Feedback Winter Calendar

Howdy Farmers,

​

Please post your constructive comments, positive and negative, regarding the "Winter Calendar" in this Feedback thread. We are looking forward to capturing your initial reaction to the event, as well as the final opinion after participating in the event.

Please be sure to bring arguments for supporting your statements, simple comments saying you like it or hate it will not help the Team understand what goes great, and what needs to be looked into, when planning future events.

The FAQ of the calendar can be found here. If you have any questions, please use the General Issues section or the Technical Issues section for technical problems - this thread is for feedback only. Thank you for understanding.

We are looking forward to your feedback!​

Best regards,
Your Farmerama Team

 

Doesn't everyone love getting surprises!
As usual, thoroughly enjoying this seasonal event and the additional reminder to open gifts is an added bonus

 

Love the reminder!!!!!

 

LOVE it. The whole animation thing is adorable, the animals, the stockings, so festive. I cant say enough about the reminder either!

 

Love it. Getting free gifts are always fun.

 

Agree with those above about the reminder. There have been numerous times in the past when I knew I clicked on the calendar gift only to find the next day that it was still unopened and that I had to pay bb to open it. The reminder corrects this problem.

A Big Thanks from the players.

 

Add me to the list of people grateful for the reminder, and as always, thankful for the goodies!!!

 

I also enjoy the animations, the festiveness & the free gifts.

That being said,
When is a free gift not free? When you have to pay for it. Kind of takes a bit of the joy out of the calendar. And as high a price as 15 BBs? If you want players to celebrate, stop being a Christmas ogre {sorry Shrek }

Yes, there may be times when someone has forgotten to collect the gift. There are other times, however, that perhaps a farmer may be down with a ghastly flu for 3 days. Or it could be that they were traveling & at the end of a long, tiring day, were so exhausted all they could do was eat something & fall into bed. Maybe a family member had some sort of crisis & that certainly preempts collecting a prize.

I could go on & on of course, but my point is clearly made. Therefore, I'd like to suggest that unopened gifts are handled like this ~
1st time… no penalty. 2nd time … 2 BBs. 3rd time … 3 BBs. Thereafter, the penalty could be as high as 5 BBs but NEVER higher!

 

A free gift should be a free gift regardless. If a player wants to open all of the gifts at once - why not? If life happens....and it will...don't make a player pay for a free gift!!

Having said that - thank you for the event calendar. I appreciate all the help I can get

 

Did anyone say it was supposed to be a free gift? I've always seen it as a reward for logging in, for prioritizing the game. I've got several farms that I don't regularly logged into. It would be nice if I could log in to all of them today and collect all the prizes for the whole calendar, but that's not really the point of the calendar.

That being said, a system like this would be good:

 

An oxymoron is a word or group of words that is self-contradicting, as in bittersweet or plastic glass. In this case, the oxymoron would be "paid gift".

Oxford Dictionary … gift {noun} ~
a thing given willingly to someone without payment; a present. example: "a Christmas gift"

something voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation

free : given or available w/o charge. Synonyms ... complimentary, gratis

Dictionary.com
something given voluntarily without payment in return; something bestowed or acquired without any particular effort by the recipient or without its being earned

Wikipedia.org
A gift or a present is an item given to someone without the expectation of payment or anything in return. Although gift-giving might involve an expectation of reciprocity, a gift is meant to be free.

Therefore, we may safely conclude that by its' very nature, paying what amounts to a fine {and a hefty one at that} for missing the prescribed time for collecting that days what??? … present, gift, goody? makes the item{s} a paid for gift & so not really a gift at all.

My real feeling is totally in agreement with 007Farming!
The suggestion I made about any penalty at all was to meet BP somewhere in the middle, to try to get the company to be reasonable.

What is the point of the calendar? From my perspective, it's to dispense gifts. It is something BP offers to their customers to generate goodwill.

 

Sorry, what I meant was: "Did anyone say it was supposed to be a gift?"

I have always taken the more cynical view that it is not a gift, but an incentive. An incentive to log in every day, even when we are busy during holidays.

 

They are presents/gifts....wrapped up. They should be free. I guess we all have different opinions and values.

 

Always like getting all the items from the calendars. Thanks

 

The FAQ describes each reward as a gift. For example, "After 6 days, you can collect one additional gift" (taken directly from the FAQ). Although it previously describes each item as a "reward" or "prize", the use of the word "additional" implies that each of the daily items was also a gift, and an extra one can be gained for opening each daily item. If they weren't a gift, the FAQ would simply read "After 6 days, you can collect a gift".

 

Why focus on the part that says "additional gift" and twist yourself into a pretzel trying to figure out what it may or may not imply, when you could just read the part where it literally says in bold letters:

Logging in and collecting rewards consecutively will yield bonus rewards on the 6th, 12th, 18th, 24th and 30th​

Why obsess over the use of the word "gift" and ignore the part of the FAQ where it explicitly states:

Prizes can only be unlocked on their specific day, you will not be able to collect them for free at a later time if you miss a day.​

Argue with -Mir85- all you want... it doesn't change the fact that daily rewards are a well-known mechanism used in free-to-play games to encourage players to keep coming back. They do this because they know the more active you are, the more likely you are to spend money on their game. It's all about customer retention and monetization. Doesn't really matter what BP calls it or what form they take.

 

I'm an active player who spends a great deal of real life $ on this game.... from SG, to SSG, to PF & so forth. It's about free choice for sure; no one is twisting my arm for me to get out the credit card.

I take exception though, to being punished by getting hit with the payment of BB's to collect the daily "rewards"? Seriously, if BP is "all about customer retention and monetization" they would do well to remove this practice by changing their policy and actually rewarding their players.

It's almost as if some secular court or religious body proclaimed that redemption is/was possible but only if the criminal/sinner pays for their offence(s).

 

Hey, if you want to argue that BP would be better off giving us the carrot without the stick, be my guest. I just don't see how allowing players to collect a month's worth of rewards all at once will motivate us to log into the game every day...

 

Ignoring your rude tone, the discussion was about the morals of making us pay for something marketed as a gift. The reason I raised the wording of the FAQ was because of the previous discussion in which players were talking about the fact that the very premise of a gift is that it is free. If at any point it must be paid for, it is not a gift.

If BP doesn't consider the winter calendar a daily gift, they should take the word gift out of the FAQ and stop wrapping the daily item up as a present. If it is intended as a gift, then it should be just that.

I didn't "twist myself into a pretzel". I spoke about how the English language works. I didn't obsess, I raised a point. I didn't argue with Mir, I conversed. Disagreement does not mean argument. They asked "did anyone say it was a gift?" - so I pointed out exactly where BP said that it was. And it does matter what BP calls it and what form it takes, because if you market something one way and treat it the opposite, that is misleading advertising.

Please do not speak to me or others in that tone. It is unnecessary and rude.

No one is arguing that. We all understand how companies appeal to customers. We're also not saying that being allowed to collect the gifts all at once would motivate daily logins. A quick read of the thread would tell you that. What we are saying is you cannot tell us something is a gift and then make us buy it. Especially not at Christmas which is a time for generosity, and especially not for such extortionate prices. And if BP wants its customers to pay them more money, or to log in each day, there are far better ways to do it than a gift of 10 supergrows - like, for instance, listening to their players for once.

If anything, the winter calendar is a way to extract even more money out of players. They know that most of us are busy shopping, cooking, preparing, visiting friends, spending time with family and doing everything that Christmas is about. They know we are more likely to miss a day and that's a great way to get our BBs and by extension our real money. BP demonstrates the greed of a real life Scrooge and the players are calling them out for that.

 

They have actually taken a step back lately with this and I commend them for it. It used to be that the bonus prizes were good and I would have been disappointed not to get them. During the halloween calendar this year I missed two days. The prizes themselves weren't worth paying BBs for, so I waited to see what the bonus prizes were. They also turned out not to be worth my BBs and so I just left it like that, which was pretty nice.

When I opened the last bonus of the winter calendar I had to look twice, event plant EP booster, that's underwhelming at best. But then I remembered the players who missed one or more days and thought, ok that's fine.