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Teaser - Upcoming Highlights 2018/2019
Welcome one and all!
With this post we would like to give you a preview of what is coming up for the rest of the year in Big Farm, along with some previews of some plans for a little further down the line. So let’s see what’s in store for 2018 (and potentially 2019)!
Upcoming Changes for 2018
Subscription Packages
We will introduce subscriptions to the game, allowing you to choose a recurring content pack that will be delivered to your account every month. This will start with two packs, a player pack and co-op pack. The player pack helps you manage your farm, with such features as unlimited use of the repeat harvester while the subscription is active and focusing on making your daily farm more convenient. The co-op pack provides benefits for your whole co-op, and they get better when more members are subscribed! You can reduce the penalty on your fields from edge plants, reduced costs of constructions tokens and more! These will later be expanded with more packs, more content and more variety. Check out the full contents of the packs in-game this year!
Village Fair
Some more features will be coming to the Village Fair! Dynamic promotion and relegation between leagues should heat up the competition and even out the scoreboards a little. Internal co-op scores and rewards for the most helpful players in the co-op are also coming so that the most helpful players in the co-op can get a little reward for their efforts.
Combined Trader
Benny works hard selling all of the games items and trading for the various in-game currencies. Wouldn’t it be easier if he was were always just in one place? We agree! And so we will create a permanent trader where you can use any game currency at any time to get the things you want. This new permanent home for all the traders will appear in December, and this also leads us onto news about...
Trick or Treat Rework
Treats will be returning in December along with the new combined trader. You will be able to use your Karma Points to purchase the Treats from our new trader. Tricks will not make a return in the trader (though are still currently available in places), but we want you to continue treating your friends and spreading the love! Treats will eventually be available for gold but you will have plenty of time to spend your remaining Karma points before then.
Santa’s Wheel (Karma Points)
In addition to Karma points and treats being added to our trader we will ensure that your Karma points can also be used in the Santa’s Wheel event in December and traded for some nice decoration rewards!
Christmas 2018
Feedback from the last couple years at Christmas time has shown us that our previous Christmas event was not optimal. We want to give you a good feeling in the Christmas period and the Santa’s Wishlist event has not done the best job of this in the past. As a result we have decided not to run this event this year or again in future. Instead we will run the other usual Christmas events (the Advent Calendar and Santa’s Wheel) with some updated rewards.
Further Ideas for 2018 and Beyond
While the above topics are already planned in for this year, we also have some further topics we want to address down the line. Here is a preview of the things that are next up on the list of things to add!
Acrobatic Kite Changes
The Acrobatic Kite was a great item that was much sought after by players due to the boost it gave in the CC event. When this item was added it was well-received but later it was clear the effect it had on the CC was one that unbalanced the economy of the event and provided a small number of players with a strong advantage. We want to give this item back to you guys but in a much less damaging and much more fair way! We will therefore rework the item and release a new version of it, introducing a limit to the boost you can have on a kite, making it upgradeable, so that you can improve your boost and making it available for all again!
Deco Park
Decorations are an important and core part of the game, so we would like to provide you with an area where you can show off your decorations! The new area will be a space in which you can show off your favourite decorations.
Layout Mode
Some of you may remember that last year we released a mode that helped you organise your buildings and decorations with a handy grid and storage tools. We will re-introduce the layout mode by totally rebuilding the base code from scratch to bring back the old look and functionality of the feature and make your journey to the most efficient (and pretty) farm even more achievable ! Nothing will change and the feature will work exactly as before, just better!
Sneak Preview for 2019
And finally, a sneak peek at the topics we are considering and working towards for Big Farm 2019.
Convenience Features (Production Management)
We will add more convenience features to make your daily farm more enjoyable and easier, allowing you to focus on the events and features that mean the most to you. One example of this is a ‘production manager’, a more in-depth way to manage your farm and what is produced on it.
New Events… (Oktoberfest)
Oktoberfest is a fantastic time of the year, and an enjoyable event in Big Farm! We had fun building this event and would like to use it more often. We will adapt the event slightly so that it can be run more times throughout the year, potentially with a reskin to make it more suitable for other seasons.
Greta Upgrades
Greta the Landscape Designer was created at a time when the Village didn’t exist and Village Happiness was but a glint in the eye of our designers. She will get some upgrades and learn how to handle Village Happiness a lot better, as well with some general improvements to the system.
Volcano Farm (rethinking concept)
We have seen you asking about this topic a lot and now we would like to finally take the chance to give you an update on the fourth main farm. In the planning process we noticed that things can’t be realised quite as we intended and a rethink of the concept is required. This might take some time to put into action as we have to rethink exactly how the farm will work and tie-in with other existing features and events. As that’s the case we can’t give a specific date but we will discuss the scope of the new farm and what we intend to bring along with it when it does eventually go live.
Deepsea Rework (maybe next year)
As mentioned in previous statements, we intend to rework the deepsea area to create an enjoyable and fun play experience for everyone. After changing it we noticed that some of you are not very happy with how it’s mechanics work and are hoping for changes, which we will perform in the course of 2019. Amongst other things, these will include:
A new way to display your fleet of boats and put them to more use
More reliance on skill than the random events of the current system (all fish available at all times)
More fishing spots, more boats available to use and therefore an even bigger catch!
Cat Tree Rework
Cats are awesome! You know, we know it, the internet has known it for many years now. We introduced the Cat Tree because we wanted to bring some of this awesome to your farms. Unfortunately the reception was not great for this feature and so far it has fallen a little flat of your expectations. We know that too, and we would like to make some changes by revamping and upgrading the Cat Tree, including lowering the entry bar to make it a bit easier to unlock your feline companion and increasing the amount of tricks it can purr-form and to make sure you are feline good.
Temporary Farm Changes
The temporary farms were designed originally as a bit of a playground for new features, mechanics and experiences for players, but primarily as a different way to farm and an entertaining break from your usual daily farm. Over the last few years we have added variations of the temporary farms which you guys have enjoyed, but we feel it’s time to get back to what they were designed for and start taking on your suggestions for what you want to change about them. We will be looking at feedback you have given us on the Candy, Winter and Tropical farms to try and improve them, introduce some new & fun pastimes for you to enjoy and to give you more fun things to do outside of your existing and well-maintained main farms.
So that’s our aims for 2018 and a little into 2019 as well! - What’s your most anticipated change or addition? What are you looking forward to? - You can let us know below.
Your BF Team!
EDIT: Gold Lock - Several of you have asked what happened to the Gold Lock, so here is what we have been told:
"Creating the gold lock in Flash and HTML5 actually creates a double task for us, so rather than build it now for both versions we will work on that feature when we fully switch off the Flash version. It wouldn't make much sense to have to build it twice and spend double efforts on it but we are already preparing the beginnings of the the feature to be ready shortly after HTML5 goes 100% live."
Comments
So, does this mean that eventually sparkles will be available only with gold, and that karma points will eventually disappear?
@CM_Hunter - could you please comment on this topic directly. Specifically, is it true that this feature will be implemented at some time. Can you put some level of definition to 'coming soon'.
I am so very excited to see the Layout mode listed there in yellow paint, looking forward to seperating my stables.
The deco pack is very excitting too, I have some decos I hold onto because I love them but not worth the space on a farm so that is something worth looking forward to.
The only thing I'm not happy with is the removal of the karma sparks. Please do not take this feature away from us. Not everyone can aford to spend a lot of real money on this game. It will put even more stress on players that want to help their teammates but can't because they don't have the gold to buy the sparks.
As the "free to play" features are being taken away and replaced with gold only options, and as the game continues its steady march to a "pay to play" commodity, surely they can see the value of putting a gold lock/confirm button into place.
The other main problem is shellfish (oysters, clams, shrimp). There are simply never enough of them. All of my time in the market, is spent waiting on shellfish.....often for days. I know that working on the market order structure is hard, but there is simple work-around that would relieve a huge portion of this bottleneck. Simply increase the number of fish at the Shrimp, Oyster, Clam pools. Just triple the number of fish at those locations. It would still be way less than most lobster and tuna pools. You still easily get them out with under 4 boats. And this would largely relieve the largest bottleneck in the market currently. Coding-wise, this is a simple task......Can we simply get this?
P.S. Honestly, you should probably quadruple the shellfish, but tripling them would vastly improve the market's overall usefulness.
Having said that, SQ's suggestion that those who want to can turn it off makes good sense. Not sure how doable that is in terms of coding, though.
The rest I either dislike or could care less about.
subscriptions = yet another way to get players to spend (its a gold purchase by another name imho)
That's correct for the time being, we have a lot of topics to cover over the next few months as you can see but this one wasn't put on the list because I don't have a solid confirmation of it just at the moment. I will again forward the feedback as many posts so far have been asking the same. For now I would assume the above is correct but I'll talk to the team and see if I can get more details about this feature.
This is exactly the issue we hope to solve. In the new system fish availability should be MUCH less of an issue. The new system should also come with a rebalance of the contracts so we can certainly take that on board when the time comes.
I can ask about the possibility, not sure if this is technically feasible but I'll see what the team says.
There are 2 packages, a package for co-ops and a package just for the player account. You can buy one or both if you like but the co-op pack is more useful and valuable when multiple people in the co-op purchase it because the bonuses affect the whole co-op and the more people who have it, the better the bonuses will be. That system isn't possible to implement unless you're in a co-op already but it's also possible we will add more packages later if it's felt necessary.
Not precisely, the packs are higher value than they are sold for. The point of them is to give you a discount on things you would need regularly, so it's not like purchasing gold in that sense. Also remember it's totally optional, if you aren't interested in them you can feel free to skip them
Thanks for all the feedback guys! Keep it coming in!
Thanks for getting back to us, Hunter.
Please ask old Scrooge to reconsider the sparkles for gold issue. The gifts may seem trivial to him, but they go a very long way in building goodwill and camaraderie within the game. Getting rid of the karma points will make the gifts inaccessible to many, for all intents and purposes. The game has been losing a great deal of joy already, and the gifts help alleviate that. (We recently lost a valuable coop member -- a gold buyer -- who left the game because it was no longer fun.)
We all understand the need for gold sales, but remember, a good percentage of happy players will be more inclined to buy gold. When a game becomes less and less enjoyable, even the hard core gold buyers will buy less and less.