Podcast Transcript 2010-05-21

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= Official FarmVille Podcast – May 21st Transcript =

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 of the latest news and information about FarmVille from Zynga. This week, we will be discussing our latest releases, you guys will all be getting a sneak peek of things coming to FarmVille in the future, and we have a very special guest with us today to answer some questions from the FarmVille community!

Well it was business as usual this week with the release of our new Limited Edition Tuscan theme and some exciting new features.

Probably the most notable feature that has been released recently is the new Horse Stable Expansion. Now, I have seen a little bit of confusion from players as to how this new update works, so I am going to go ahead and quickly discuss this feature in a little bit more detail for any users who may not be familiar with it.

Now as I am sure most of you know, Horse Stables provide you with both foals and consumables that can be used around your farm. The new Horse Stable expansion means you can now hold more horses in your stable. On top of the extra room on your farm, having more horses will increase your chances of finding Arborists, Farm Hands, and foals.

Your Horse stable can be expanded a total of 4 times. Each expansion will increase your stable capacity by 5 horses, for a total capacity of 40. Each time you wish to expand, you will need 10 Wooden Boards, Nails, Bricks, Horseshoes and Harnesses.

To start the expansion, open your Horse Stable and click on the “expand” button. This will give you a pop-up which will allow you to post a feed to your wall informing your friends and Neighbors that you need materials to start expanding. When clicked, this will take your neighbor to the Free Gifts page where they can send you building materials for your expansion.

When clicking “look inside” from your Horse Stables menu, you will now see a new “expand” button at the top of your Horse Stable information page. Clicking on the “expand” button will show you what you need to complete your Horse Stable expansion.

As I said earlier, each time you wish to expand your Horse Stable, you’ll need 10 of each item. You can get these items one of three ways. Firstly, your Neighbors can send you the necessary components via the free gifts page. Alternatively, when viewing the interior of your unfinished Horse Stable expansion, each component that you have not yet received 10 of has an ‘Ask For More’ button, that when clicked will take you to the Friend Selector page where you can select friends to send Gift Requests to for your chosen component.

And lastly, the items required for expansion can be purchased for 1 Farm Cash apiece from the Market. When you complete your expansion, you will receive a popup asking you if you’d like to share the news with your friends. Clicking the Share button on this popup will give you the option to post a feed to your wall that will give up to five neighbors who click on it a free Grey Horse.

On Thursday, we released our first round of Limited Edition Tuscan items which is complimented beautifully by the new Tuscan Green landscape that was just released yesterday. A new Mystery Box is also available in the Market for 16 Farm Cash, along with the new Cucumber and Basil crops. And as per the communities request, we have adjusted the contents of our Free Mystery Gifts which now feature some never before released items, like the new chinchilla, and we have released another new breed of puppy for your enjoyment. The Blue Heeler puppy can now be purchased from the Market for 65 Farm Cash.

And lastly, we have a new offer that is now live to all of our players that I am sure you guys will all love. As a thank you to for giving the FarmVille Game Bar a try, we’re giving out a special gift! Now when you install the FarmVille Game Bar, you’ll be able to receive 25 Farm Cash! If you don’t already have the Game Bar installed, you’ll see a page prompting you to install it the next time you log-in.

Clicking the Install button will take you to a page with instructions on how to add the Game Bar to your browser. Unfortunately, the Game Bar only works with Firefox at this time.

Once you have the Game Bar installed, the next time that you enter FarmVille and have the Game Bar turned on, you’ll receive a message letting you know that your Farm Cash is in your Gift Box.

The 25 Farm Cash in your Gift Box can be redeemed simply by clicking the Use button.

If you already have the Game Bar installed in your browser, you’ll also see the same page I mentioned earlier if you have not already received your free prize. You do not need to install the Game Bar again. Simply click Skip or the Play button from the navigation bar at the top of the FarmVille screen.

Once you turn on or refresh the Game Bar, you’ll receive a message letting you know that your Farm Cash is waiting for you in your in your Gift Box. Alright! And that’s about it for new releases this week! On that note, let’s go ahead and get into answering some questions submitted by members of the FarmVille Community! Today, we have a special guest with us who has graciously taken time out of her busy day to sit down and answer some questions from the community.

Our first question comes to us from SilverBaller. “What is the real concept of the nursery barn, besides storage for baby animals?”

Well, Here is what one of our Designers, Heather, had to say about this question.

Now, Our second question comes to us from ladycoffey. “Why are we not able to add lambs to the nursery barns? It's my understanding that lambs are baby sheep. If we can place baby foals and baby calves, we should be able to place lambs in the nursery barns.”

Alright, awesome. I want to give a big thank you to Heather for taking time out of her busy schedule to sit down and talk with us today. And going forward, we will be doing our best to get other members of the FarmVille team to sit down with us to discuss new features and answer questions from the community.

Alright and finally, our last question comes to us form bubba87. “Does the development team actively take feedback from the forums, or are the forums just here for us to discuss?” The FarmVille forums are frequently used by many members of the FarmVille team as a way to gather feedback and opinions from our users. While we may not be able to implement every request, our development team absolutely takes the time to gather feedback from players so that they can keep community concerns and requests in mind when developing new features.

So for this week’s coming soon segment, I actually have some information for you guys on the Farmer's Market feature we have been teasing for the past few weeks.

At level 15, you’ll get the chance to find bushels of crops when you harvest your fields. Finding a bushel activates a Market Stall. Your friends can shop at your market stall and take some of the bushels and you earn rewards from each friend who shops at your stall. The bushels will be used in an upcoming feature and can also be consumed directly to get a license to plant that crop, earn more mastery from that crop or earn bonus exp from that crop for a short time.

In addition to this, we have the new underground storage feature coming soon. Coin and Cash cellars will soon be available that will allow you to store up to 200 items in the same size area as a plot of tulips! Players start out with a smaller number of slots and can get their friends to grow crops for them. These crops will give you energy to dig underground and increase the area of your cellars. You can have a maximum of two cellars. That means if you buy and max out two cellars, you’ll be able to have 400 slots of storage in the space of TWO tulip plots!

Now, before I get out of here, I just want to let you guys know that due to popular demand, we will be bringing back the “tip of the week” segment of the podcast starting next week. And on that note, Im out of here folks. Again, my name is Lexilicious and I want to thank you all for listening. I will see you next Friday with all of the latest news and Information from around the Farm. Happy Farming everybody!

= See Also =
 * Official FarmVille Podcasts
 * FarmVille Updates