Feedback The Alchemist's Herbs

Howdy Farmers,

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Please post your constructive comments, positive and negative, regarding "The Alchemist's Herbs" Event 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 Event 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

 

I love these puzzles. I know a lot of people do not - and I like them more when there's not a strict time component to them, but they are interesting and different. I like the event plant bonuses that come as part of it, requiring some strategy - I have to decide when to do my growing so that I have enough hours that I am available to make this make sense. That part is enjoyable. What I did not love was that the "meter" kept sticking, so it wouldn't show that you were advancing, unless you looked carefully, which made a lot of people go right past the bonuses and not realize they had activated them. Other than that, this event was fantastic.

 

All done.
No grizzles.
The End.​

 

I love the puzzles side of it. I enjoyed that. However the signet ring drops on the baha side are terribly slow going and not in sync at all with the scarabs. You needed more signet rings than scarabs, and that is reflected by permitting the drops on the 3 lands, instead of the 2. However, you still needed to grow double length crops to obtain half as many.
I'm unsure how people managed to finish both sides because once you finish the main 60 levels, those seeds prizes drop down to 5 or less and its hard to progress from there. I did make use of the event plant harvest bonus nicely, thank you, but it still wasn't enough. I will have to think of other strategy's for next time, however I'm not sure what would make the difference.

Once a person has finished both sides, I don't think the starting market prices are a big enough incentive for them to keep playing the event and sell surplus crops. I have yet to see any for sale.

 

I agree the market prices are so low, there is a tremendously high opportunity cost. By this I mean I would loose significant money would be lost if I grew excess seeds.
Not a single time when I sold my excess crop were there event crops from other farmers on sale in the market.
Players wanting to buy would rarely be able to.
I was not able to make money on the quest, and I could have if the market condions had been designed well since I had some usually nice boosters.

Frankly, I don't understand this whole thing of having to sell things at such a minimal price when there is a new tree or animal. These poorly designed price controls are a terrible part of the game. There certainly isn't enough time during these quests to drive the price up. I know, I tried over a period of days selling one crop at a time to no avail. They were bought instantly as expected, but a hassle and I won't bother in the future trying to work around this design flaw.

 

This particular iteration of this event was seriously flawed.

A: the cost of the baskets was ridiculous for the items contained therein. NONE of my farms spent any real money to do this event.

B: The number of seed sacks rewarded per mini-game was too low to achieve the right side end goal. This also kept farmers from selling excess crops at the market - the numbers simply weren't there. This was especially the case once you reached the last goal on the left side of the event page.

C: The event page had a glitch where the left side did not always advance. The glitch was "self-induced" when a farmer backed out of the mini-game and went back in to retry it with a new set of tiles. But, nonetheless, it was an issue as it required an F5 reboot to see where you actually were on the left side.

 

I liked this event but it became clear that there was no way I would finish the points side once I had finished the 60 games. I did as much as I could and then sold the seeds I had left, not so much for the profit (cos there was none!) but so that others might have a chance to get further along.
Prizes were okay and I did get a much sought after Secretary Bird (by me anyway!) so I'm glad I did participate.

 

I enjoy the puzzle part of the event. In fact it is one of my favorite games. But like everyone else I realized about half way through that I would never get enough plants grown to complete the right side. There were just not enough seeds given out as prizes. Water Berries on my farm were very stingy.
I did try to utilize all the plus 1's 2 and 3 extras by playing the games up to first plus 1 and then waiting until I had the first crops ready to harvest & had enough to play all the rest of the games at once. Even that did not work for the vast numbers needed for the right side. Luckily I was able to buy enough in the market to finish the game but just barely.
The other thing that I did not like at all were the plus 1's for animals, products and trees. When you are using 5 of your 6 fields for drops (and I never put out trees as I find the drops are not good with them) it was a complete waste of those prizes. It would have been better to have them as a coupon to be used at a later date.