Farmvillain

What makes you click nearly 1,500 consecutive times on your mouse? What makes you wake early in the morning? What makes you sit in the computer for long? As for me, the answer is the freakin’ Farmville.

Sort of a shocker to me, Farmville is the biggest game on Facebook. It has over 20 million daily active users, people who share the same sentiments with me, 9 million fans on its fan page and 70 million monthly users. I never expected that such a stupid game like this can get a third of the Facebook population hooked up?!

Farmville was introduced to me by no one. I just saw it being posted by some of my random Restaurant City friends. Then, as weeks pass, my real life friends started playing it and started to post level-ups, lost animals, item purchases and crop masteries. At first, it was irritating to see all those alien-eyed characters clog my news feed. The Farmville logo does not bite me, and it is not as catchy as the logo of Restaurant City and Pet Society. I am a Playfish loyalist, and Zynga is not my type.

At the classroom, buzzes will start flying around of seeds, plowing, animals and other farming stuff that I thought was for our Home Economics subject. It was kinda weird to here farming when our topic was food management. Soon, the word Farmville became the talk of the town, and I became an outcast, not knowing a single bit, except for the lame logo and the bulgy eyes, about Farmville.

Going back in front of the desktop, my news feed is being jammed again by the following words: “**Facebook user** has given up city living and started his own farm…” That was Farmville’s way of welcoming new obsessed and ill-fated farmers.

Another day at the classroom and the frenzy for that farming simulation game is getting wilder. My classmates are screaming the words “pagift” several times. They say they want lemon trees, cherry trees, horses, and not the whitewash fences and the topiaries. “What the heck were those?” I just thought to myself.

Farmville’s first impression to me was an overly childish game with very poor graphics quality. I think the gameplay is as sour yet addicting as Tetris, and good for a human whose brain capacity can be compared to a floppy disk. They say the music is cool, with the sounds of the farm animals circulating your home. I hate moo’s and oink’s, and who would be crazy to play those sounds at home. I’d rather play a recording of the Holy Week’s pasyon on our computer all day long than turn the toggle on for the Farmville music to play even for just a minute.

But since everyone is hooked, I tried.

The loading is screen is awfully unattractive. I am missing the wavy loading action of Playfish games. The first games that I played on Facebook were Playfish games. I got hooked to Who Has the Biggest Brain, Word Challenge and Geo Challenge back during the summer break, and later, I tried my food management skills in Restaurant City. I also have my Pet Society, but that did not fascinated me so much. I felt bored seeing my pet walking around like a silly voodoo doll.

“Farmville Beta…” it says. I could have read those words a million times before the loading bar gets filled.

Finally, it opened and it prompted me to choose my gender. After it, I saw my character standing in front of 4 to 8 plots, some of the plots were fallow land, some were plowed, some with plants ready to harvest and some with plants still growing. The tutorial was fast and cheesy; not a drop of sweat was used.

I harvested, I plowed and I planted, and the first crop I planted was the first seed on the list – strawberry. I never thought that Farmville was such a boring game, that you have to wait for hours just to harvest a crop. Unlike in Restaurant City wherein when you are logged in, you are already earning money. In Farmville, it is different. Plant today and earn tomorrow.

Days passed and my enthusiasm for Farmville grew. I was the fastest leveling person in the classroom at that time. I jumped 13 levels on my first three days as a farmer on Farmville, and they are all shocked by my progress. Now, I am in my quest to be the top 1 on Farmville.

I give gifts and gifts, so that I can receive gifts as well. I added neighbors, lots of them, so that I can have many people to help, and that gives me XP. I plant strawberries or blueberries, these are four hour crops, and by my calculation, they give the most XPs out of any other crops.

Earning money is fun. Unlike in PS and RC, money is so rare. Here in Farmville, one harvesting session can earn you a hundred thousand coins, and that allows a farmer to buy amazing and cool stuffs. The only thing expensive in Farmville (except for those items in Farmville cash) are the buildings, but the rest, the decorations and the animals, are all centavos in price.

With that, zoom zoom, I got passed my classmates and is now on the top spot. Haha. I am now the King of the Plow! Haha! Farmville XPs and levels had become a competition in our classroom.

But Farmville has given me more burden than joy. Farmville has caused me more failure than success. No one can ever get success with those virtual coins anyways.

Farmville is the ultimate schedule wrecker. Nothing can make me click almost 1,500 times a day, and during my blueberry planting heydays, 4,000 clicks a day, than Farmville. Clicking, and waiting for those processes to be done takes time, and the time being taken is a time that is supposed to be for sleep or doing projects. It takes me 30 minutes to farm my 24x24 farm today, and because I am so rushed always, I do not harvest my trees and animals anymore.

Harvesting trees and animals is a burden more than a profit. Imagine clicking two times for a hundred coins?! These are one of the many complains I have in Farmville, why can’t they have a “Select All Ready Animals” so they can be all harvested at once. I’m quite glad at their approach at chicken coops and dairy farms, but those efforts are not enough.

Another that puts me at wit’s end is the synchronization issues. Once you have clicked the 400 plots and the processes starts to running, a message will appear in front of you, “Code a4, out of sync with the server, refresh the page.” Yes, I know you share the same complaints with me if you are a Farmville player, and these messages makes me wanna bang our monitor into pieces. I want to suck the liquid out of this liquid crystal display that they are telling me, and I wanna tell the management of Farmville that they need a new set of programmers now!

Another message that sounds familiar to the 70 million monthly users is “Farmville has enhanced, refresh the page to continue.” That message makes me wish that Farmville should have always stayed the same and never enhanced, for after the million clicks that I have made they will just put it to waste?! They are downright merciless! I hate it! Seeing the dialog box is a sign that my efforts are wasted, for there is no other button than that green “Refresh”. Clicking it is never refreshing, in fact, it raises the temperature inside my head. A question in my mind: Why is it that when I refresh, I see no enhancements?

Then, there is an aid for all those clicks. They introduced to everyone their seeder, harvester and *I forgot how they call the one that plows*. One click lets you do a certain task to four plots, making your work four times faster. But merciless Farmville won’t give convenience that easy to its players, they have incorporated fuel refills to their system.

One fuel refill lets you harvest a third of your farm, and once you have your refill unfilled, you have to wait two hours for the fuel to be full again, or buy a fuel refill worth some hefty Farmville cash. Buying a fuel refill is a waste of money, and waiting for it to be full again is a waste of time. So, in other words, you still have to click the remainder of the plots, not to mention clicking the whole field two times again for the plowing and planting.

My classmates are now using AutoClickers, their cheating devices that they say are just for convenience. And I, I use my hands, just bare hands.

Going to my Facebook home page, I can see that I have requests stucked and unapproved. I have 80+ Farmville gift requests and it sometimes zooms up to 100, the maximum number of pending requests one can have. It is tiring to approve all the gifts. It takes two clicks, and between those clicks is the boring loading time for the page, for you to approve a single gift. Do it a hundred times and I’ll be as old as the Earth itself when I finish.

Withered. I hate it when my crops go withered. It is the ultimate bankruptcy a farmer can have on his farm. It is like putting Ondoy on the screen to flood the farm, followed by the intensifying global warming to dry the leaves up. It will be a total disaster since you have your money going to waste. Just imagine nearly 500 plots, each with seeds nearly 200 coins in price, giving you a deficit of 15 coins because of plowing? That’s pain in the pocket. That’s why, Farmers will even disrupt their biological clocks, their class schedule, their eating and sleeping time, and even their brothers’ and sisters’ happiness just to harvest those delicate crops.

Farmville is more boring than it should be fun, and the only reason I got into it was because of my classmate’s pressure, and that is also the same reason on why I am continuing farming. Call me a Farmvillain?! Call me. haha. I’d rather go cooking at Café World or Restaurant City rather than waiting for my peas to grow and be harvested.

Oh wait, it’s time to harvest my crops. ‘Til then. Bye :D