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Announcement - Big Farm TV - First Live Broadcasting!
WascallyWabbit (FormerMod)
Posts: 6,097
We would like to present a new thing for you all! Tomorrow, Wednesday the 15th starting from around 17:00 CET, we will be broadcasting live for the first time on Twitch.
The goal of this format is to have a more direct communication approach with all of you from our Communities, so we hope to see you all there tomorrow!
A member from our Community Management team, together with Big Farm's producer Dennis, will be on camera for a live broadcast that will go through what happened in the last months, the current situation and some insights on the future development of the game.
Afterwards there will be some time to answers your questions from the chat
A  few details to consider:
- The broadcast will be in English as it is a live event and it wouldn't be possible to do it in multiple languages.
- The chat is available to everyone with a Twitch account (making one is simple)
- The chat will be moderated and bad language and mean comments will be removed. Let's keep it constructive

- The broadcast will last around 1 hour
- We plan to do this on a regular basis, but how often we can do it will depend on our learnings from this first session.
Don't forget to join us tomorrow at 17:00 CET at this link: https://go.twitch.tv/bigfarmtv . See you there!
Best Regards,
Your Community Team.
Comments
Hi Guys,
We finally have the transcript of the live broadcast for you. Sorry for the delay, especially to those of you waiting to do translations - Its a good job its so short hehe
Daniel: Hi guys and welcome to the first ever Big Farm TV broadcast. I am Daniel, Community Manager with Big Farm and here with me is Dennis the Executive Producer. So, just to go through kind of what this stream is all about and why we are doing this. It’s basically just to give you guys a bit more feedback on things that have been happening lately, things that are gonna be coming up in the future and things you can look forward to. Just a bit more detail for you its a nice kind of direct way to do it we think, and yeah it’s the first time we’ve ever done this so it would be great if we can get some feedback on it afterwards, if you liked this kind of thing, if you want to see more of this kind of thing and what you wanna see. So yeah, let’s get kicked off. Dennis, tell us a little bit about you and what you do on the Big Farm Team.
Dennis: … (I don't have to do it at same speed as you, can't speak that fast as he does lol ) Well, hi I am Dennis, I am the Executive Producer of Big Farm. I am taking care of the game already like I think 3 years now, so everything that kind of happened, you can blame me about it and I will try to tell you a little bit about the general situation we have in the game, what happened in the last couple of months and what is going to happen in the next couple of months. .. (so, shall I just do it?)
Daniel: Yeah, yeah shall we jump in, do you wanna talk about the outage yesterday? [4:40/1:05:32]
Dennis: yeah, I think I would go a little bit further back, before I talk about specific topics. There shouldn’t be any excuses, I just wanna give you some background why things happen because in general I feel really bad about the bugs and the problems that we caused in the last couple of weeks and months and I hoped that would have worked better and I really apologize for all the inconvenience that you guys had. The thing is, our company struggled a little bit last year and therefore we had quite some layouts. We used to be 1.300 people in the company and we are down to, I don’t really know, but we lost 300 I think ..
Daniel: much less anyway, very much less yeah. [5:38/1:05:32]
Dennis: ...and, Big Farm is still running and will be running for lot of years still to come. But our team got a little bit smaller, so right now our team contains: 2 server developers, 4 client developers, 4 artists, 2 game designers and 1 balancer, that’s like the core team that we have. And we used to be a little, well lot larger and one of the main problems is that our server developers stopped working here, they had new challenges in different companies so we had to change the team and since the game is already pretty old it was tough for the new guys to get actually into the code and most of the bugs that you encountered in the last couple of weeks and months are server related and they are actually doing an awesome job, to get everything that we had planned, into the game but it just takes a little bit longer and sometimes errors occur that we didn’t anticipated. We actually do test a lot. We first put everything on test servers and we test it internally, we have a huge QA department testing everything and that’s all we to before put it on live and we test it on pre client first and then we put it on live and if it’s a larger feature, we actually test it on our beta server as well. But things like with the coop point? Coop Hard Worker Event ? [Daniel: Yes] Sorry about that, we have different internal names than we have like on live [Daniel: Its very confusing!] Yes… for that example we tested everything and everything looked smooth and right and then we put it online and all the rankings got messed up, we actually got negative cooperative rankings and this wasn’t supposed to happen and we couldn’t really figure out because there was no subtraction in the code at all, there can’t be any negative numbers but they always occurred. And they never occurred on our test environment but they occurred live. So we couldn’t fix it because it doesn't happen and then everything like whoa, we tested everything, everything looks fine, then we put it live again and we started running it and then it went to the (not swearing word) afterwards. And that’s why, it’s constantly breaking and we are trying to fix it and we are actually putting our main focus in development on fixing bugs. We always get the feedback from the community: “Why do you bring so much new stuff, why don’t you fix our bugs?” Actually more than 50% of the development time we are on bugs, we are trying to fix bugs, getting things smoother, we do a lot of stuff in the background. The game got older and bigger and bigger and the performance is sometimes really bad. So we are working in the background on the performance issues as well so we get the performance running, and things like that ... (I kind of lost my thread here, where I wanted to go) … Just to give you like a broad overview what's actually happening. And we want to bring a good mix of getting old stuff running again, better again, putting new incentives in there like new rewards or putting village happiness on decorations for older events, and on the other hand side we try to create new mechanics in the game as well were you can experience new stuff in the game, so that the game is never feeling old, there is always something new coming. We have times where we fix a lot of bugs and then we got the feedback from a lot of users: “Whoa it’s getting boring, nothing new is coming!” Then we are putting something new in and then: “Why are you not concentrating on bugs?” It’s really tough for us to please everybody, but we are really trying our best. And especially the feedback that the moderators collecting from the community and the CM´s are passing over to me this is really good input and we trying to put all the input from the community into our features. [10:19/1:05:32]
Daniel: Just to add as a note to that, like one kind of really good example of that, is the Worldwide Championship; we actually got a lot of feedback about the first time we ran that event. I think pretty much all of them ended up into going into this round of the event. So that is a really great example of you guys are giving your opinions and than it goes into the game. We can’t necessary do that every time with every piece of feedback that you give, but if you give a good piece of feedback and we can’t put it in, then we'll always suggest it and Dennis is always happy and open for suggestions that kind of make sense and work with the game, so. [10:55/1:05:32]
Dennis: Sometimes things get lost in translation, the Worldwide Championship is a good example there, I promised you guys that there won’t be a wheel that can generate points, and that's what I gave to our balancers and they said; well you cannot win directly points there anymore, but they forgot to mention that on the wheel itself, the points you generate actually translated into points and I didn’t know that and I put that live and I already got right away the feedback, well this is messing up again and well we stopped it. [11:34/1:05:32]
Daniel: Yeah, Dennis, we were quiet quick with that as well I think, I think that was a really good response from us, like we saw the problem come took it out the game straight away and we're not running it again like that, so yeah another really good example. [11:46/1:05:32]
Dennis: Sometimes the feedback we get from you guys is something we cannot really do, because it’s hurting the economy of the game in general. One thing we did to complete the Big Farm World is kind of introducing the deep-sea fishing into the game. In the deep-sea fishing .. I wanted to have that feature really attractive, so I told my balancers it should generate a little bit more cash than you can gain on the flower farm but not that much. I said like 10 – 20% more cash, but actually it went up to 200% more. And that destroyed the whole economy of the game. That’s why we had to put a stop to that. And we didn’t have a fix right away but it was accumulating so much cash that all mechanics didn’t work anymore and the people didn’t have any challenges anymore. Yes I know it felt really nice and it felt really easy, but if everything comes too easy in a long time then there is no challenge of the game anymore. So we put a stop to it. So how we can fix it? And we decided to do the market and that wasn’t enough for you guys, you wanted to sell the fish again, so we put it back in there but for a lot lower price. Right now when I look at the numbers, the fish market is generating lot more cash than any other part of the game. So it’s still a huge advantage that you have when you compare to prior to the fishing, but it’s not overwhelming everything anymore.... and, well, its probably something I shouldn’t say, it felt a little bit like, well I gave you like this really cool lollipop and then I took it away from you guys again and then like give you like a really little one and I know it feels bad, but I promise you it’s better for the whole game and it’s not about us wanting to like hurt you or wanna earn money or something like that, it’s really that the whole economy of the game needs to be fitting together and needs to work together. Otherwise it would be not Big Farm any more, but Big Fish, because everything would resolve about the fishing. Why did we get to the fishing anyhow? I wanna talk about that. ….. [14:21/1:05:32]
The thing is, when I took over the game, the game was really straight forward, it was more like one of my game designers said it, it’s like a interactive movie. Because you had to go a straight line through the game and had to do exactly what’s asked of you, and couldn’t divert from the plan and my vision of the game was and is to create a Big Farm World. That’s why we introduced the world map, and we had different environments now for the farms and we put the horse paddock somewhere different, we introduced the fishing and the coop village, and the next upcoming farm. So it’s actually the world, were everybody can decide what they wanna do. You don’t have to do everything and actually a normal person, that has a normal life, cannot do everything in Big Farm and that is intended right now. Like everybody should play the part in Big Farm which they enjoy the best and not try to do everything and so choose what you like the best, play that. Same thing is was with one of the topics that was there; “why we have so many events right now?” Well some events are liked more by some people, some events are liked more by other people, so we are putting a lot of events in there and you guys can choose, which kind of event you wanna play and which one you don’t wanna play. It doesn’t hurt you if you don’t play one event, just do what you want. And from, we have a lot of tracking data, and we can see that the most participation in the games, in the events, is where the cooperative has to work together. That’s the reason why we changed our planning like that, that we will have from last month until the future there will more events coming, there is always an event running, were the cooperative can work together. So right now it’s the Cooperative Hard Worker Event and the Cooperative Championship, running one after the other, but there are other events that come in-between – So, one thing is, next week the Goldfish Rescue, there is a single player part and a multi-player part, during that time, you won’t have the Cooperative Tournament running, so there is always options that you can play. [16:45/1:05:32]
Daniel: Just to backtrack slightly, we were talking about deep-sea fishing, so we've done a lot to deep-sea fishing lately, we've made quite a few changes, like you we said, we brought back the selling of fish, and we've done a few optimisations there, but we are not completely finished with that are we, do you wanna just talk about some of the things that might be coming up in the future for it? [16:45/1:05:32]
Dennis: Actually there is an optimisation still planned, we wanna optimize the contracts, and we wanna bring some sense into the dangers. The dangers are senseless at the moment. You don’t even have to prepare for the dangers because that doesn’t make any sense. There was a totally different mechanic planned, but we didn’t had the time to do it. But this is actually delayed to mid of next year. Since like I told before, we have limited resources. I can go into the roadmap what’s planned. (Should we do that now or maybe little later?) [17:42/1:05:32]
Daniel: maybe go into that a little, that would be good I think [17:44/1:05:32]
Dennis: Okay, so, what’s the plan for now or for the rest of the year? Right now we are just working on old events, well including the Goldfish Rescue that will come next week. So next week the Goldfish Rescue will come and lot of offers will come, over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday time, so it’s like the Thanksgiving week, it started in America, it’s a huge week for online offers, so we are going with the flow, there is a lot of special offers coming up for you, there will be wheels coming up, where you can earn up to 500 % bonus on gold purchases and there will be a lot of events running, we will have all the summer activity boni (bonuses) in there, like the fireworks booster is coming, the neighbours are coming in, the horse trainer is coming in, we will have the snowman running and there is a lot of stuff going on - And please, don’t try to play everything. Pick the stuff you wanna do and leave the rest alone. So it’s like a huge wall of offers. And we will start with our wintertime on Monday, so we switch our background to snow. Oh there was one question in the past, “why can’t we choose if we wanna have snow or not?” We cannot do that because then the game would have to load everything twice, and it is already really slow and this will kind of make the game so slow that it's unplayable, so, well we have to decide when it is winter is starting and when it stops and we're deciding winter is starting.... [19:24/1:05:32]
Daniel: So we're the weather gods
[19:26/1:05:32]
Dennis: … And, so, we are starting with winter on the 20th and therefore the snowman event is coming and stuff like that. And beginning of next month there will be the Advent Calendar again with lots of gifts in there and we will have the Wish-list again, we already put a lot of input in there from last year, and now we fixed some stuff as well, so it’s current to the game and during Christmas there will be Santa´s Wheel again, were you can like, put all the stuff you don’t need in there and get some awesome decorations. Oh yeah, and another thing we just designed, I just got a feedback last week from the CM that you think the current wheel of fortune is really boring and you get all the time the Pavilion and during Christmas time, we will run a new wheel of fortune with all kind of Christmas decorations, so you get a lot of different decorations in there, not the normal ones any more. After that we will try to get all of our themed events some extra challenge in there. There will be kind of, we call it “Speed Challenge” right now, but that’s a working title. So everybody that is finishing the themed event really early and get bored in the rest of the week, we will have some extra challenges on the next, there will be another map on the next side, next page were you can do some other challenges. So that’s already the end of the year, while doing that, we are fixing bugs of course. And for the next year we have 2 new themed events coming up, one will be the Food Truck that will be for the second farm and one will be the Wedding Planner that will be for the third farm. Both of them will probably come in January. I already have some pictures for that… [21:17/1:05:32]
Daniel: Let’s see some previews
[21:19/1:05:32]
[Dennis holds up pictures]
Dennis: Well that’s ... (is that fitting?) ...yeah that's the UI for the Food Truck, so it’s kind of the same, but you finally have something ....
Daniel: No that’s the Wedding Planner.
Dennis: Oh, it's the Wedding Planner?
Daniel: Yeah, that one's the Wedding Planner, that one's the Food Truck.
Dennis: That’s the Food Truck, sorry about that, that’s the Food Truck and that’s coming for the second farm and therefore you finally have a themed event for the second farm and if it works well, we probably will produce more themed events for the second farm as well and again here, [switches back to previous picture] that's for the third farm. [21:55/1:05:32]
Daniel: Since we are on scheduling and planning and stuff, we've had a question from the Twitch users. So, they've had the new chat system, they got a little preview of that, on the test server. When can they kind expect to see more of these features come into the live servers? [22:12/1:05:32]
Dennis: The thing about the chat was, it wasn’t really complete, it actually had less functions than the old chat but in a new style, we wanna add all the other functions as well, that we got feedback for and it should have at least the functions that the current chat has, but even more. And we need some more development time for that because we ran into some problems with our legacy codes there, therefore it probably won’t come before the beginning of next year. [22:45/1:05:32]
Daniel: Okay, awesome and we also have another question, while we're on it, so the ... we may as well start talking about this now actually... they're asking about the cat on the gourmet farm. So we recently added the cat to all of your farms and we're aware obviously, that there have been a few issues, in the last few weeks and we tried to fix it, last week I think, or a couple of weeks ago? [Dennis: Yep] ..and we thought we'd had it fixed, we put through the tests and everything seemed to go fine, but then we've since had reports that some of you are still having some problems collecting charms on the gourmet farm. So when have we got a fix coming for that? [23:24/1:05:32]
Dennis: Yeah, well there is more to it. The cat, you guys just waited for the cat really really long and I always put it on hold because we don’t have 3D art in our game. We have 2D art in our game. And doing 2D animations takes really a long time. And therefore we never really had the time to do an animation of the cat. We did a contest for the cat and we kind of got a nice cat there, but nobody actually did an animation. And therefore I like ok if we didn’t get an animation we don’t do the cat. We had a lot of discussions in the team, we ok well let’s do the animation, therefore we have an animation for the cat now, but the distribution of the cat was really difficult, there was supposed to be another mechanic in there, where you get a lot more cat charms. But that never made it into the game because we had so many errors in there that we couldn’t fix it in time before we had to start working on our Christmas features. Therefore when we put it live, there was another mistake, or error or bug that you couldn’t collect, some people couldn’t collect on the gourmet farm. We fixed it right away, but the fix did not apply to the people who already build it up. So we needed to fix that again. So the only way to fix that is to take away the cat tree and the people have to build it up again. But we didn’t track who actually, for what people it actually worked and for what people it didn’t work. So we had to take it away for everybody. Then we put it back on and the mistake was there again or the bug was there again and like I explained it before on our test server everything worked fine. But now we have like a real fix, well, supposedly, we tested it really good, and on Monday on our update, we will fix the gourmet farm bug and everything should work fine. And we took the time from when you build it up to the first of November when we took it away, that timeframe what is possible for you to collect cat charms and you will be credited these cat charms. It will be up to 650.000 cat charms. Some people will only get 4.000, depending on what is the timeframe and what's your charm collecting power, kind of, but more than that, because there was so much trouble with the cat tree, we wanna help you actually get to the cat itself a lot faster. So starting from next Monday for 10 days the cat charms will drop from almost every building, and the drop chances are a lot higher than before. If you do exactly the stuff where the charms drop, you can actually get it done in those 10 days. [26:23/1:05:32]
Daniel: So it should be about, up to 5 to 10 times more? [26:28/1:05:32]
Dennis: It’s 6.4 times more. [26:31/1:05:32]
Daniel: 6.4 there you go, very precise thanks for that, okay great. Yeah we have a couple more Twitch questions here, so do you wanna start talking about some new features, maybe the new farm and things that are coming up? [26:48/1:05:32]
Dennis: The new farm. The idea was there already 2 years ago. And we started planning it 1.5 year ago, but then we had more urgent topics that we are working on right now, and we had to push it back, then we had the shrink to the team, got a lot smaller, and therefore we couldn’t, before it was the plan like 1 part of the team was working on the 4th farm and one part is like doing normal work like, exchanging the rewards and doing daily stuff, having the themed events like Easter and Christmas and stuff. So this doesn’t work, so we had to handle it somehow, but we actually started with the development of the 4th farm, the artwork is pretty far by now, and at the moment the plan is to put it on beta by end of February. I brought some pictures … we already have from the 4th farm. [27:57/1:05:32]
Daniel: Very nice! [27:58/1:05:32]
Dennis: So, the 4th farm will be the Volcano island. You already see the volcanos in the background.[Dennis holds up pictures] This will be the background of the farm. (Can you see that? All right) And you will have to help and rescue animals on that farm and there will be a lizard which you have to take care of, yeah? And What's that like, err some sort of kind of fish, I don’t know the English word for it, it’s like killer whale, [Daniel: Killer whale – Orca? I think] yeah Orca and Vulture and probably like most Tiger! [Daniel: hehe that's gonna be awesome] and this will be the new character for the volcano island, here you see some of the decorations that will come there. Erm well, UI's are probably not that interesting for you, but this will give you already a hint that, you have to make it work, you have to bring stuff from your main land, from the other farms over the jetty, over to the volcano farm and to build things up. So, it will be quiet challenging, but lot of interesting stuff and to actually to get to the volcano farm, there will be a treasure hunt beforehand, so you will have to collect map parts to find the way to the volcano farm and to actually reach it. So there is a huge questline, a huge story behind it, there will be a lot of mechanics that you already know, there will be orcas, there will be acres, the nurseries, there will be residentials and workers. So not everything new, we will have some old parts, but there will be new parts as well, like taking care of the animals, having a feed kitchen there to actually cook meals for them, and at the end you are releasing them then through an animal gate into freedom again and you will get rewards for that. The plan is as rewards, (should I already talk about?) it will be something were you can actually increase the power of all of your old farms by getting some, I don’t know how it is called, some gems, magical items that you can put into existing buildings to boost them or to get some new effect out of it. [30:46/1:05:32]
Daniel: OK, awesome, so we have more questions from Twitch: “Will the prices for equipment be lowered since the amount of farm dollars earned has been lowered?” So this is, I think is coming back to some of the deep-sea stuff we talked about. [31:01/1:05:32]
Dennis: To the fishing? [31:02/1:05:32]
Daniel: Yeah, so they asking will the prices for equipment ever go down? [31:07/1:05:32]
Dennis: No, the price for equipment won’t go down. Maybe, some of them will go down, some of them will go up, there will be a new balancing there, but right now you guys are earning a huge amount of farm dollars from the fishing as it is already. So… (shakes his head no) [31:24/1:05:32]
Daniel: There is actually, some of our users have been really fantastic with this feature as well, cos there is a user, I think he's on the English forums and he made a calculator for the deep-sea fishing which I thought was absolutely great. So yeah you guys are obviously been really into that, you got a lot of resources out there that you can use, to even boost you up even further there. [31:45/1:05:32]
Dennis: If you upgrade your market your fish market, get it to the higher levels, you will earn millions of farm dollars a day. [31:54/1:05:32]
Daniel: Yeah, it's very possible to do [31:56/1:05:32]
Dennis: In the beginning it is a little bit frustrating and sometimes you actually do minus, but after a few upgrades it will boost a lot. [32:05/1:05:32]
Daniel: So yes it's an initial loss, but then … [32:07/1:05:32]
Dennis: I have an negative thing I have to say. I will do it right there, because it comes hand to hand there. A lot of stuff is balanced right from the start of Big Farm, so 5 years ago and the economy changed a lot and you guys earn like 10 times, sometimes 100 times more cash through all the events, the activity rewards and through the new features. But there is a huge inflation there how much in game currency or farm dollars you earn. But we never really changed the buy price of products so that is something that will come up. We will change the farm management at the moment. It’s like 10 times more when you buy something then selling, that will increased by a lot, because right now a lot of people are evading playing events by just buying it, because they are earning by the fishing so much cash that they don’t even need to produce stuff anymore. But we don’t want people like .. this is kind of like cheating but we are providing you the cheating. So we wanna like.. there are several things we can do but the easiest way would be that we just raise the prices for products in the farm management that you actually have to produce them to fulfil the quests and events. [33:35/1:05:32]
Daniel: Yeah I mean, like you said, it’s Big Farm not Big Fish in the end & we kind of wanna go back to the Big Farm side of things, rather than the very fishing heavy kind of way, it’s been lately. Okay, ooh that’s an interesting one. So we have another question from Twitch; “We always said none of our animals will be killed or eaten in the farms, so why have we changed that policy?” I guess this is in relation of the volcano farm. [34:00/1:05:32]
Dennis: No I think it’s in kind of to the fish thing [34:02/1:05:32]
Daniel: Oh the fish thing, yeah that would be it [34:05/1:05:32]
Dennis: Yeah, well I don’t know, like kind of vegetarians sometimes eats fish, so I don’t know, it was really tough to continue to get new aspects into the game without doing that to the fish. We will still be for the mammals that we are not doing it, so we don’t do ground beef, out of the pigs, it will continue on the 4th farm on the volcano farm that you are actually saving animals, not killing any and so with the fish we made an exception. Well if you don’t like that, just don’t play the fish. [34:58/1:05:32]
Daniel: Okay so, we were talking a little about testing things on the test server. So we have our internal test servers where we test things, but as many of you probably know, we have a test server that you guys can test things on as well. And we've been putting that to a bit more use lately, which I think you guys have quite appreciated and we have a question from Twitch, which is directly related to this. “Would it be possible to implement new events on to the test server before going live?”, is that something we can do constantly or isn't? [35:29/1:05:32]
Dennis: Yeah, actually that's something we want to do and we always wanted to do but there were some technical problems in there and problems in the process, but we actually changed the process just a couple of weeks ago and for larger features it’s mandatory that we put it on the beta-server first. So if there is a new feature coming that has new mechanics in there, we will always put it on beta first, test it there before, never say always, we try to put it always on beta first and then put it live. If we encounter issues or we think that it might occur on a larger scale, that we cannot test on our internal test servers, we will put it on beta first as well. But we won’t do it for every single little feature. Because it takes a lot of effort to put it there and test it there and we don’t just put it there to be there, but we need to evaluate that to take the input, do something with that and that takes a lot of time which we don’t have always. [36:37/1:05:32]
Daniel: And that kind of leads into, so talking about the test server, that's part of our new production process which we were discussing recently. Do you wanna just tell them a little bit about what some of the new things that in there, some of the changes we are making internally? [36:51/1:05:32]
Dennis: Yeah, I don’t know if that’s interesting, but I can tell. One thing we didn’t do in the past, that started doing as we do a balancing concept. You will think it should been always there but our balancers always did it on the fly, but we actually do a concept of that, we are testing the concept and then it comes back we redo it and then implement it. Because a lot of bugs that happen in this year were balancing related, so we are trying to put more focus on that. The next thing is we will do for features after the developers have done a team testing, play this whole thing around, give the feedback back to the developers, take another round from there, and then we put it on the test server to let you test it. Then it comes back again and we adjust it and then we wanna put it online. [37:49/1:05:32]
Daniel: Okay so we got another question from Twitch, this one is about events, so “Why are big events like Oktoberfest or the WWC … “ [37:57/1:05:32]
Dennis: LOL I am already at the next question there …so can we skip that first “What is a space unicorn?” [38:02/1:05:32]
Daniel: What is a space unicorn, okay
this is a YouTube channel that I
used to work for and this is my lucky filming hat so I am wearing it
today so we'll have good luck. So yeah, we'll go back to the last
question, “ …..events like Oktoberfest or WWC, they're asking,
“Why they're so difficult, why aren’t they designed so that
normal players, of an average level, of an average kind of play time,
can’t get right to the end can’t get every single reward?”
[38:31/1:05:32]
Dennis: Okay we have a lot of different players, we have 100 thousands of players worldwide and everybody has a different pace. Some people like to play Big Farm for hours a day, some people just play a little bit in the morning and a little bit in the evening, and we wanna make all the events interesting for all of the players. Therefore we need to put in activity rewards for even for really high scores, because those players need to have goals and next incentives as well. Don’t try to get all the activity rewards, the top activity rewards are normally for players that don’t sleep, probably spend some money as well to actually get those rewards, but if we cut them the activity rewards earlier, you don’t get more, but those people don’t have any challenges anymore. That’s why it’s really tough to get the top rewards. I think that’s kind of it. [39:35/1:05:32]
Daniel: That kind of covers it yeah … Okay, have you got any other kind of particular topics you wanna talk about, stuff that's coming up, are there any other pictures? We've already talked about the volcano farm and the new themed events, do you wanna talk a little about the Goldfish rescue or shall we leave that for patch notes? [39:58/1:05:32]
Dennis: No I can talk about the Goldfish rescue, but I just, we were at the road map earlier on when we stopped. So what will happen in January, we said we have the 2 new themed events, afterwards there will be again the Chinese new year and next year is probably interesting for a lot of you guys, because I've seen that you like the dogs, so next year is the year of the dog, that will be a really nice decorations there, and valentine’s day will be really kitschy again [Daniel: lol Beautiful!] Yeah beautiful, that’s what I mean and afterwards so St. Patrick's day will come again, so we are all set that we will have like every month at least one thing that’s kind of special, some are like two things in the month very special that don’t occur every month. Well then the volcano farm and then it gets a bit blurry so we have a plan, we have a vision there, but that could change depending on what is the situation in the game. If you guys feel like this is needed or we see there is a problem it changes. But at the moment we have the plan to have a better guidance in the game, a better quest system in the game, so the start of the game, the tutorial and the quests are still based on the game how it was like 5 years ago. So we wanna change that to the current Big Farm world that all the new players and your new cooperative mates will have a really good introduction to the game and know what is all about. The next thing is we wanna put in some convenient features, because some people like I said, you shouldn’t, but some people really wanna play everything, so there will come some features into the game that help you actually play the farms faster, so you can concentrate on the events. Something like click a button and you harvest everything, something like that, things like that will happen and at the end of next year, we wanna try to create some platforms in the game were you can actually provide .. how you call it … game contents for other players. Like we plan to do more with the horse paddock, were actually every player can build up their own stadium and hold races, championships for other players, so we wanna try to get you guys more close together and help each other..... Well, talking about bugs now, our screen just went dead, I hope you guys can still see me (holds up a microphone) this is our microphone we are using right now, and actually we have like a couple of thousand Euros worth of microphones standing there not working, so... [42:50/1:05:32]
Daniel: We had a really fun time trying to set everything up and working [42:53/1:05:32]
Dennis: Yeah well that’s the plan for next year and then I will step back to talk about what's coming next week. So we will have the Goldfish rescue and I have like a little slide-show to show you what’s going to happen. [43:12/1:05:32]
Daniel: Have we got the BigFarm music in the background right now? lol This is perfect. [43:17/1:05:32]
[Dennis holds up pictures]
Dennis: So here you see the new ISO, that's the new ISO building for the Goldfish rescue, that open ups this UI and its kind of, she's collecting Goldfish. How does she collect Goldfish? There will be drops on the farm that drop this little fleas here, and yes the fireworks booster, boosts the fleas as well, then you get them into the inventory (well let me go back) then you actually create a bait. This bait you have to equipped and then use it, in the deep-sea fishing, no in the fishing mini-game, if you do that, little Goldfish will appear and you will actually catch Goldfish. Those Goldfish will appear in the Goldfish glass on the event, now what you have to do is, you have to produce in the mill, food for the Goldfish. After you produce food for the Goldfish, well you can see …. Well let me go 1 step back... Here you can see, you are not generating any points, because the fish are starving. Afterwards when you produce food for the gold fish you will actually generate points. Then you can see down here the more Goldfish you have and the more points you generate, the more points you generate the more happiness and village happiness you generate and you can get another village happiness for the decoration from the effort from your cooperative. So that’s kind of a thing, it's a single player part, it’s a multi-player part, and you get the Goldfish either by fishing them yourself in the mini game or you send out Oleg to get them. It’s like kind of for freeish, when you do it in the mini-game, or you can pay farm dollar or gold to send Oleg away. That’s just the first part out of it. This Goldfish rescue will run every month and between the Goldfish rescue event, there will be a pond at the coop farm were everybody from your cooperative will like empty their glass of Goldfishes that will be put in there and this pond will generate village happiness for your whole cooperative. But the Goldfish need food, otherwise they will starve and you will lose the Goldfish and you will lose the happiness. Therefore the more Goldfish the cooperative rescues the more they have to take care of it. But the more they take care of it, the more village happiness they will generate. [46:33/1:05:32]
Daniel: Yeah, so some of you were actually really keen-eyed and noticed that one of the ponds on the village had disappeared, like we got I think, 2 or 3 comments about that. This is the reason why, so if you were wondering that’s where the new Goldfish pond is gonna be in the village. So congrats if you figured that out, well done if you noticed and yeah, so, we have another question from Twitch, oh there was one that was there and it's missing. Ahh okay we'll move on to the next one, so the village points, “What are the village points all about?”, the village happiness points. [47:13/1:05:32]
Dennis: What are the village happiness points all about? [47:17/1:05:32]
Daniel: Yeah, yeah, I mean like one of the pieces of feedback that we've been getting is that players want more of them in various aspects of the game recently, I think we've kind of done some of that, in some of the events, we've thrown extra village happiness in there, but uhm … [47:31/1:05:32]
Dennis: Okay, what is the village happiness for? The village happiness is for the coop village and there you reduce costs, for gold and for other aspects in the cooperative, you have to upgrade with gold or some other products and the requirements are lower and lower the more village happiness you have. We will probably use the village happiness for other stuff as well in the future, like right now the Alliance (Coop) League is.... (how can I say that without term like.... is crappy okay?) [Daniel: Yeah yeah that's...] …..Yeah, its kind of crappy at the moment and we will do, we already have a rework for that, but we are not coming to that this year. But in the rework the village happiness will play a major role as well. [48:22/1:05:32]
Daniel: Okay great, awesome. Okay we have another question from Twitch, So “Why is the Fishing Hard Work Event based on fishing XP, when the dockyard upgrade and boats and stuff like that is based on normal XP?” So why do we have these, kind of, 2 separate values? [48:41/1:05:32]
Dennis: The reason why we have fishing XP and normal XP is so the people won’t do the, kind of the wrong thing in the beginning, so if we had only Fishing XP for everything building up, the people could like start Big Farm and go right way into the fishing part and just do everything from the fishing and they might miss out a lot of fun from other parts of it, just concentrate of fishing. Therefore we had the normal XP Level for the fishing as well and then to go further from that go from the fishing XP so kind of enjoy the fishing more they can progress there even further without progressing somewhere else. [49:31/1:05:32]
Daniel: Okay cool. We touched it or we we're about to touch on it slightly in the beginning, but I think its worth just quickly talking about the outage from yesterday. Just if we could kind of explain what happened, what it was all about, why it happened, because it wasn’t just us that was affected in BigFarm. [49:49/1:05:32]
Dennis: Right, there was a problem with our DNS and actually all our games went offline. So we needed to move to a new DNS and that took a little bit of a while and that’s why everything was down. It’s like as simple as that and as horrible as it was. [50:10/1:05:32]
Daniel: Yeah, it was completely unexpected and very very sudden for all of us, so we just kind of had a little panic mode yesterday, but... [50:18/1:05:32]
Dennis: The connection there is, at the moment all of our events that have cooperative ranking in there, always crash when we have a downtime with our servers and we cannot find the bug. This was created from our previous server developers and new server developers cannot find it and since it's only happening on live and not on our test servers we cannot figure that out, that’s why we have really limited time slots for hot fixes and for updates and like yesterday something happened again, the crates were resetted and the ranking is not showing any more, but from what I got to know from our server developers the ranking is still intact, but it’s just shown wrong. So all the rewards at the end should be distributed right, but not the way you see it right now, but how you earned it actually. [51:16/1:05:32]
Daniel: Okay, another question we've been getting a lot lately is about Lester, there used to be a little quest for Lester, where he could show up to your farm and offer if you completed so many contracts and then spent so much gold, you would get some rewards back. Players haven’t seen him for a little while. Can you say something about that? [51:35/1:05:32]
Dennis: Yeah, of course, I deactivated it 2 months ago, there was a huge error in there, that caused a lot of trouble, ended for the people earlier, so they didn’t get anything, some people didn’t get anything even they finished it and I thought it’s not really worth fixing it right now because we have other things that are more important than having this gold related offer fixed. [52:00/1:05:32]
Daniel: Okay, awesome. Do we have any more Twitch questions there? Okay so this is again related to the contracts on the fish market. So the question is: “Why does the fish market always ask for a lot of Oyster, Shrimp and Clam?” Is there any kind of specific reason for that? Or? [52:18/1:05:32]
Dennis: Yeah, it's really our, the people that are actually buying at the fish market are real gourmets and that's why... [52:30/1:05:32]
Daniel: So they just really enjoy shellfish? [52.33/1:05:32]
Dennis: Yeah! - No, the balancing is a little bit off, but at the moment I don’t wanna fix it, well, I would like to fix it, but I put my resources on different things right now, because you guys are already generating a lot of cash through the fish market, so it’s not really worth fixing it right now even so it’s annoying and sometimes you have to wait really long to fulfil a contract because always asking for the same thing and when you actually fish it’s something that you fish the least. But since we allow you to sell the fish any more so the extra products you don’t need you can sell anyhow and just the little products for the fish market the Oyster, the Shrimp and the Clam, that will be fixed but not be fixed this year. [53:22/1:05:32]
Daniel: Okay, so yeah, since we are on fishing... [53:26/1:05:32]
Dennis: Actually it is called Big Farm [53:30/1:05:32]
Daniel: But since we're on deep-sea fishing, there's actually something I wanted to mention about this, there's a little kind of shortcut that a lot of people don't know about, which is when you're equipping your boat … [53:40/1:05:32]
Dennis: Wait, wait, wait, what? [53:41/1:05:32]
Daniel: yeah yeah yeah
[53:42/1:05:32]
Dennis: You're going to tell a shortcut? [53:43/1:05:32]
Daniel: yeah right
[53:42/1:05:32]
Dennis: Alright! [53:44/1:05:32]
Daniel: It's if you hold the shift key while you are equipping your boat, you don’t need constantly to click and drag equipment into the boat. [53:51/1:05:32]
Dennis: Ahh ok [53:51/1:05:32]
Daniel: It’s just something the developers put in there to save themselves a bit of time. But a lot of people don’t know about this and it’s actually really handy, so you should try it next time you're deep-sea fishing. But this kind of brings us on to the next question about kind of saving time. People asking if there is a possibility to add pre-sets for equipping boats. So that you can already have, you know, rather than having to every time set it up, you could have a pre-set available and then just send that boat out. [54:17/1:05:32]
Dennis: That’s a good idea, I will have to ask the developers how much time that needs, if it’s not that much than this is something we could do in January. But beginning of next year, let's call it beginning of next year. Until Christmas we cannot actually put any of your wishes in there right now because we are totally packed. [54:40/1:05:32]
Daniel: Yeah I mean it's up to kind of April really, isn’t it? That we've got a whole lot of things... [54:44/1:05:32]
Dennis: Nah, not, well, there is little room for little stuff in the beginning of next year, but only stuff that just can be done in a couple of days but nothing with new mechanics and well this is a new mechanic, but it could be really easy to do. I have some thoughts about it, but I have to talk about that with the developers, I cannot promise something, but I will definitely put that on my list. [55:09/1:05:32]
Daniel: Awesome that’s great. Do we have any more Twitch questions coming through or? …. Is there anything else you wanna cover particularly? Is there anything you feel like you haven’t … [55:26/1:05:32]
Dennis: No I think we touched kind of everything. [55:30/1:05:32]
Daniel: Fairly thorough with it I think. [55:33/1:05:32]
[Dennis and Daniel admire their shoes]
Daniel: Okay, yeah, I think then that's pretty much it , unless you've got... [55:45/1:05:32]
Dennis: Really? Well, did you filter too much? I don’t know, it's like, is there almost nobody there or maybe it's just talking to one person. But, I am not so much talking to the Moderators, but I sometimes do and the Community Managers are telling me stuff and from what I got to know that the mood is not the best right now. I hoped I shed some light into the reasons why we cannot act as good and fast as you want us to be and I hope you understood that I really sincerely apologize for all the bugs and problems we caused, we are not doing this on purpose, really try to help you. And there were no questions about, pretty good questions, I was thinking of more, I am not asking myself now the questions… [56:46/1:05:32]
Daniel: Do you wanna ask yourself some questions?
[56:47/1:05:32]
Dennis: No! Maybe I should touch some of them. The thing is about lot of times people are saying in the forums well you just wanna milk us, you wanna shut down the game, you just wanna get much money out of us and this is absolutely not true. But since nobody asked that now, I still feel I should touch that topic. We always have some mechanics in our new features where you can spend gold on it and of course we do, it’s like, it’s our business model, we are providing the game for free and earning money with the people that wanna shortcut or wanna have something really convenient and therefore pay for it. But you should be able to play and have fun with all our features without paying. But you never will be able to reach the top activity rewards unless you don’t sleep and things like that. Don’t try to reach that. This is for the people that wanna spend some money and wanna help us with our development and for those players we have those rewards in there as well. Next thing is, we have a lot of plans for next year, and we actually have visions for the next 5 years already for Big Farm, so it’s definitely not planned to shut down Big Farm. We love the game, we love you guys and we wanna continue with that. I had that on my chest, I needed to.... [58:30/1:05:32]
Daniel: That's okay, because that kind of came up recently, especially with the release of big Farm Mobile Harvest, there were some people who thought that maybe that meant Big Farm was gonna stop, but that's not the case at all... [58:41/1:05:32]
Dennis: Ohh, you should have said as well. They are two different teams for Harvest Mobile and Big Farm Web. We worked together in the beginning, they are using our art assets, they use our general mechanic of the game, but they are developing in a different direction. Just mainly because everything on Big Farm cannot be put on mobile. One thing is like it’s too hardware pressure, there's too much hardware pressure there, and people play on their mobile differently. There are shorter session times, there are different mechanics. There is some things I actually like on Harvest Mobile better than on web, but you don’t have the complexity and all the variety and all the events that you have on web right now. There are some things I really enjoy, one thing is, there is one button there were all the offers are and not like the thousand pop ups. When I don’t log in for a day I have about 1000 pop ups in Big Farm, this is terrible and we know it’s terrible we don’t change something right now there but there will come change that you don’t have so much pop ups, so much offers there all the time because we want you guys to be able to log off an on and not click through 1000 things again. There was, didn’t we have like there a question like dangerous question or something? [59:55/1:05:32]
Daniel: Yeah, up slightly, the question was…. [59:56/1:05:32]
Dennis: Let me read it first before like… [1:00:00/1:05:32]
Daniel: Okay [1:00:01/1:05:32]
Dennis: Oh, yeah, okay... [1:00:02/1:05:32]
Daniel: Do you wanna talk about that? [1:00:03/1:05:32]
Dennis: Okay so why don’t we have a confirmation button for buy gold. [1:00:07/1:05:32]
Daniel: So in Big Farm Mobile Harvest, some of you might've noticed that there's a little setting in the menu were you can decide, you know, if you spend more than say 50 gold it will come up with a screen that says: “Are you sure?“ and then you confirm it. So yeah… [1:00:21/1:05:32]
Dennis: It is a little bit different for web and for mobile. On web (Mobile) it is lot easier to accidentally click on, press on something, buy something and that we don’t have on web. It’s kind of …. Yeah … In sales you normally don’t ask a second time the person do you really wanna spend money? So, I know it would be convenient and that’s why we put a delay on there on the buy thing. I was thinking about something that we put maybe a confirmation button for larger spendings, but not for the convenience spendings especially when you, I don’t know, Wildflowers skip, Wildflowers skip, Wildflowers skip, every time there was a second question, do you really wanna skip, do you really wanna spend it, than it is just senseless. So maybe we put something in there with a limit, I don’t know, when you spend more than 100 gold or something like that. We have to think about it, we might do it when we do the convenient features in the middle of next year. [1:01:30/1:05:32]
Daniel: Okay, so one more question. The broken cat trees, I think we already covered this … [1:01:37/1:05:32]
Dennis: Yeah, maybe that person came a little bit later, I am happy to say that again. We will have a fix on Monday and everything will be bright and shiny. [1:01:45/1:05:32]
Daniel: Awesome! Yeah and we've also got the cat charm madness which is coming up, so you'll be able to collect all the cat charms and really boost up the amount that you're able to get, in very very short amount of time so. So, let's do one more then: “Is there any ETA from when Big Farm will move from flash to HTML?“ [1:02:05/1:05:32]
Dennis: Well, that's kind of one of the reasons why the 4th farm didn’t come yet, because at the same time we wanted to start with the 4th farm, the volcano farm, all the big browsers now said they wanna stop supporting flash. So we cut our team in half and we have a large team working on Big Farm and Empire our other game, to convert it to HTML5. And we are on a really good track, we already have a playable version there, but the performance is not as good yet, but we are working on it and it is probably coming around spring next year. So we do a lot of testing and only when everything works perfectly we will switch to HTML5. Then you can actually play Big Farm on your tablet or phone as well. [1:02:56/1:05:32]
Daniel: Alright, awesome. So yeah, we will call it a wrap today and thank you so much Dennis for joining us, for answering all the questions and talking about the game. Thank you guys very much for joining us, its been really really fun, I really hope we can do more of these. [1:03:12/1:05:32]
Dennis: Ah, there's one more thing, I am not sure if we are doing this regularly, we might, but you can always reach us and you can reach us by asking questions in the forum, go directly to your Moderators, say this is something like it’s burning & I really need to do something, the Moderators are in direct contact always to our CM´s and sometimes I get the time to read it as well. We are reading your comments in the forum, we are trying to put the things into our roadmap, we are trying to include your wishes into everything, and if you have questions, please do that over the forums, over the Moderators, we are always trying to help. [1:03:55/1:05:32]
Daniel: Yeah. Please do like Dennis said, they are always in contact with us the community management, so anytime you pass some feedback, it does come directly to us. So please, write your comments, make your suggestions, we can’t put everything in, but we always try to put things in when it makes sense to do it and when we have the time and resources to be able to do it. Okay, so again, thank you very much guys for joining us, I wanna say a big thank you to my colleagues who helped set all this up, also a big thank you to the Moderator team not just for the job they do generally, that they also been helping in the chat tonight as well and yeah hopefully we can do another one of these soon, we'll kind of let you more details about that , we've got some patch notes coming up for the next update that's coming out, so keep an eye out for those and yeah, that’s it, thank you very much guys! [1:04:47/1:05:32]
Dennis: Yeah, I wanna say thank you as well, especially for you guys that you actually took the time for listening to us brabbling around for an hour and that the game is that important to you, that you wanna listen to us and trying to hear what we wanna say, as so we are trying to hear what you are saying. Thank you and have a good night. [1:05:08/1:05:32]
Daniel: Thank you Bye ! [1:05:10/1:05:32]