Announcement Community Managers Forum Announcement January 2016

Dear Farmers,

Everyone loves a good birthday celebration and the Farmerama team is no exception. It’s our sixth anniversary and we’re excited to commemorate the occasion with our loyal community! We’ve prepared a sugary sweet event to delight your senses, along with a special surprise that we hope you will enjoy.

The Farmerama community has played a key role in our latest milestone. Your enthusiasm for your getaway to the countryside really inspires and motivates our team. We’re truly proud to work for such a loyal audience. You’re passionate, engaged, and constructive – we love reading your feedback in the forums and on the fan pages! We strive to listen to your feedback and, as much as possible, provide entertaining content based on your wishes and ideas. We hope you can see some of your ideas reflected in the game.

Farmerama is a collective effort, not only between the developer team and the community, but within the team itself. We work hard to collaborate simultaneously on events, bug fixes, improvements, as well as new features. We’re just your average people with not-so-average jobs – but we LOVE our work!

Last year, we were on cloud nine after succeeding in making some long-standing community wishes a reality. This year, our user focus is as strong as ever.

For example, curiosity about the status of Coral Reef has been a big topic. This feature was one of our biggest challenges throughout 2015. In the end, after over a year of hard work, we had to make the difficult decision to put production on hold. Although the reasons are complex, the simple answer is this: the team was not confident that it would be a good fit for Farmerama and, as the feature expanded, we lost sight of the original goal. Announcing it so early (and repeatedly) was a classic case of counting our chickens before they hatched.

That’s not to say that Coral Reef will never see the light of day. We’ve learned that we need a different approach for it than what we originally thought. It’s surely a letdown for the players anticipating its release, but also a big slice of humble pie for the team. That said, we know that golden bananas are an important resource for the game and we are planning all-new Bahamarama content in the coming months.

There have been many questions about the Transeedlantic Express and the Happy Tree Day as well. These events have been hot topics internally as well. Ultimately, we had to conclude that we could not bring back the old balancing to Farmerama. We understand completely why this will not be the most popular decision within the community – some users have the tree upgrades and special trees that others won’t have. Unfortunately, returning these upgrades and special trees to the game economy would have a negative impact, causing more problems down the road. It was also a very tough decision, but healthier for the game in the long run.

You might remember that we’ve also teased the “Storage Quarters” feature, which we feel will be an overall improvement for Farmerama. The development is progressing nicely under the guidance of a working group within the Farmerama team. We want to make sure that the feature is solid and implement it to the high quality standards that you’re expecting. The exact release date is still pending, but it will arrive in the coming months and we’re eager to see how you’ll like it.

Questions about the behavior of manure still abound and we’re aware that most of you are puzzled and dissatisfied by the changes. However, we will not change it back in the near future. Though we’re sorry that the change has been an annoyance, this was another difficult decision that had to be made to preserve the long-term health and playability of the game.

Along the same lines as above, addressing the topic of the Tree of Wisdom and the Stable Master rune, we know that sometimes development decisions can be perplexing and frustrating for you. This can lead to a general feeling that changes always benefit Farmerama and not the Farmerama community. But we are committed to being a user-focused game. It’s always a challenge to see the long-term benefits for our large and widespread community of users from the short-term inconveniences. Not everyone will like or understand every change, particularly with regards to older systems in the game, but we have learned a lot to take special care of Farmerama’s legacy. More Tree of Wisdom runes are planned for this year, including concepting for an additional workshop rune. This is still a work in progress, however.

Increasingly, we have received more questions about trouble with Farmerama’s cinema feature. This particular feature is intended to give our players the opportunity to gain free items and, as such, its functionality is also highly dependent on cooperation between us and third parties. We love it when the cinema is working properly, because it helps our users play Farmerama. Unfortunately, the fix also requires collaboration between us and multiple parties, with both sides contributing to the solution. As for the suggestion of adding the loading videos to the cinema, this cooperation is completely separate from the cinema feature. That said, we are actively working on resolving the issue.

Which brings us to the topic of bugs…

2015 came with a strong focus on fixing existing bugs within the game. Our developers and QA have developed a new pipeline for identifying and fixing bugs with some really fantastic results. Now that we have tackled the critical issues, we will soon start working on improvements. Some of these will be small things in the background to improve performance, etc. But many will also be visual, e.g. the recent addition of a search function for Gift & Trade. There’s always a lot going on behind the scenes and the team really has made tackling bugs a special focus in the past year.

Looking ahead to 2016, there are once again a lot of exciting plans for Farmerama. We’ve got a lot in store for you, but we don’t want to give everything away just yet. But just to whet your appetite, aside from Storage Quarters, we’ll start some work on the Artisans’ Village (and the long-promised Alchemist), improvements to the market, a re-work of the Daily Login Bonus, and more! We’ll release the details, as usual, before the changes go online.

We hope that you’ll continue to enjoy Farmerama, just as we’ll enjoy working on new and entertaining content for you. Thanks for celebrating this amazing occasion with us, for your loyalty to the game and to the community, and your enthusiastic feedback. We can’t emphasize it enough: your feedback is the most valuable tool we have.

We’d also like to give special thanks to our international forum teams. Their amazing support has been vital and we really trust their opinions and experience as players. They are involved in our workflows and we are proud that we’ve been able to build such a strong collaboration with them. They are the real rock stars of Farmerama and we are incredibly grateful!
Thanks for reading and, once again, keep sending us your feedback, ideas, and wishes – your contributions are so valuable to Farmerama’s success and we appreciate your constructive opinions about our work!

Your Community Managers
Micky & Tobi