have any more questions about this new feature, please head on over to the Official FarmVille forums for more information.

And on that note, let’s go ahead and get into answering some questions submitted by members of the FarmVille community!

Our first question comes to us today from seidel mx3. “After read the last podcast about bushels, my question is: What happened with the “functional” buildings, like the perfumery, winery and fuel workshop?”

The Perfumery, Winery and Workshop some of you saw in the Market awhile ago, was a test we were doing on those features. While they were not yet functional, we do plan on releasing them in the near future. The buildings you saw were part of our crafting system. We are following up the new Farmers Market with a feature that will allow you to use bushels to craft special goods that you can trade with your friends. Players will be able to choose between several crafting buildings, each with their own unique benefits.

So make sure to keep an eye out for this new feature in the coming weeks.

Our next question comes to us from Mickey Mixx, and they would like to know how long it takes me to prepare the information and research the user submitted questions prior to recording.

Well, the time it takes to pick the questions can vary. I do my best to find questions that fit within the parameters of the segment, as well as ones that will be of interest to the community. Doing this can take me anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. Once I have the questions, I usually need to gather information. Depending on how busy the rest of the FarmVille team is, this can take me anywhere from an hour, to a few days. So in total, it does take some time to gather the information for the coming soon segment of the podcast, but it’s totally worth it for you guys to get some insight into how things work over here on FarmVille.

And now I am going to hand you guys over to Channel Zero, who is here to give us our Tip of the Week.

Howdy folks, it’s Channel Zero with your FarmVille Tip of the Week. Each week I’ll be giving you a couple of tips you can use to manage your farm a bit more effectively. This week, I’ve got one for those of you who are new to the game and a special tip for those of you currently tackling the Farmer’s Market.

First up, for those of you just starting up your Farm, I know you might be tempted to try and fill your Farm up with as many plots as you can right away, but hold off. Start out with just a few, plant some crops and get used to the game. One mistake new Farmers make often is adding so many plots to start that they don’t have enough coins left for the crops to plant in them. Take your time. You’ll be tending to a Mighty Plantation in no time.

Next, for all you Farming veterans currently gathering bushels from your neighbors in the Farmer’s Market feature, here’s a reminder. While you can only take 3 bags of bushels from a single neighbor’s Market Stall every 24 hours, you can gather up to 50 bags of bushels in total. So once you’ve run out of bags for one neighbor, head on over to another! If you’ve just started for the day, you’ve got 47 more coming.

Thanks for listenin’, and stay tuned next week for more tips from me, Channel Zero.

And last, but certainly not least, it is time for everyone to get a sneak peek of things coming to farmville in the near future.

We actually have a couple of cool things to talk about this week. Firstly, we will be implementing a new settings menu for everyone. The settings menu will allow you to easily change your preferences, including turning on and off animations, graphics, harvest indicators and the menu auto popping.

Insta-Grow will soon be coming to FarmVille, which will allow you to instantly grow your entire field of crops with our friendly bi-plane. And with this new feature, we will be releasing another nre co-op farming job for you guys to enjoy.

And I know you guys will be happy to hear that the Belted Cow will be coming in the near future. You will be able to purchase this cow for coins, but you are going to have to work for it a little bit.

Alright Folks, that’s it from me this week. I will be back next Friday to give you all of the latest news and information from around the Farm. Again, my name is Lexilicious, and I will see you soon. Happy farming everybody!

= See Also =
 * Official FarmVille Podcasts
 * FarmVille Updates