Ideas to save the Original Farm Story

[RosePetunia]

[Hello Farm Story:

I started playing Farm Story several months ago & like it very much. I think it is not only the best Farming game out there but the best game out there that allows for making a garden or yard. I tried Farm Story II and it is just not anywhere close to being the same game. The very things that I love so much about Farm Story are not available in Farm Story II. I love the amount of creativity that can be achieved by being able to finger tap each individual plot to plant & this can't be achieved by swiping an entire row with a sieve. In an effort to get you to save & bring back the weekly updates to the game I am making these suggestions which I feel may solve a lot of problems. (I just am very disappointed that updates are no longer offered to allow me to buy a great many of the holiday things which have been offered in the past which of course was one of the things that made Farm Story so special.)

A lot of people complain about all of the finger tapping being so tiring & time consuming but instead of removing the ability to individually plant each crop why not change the method of watering which is what I find to be the most tiring & time consuming to the point of making the game feel like work. I would like to be able to spend more time working in & enjoying my own garden not watering everyone else. Also, it is very hard on the eyes as a lot of players plant the entire garden full of only one plant making it extremely difficult to tell what has been watered. So why don't you change the watering so that it is included in the gifting. Since the amount of neighbors one is able to pick up as I understand is around 2000 although no one that I know of picks up that many neighbors in FS this should allow players to have as many neighbors as they like. It could work like this. You fix it so that the players could have a wish list for gifts & building supplies. Since we are allowed 20 gifts daily we would put 20 gifts on our wish list & if we were building something we would put the allowed amount of requested building supplies that can be received daily ?20 on wish list also. Then gifting would be as usual except that if you wanted to gift an item on the wish list you would still have to visit the neighbor to see what is on their wish list & gift it while visiting in their garden. Otherwise, you would simply gift 10 water drops ( since the number of neighbors may increase you could allow gifting 5 water drops for our personal neighbors & reduce the amount of water a community visitor gifts to 2 drops & the visitors would still have to visit the garden to gift since they aren't personal neighbors). So in this case you would only have to visit 20 to 40 neighbors which you want to gift from their wish list. The rest you would simply gift the way we do now by going down the list & gifting either water (or you could add some very small gifts such as individual special seeds or seed packs which could be gotten no other way). So the people you did not gift from your gifting list you would then visit to gift from the wish list. Visitors would only visit to view & enjoy other gardens or to invite neighbors or to try to get additional daily water if needed by gifting the person they visit with water. Also, then players wouldn't have to even visit other gardens at all if they were having a very busy day since they could then gift & water without visiting. Then players could use the water drops to water the plants of their choice themselves.

This method of gifting would allow for more neighbors if one wanted since it is frustrating to constantly turn people down or not. The method for picking up neighbors could be changed so that you would have to visit someone's garden to click a button to invite that neighbor if they had the button turned on saying they were accepting invites. If this is done then players could pick up enough neighbors to make up for their bad neighbors who never water back or never have anything to water in their garden due to it being full, wilted, empty or very long harvest crops were planted or permanently planned crops (& they would be more likely to water if they only had to water the way we gift now). It wouldn't matter so much whether your neighbors visit or not or if they played only occasionally or they took long vacations. You would only have to visit them if you wanted to for wish list gifting. You could then do away with the star system as it is currently useless either because you can't see star rating before picking someone up as neighbor or because they keep watering to keep their star rating up only until they have neighbors to water them.

This method of watering would, also, allow players to plant the way they really wanted to whereas now players are having to accommodate their neighbors & visitors by trying to always have something available for them to water.

You could also do away with the personal wall then & just have private messaging either by visiting them to message or replying to a sent message. Players then could message to let their neighbors know they had a wish list. Or keep the personal wall & provide an option for personal messages too. The newsfeed could be done away with or changed so that if a visitor came to your garden & watered by hitting a button to gift water then the player would be alerted to who left what gifts-water, wish gift, wish building supply & etc. Or changed to a chat newsfeed if you played online on PC. It would be important that the game only alerted players to visitors who actually gifted, watered or invited not just visited to view the garden. As it is now the newsfeed shows anyone who drops into your garden whether they watered you or not. It just makes more frustration as players are having to water back from both messages posted to their wall & the newsfeed. It could work something like the online Garden of Times game used to work on gifting & messages. Or private messaging could work like Dark Manor game. The difference would be in making the gifting so that you could still water all neighbors no matter how many you had. (You don't want to limit the gifting or you would just be changing one stressful situation for another. I have quit several games because of stressful gifting due to the fact it was limited.)

Maybe, you could even add Tapjoy to allow a way to get more gems if you do not have money to buy them since gems are difficult to get & most good things require gems.