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Sunday, February 26, 2012

Zynga, Please Stop

To my four friends still playing FrontierVille, I hate to break it to you this way but I'm no longer playing.  You see, FrontierVille had become the online equivalent of one of those crazy tasks you had to do over and over again but never got anywhere in Greek Hell.  It seems Zynga had a new model as they started fiscal year 2012 and it was forcing their users to do one of two things:  a) Make a lot more friends who play the same game or b) Pay Zynga for in-game credit so you wouldn't need friends.  Granted, this was the model they were always going with, but they kicked it up a notch this year by relentlessly putting up new missions that require new building that require begging friends for parts that...yeah, you see where this is going.

Now Zynga, let's chat for a sec.  I understand guys.  You have a popular product and you're in it to make a few bucks.  It's all good.  But you're going about it ass backwards!  I think in response to your 2011 4th Quarter earnings you kinda lost it.  See you're gambling that your current users are so addicted to your games that they've invested hours upon hours of time upon that you can drag us towards buying the in-game credits so we'll have some hope of completing the endless onslaught of missions.  There's just one teeny tiny problem:  We're just not that into you.  While your strategy might work for the hardcores who have a separate Facebook account just for playing games where they can invite a flurry of people just to play specific games, your casual gamers, like me, are just going to give up. 

That doesn't mean I'm going to stop playing the other games though.  I still have enough active friends in CityVille and Words With Friends to enjoy playing them.  There's been a mass exodus from Mafia Wars for exactly the reason I outline earlier so not really much fun to be had there.  Mafia Wars 2, I'm trying to give it a chance but have only 4 active friends is killing it for me.  I quit Vampire Wars ages ago because you guys created new tiers that required me to waste energy on tiers I already completed.  Treasure Isle, I don't even wanna go there.  Hopefully you get my point.  Please stop this crazy train and maybe, just maybe, if you go back to making sure the games are fun again I might play again.

1 comment:

  1. Agreed, agreed, agreed. Not to mention the forever loading issues, dis-appearing and re-appearing crops that was harvested before refresh message and on and on. I am a big Western movie fan and originally when I started to play the game one of the few people in a beginning the concept was appealing now I have no idea why pig have to have a football field and other such stuff. I stop playing a few moths ago because it just was not fun> spent so much time trying to finish the same goal over and over, it started to feel like a job I was not enjoying and not getting paid'

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