Whoops. I meant to come up with something before September ended but forgot. The silly thing is that I always have a lot to write about! However, they always end up as snippets on Twitter.
I probably mentioned it before, but one of the biggest deterrents in writing a blog post is that I feel the need to think up a theme or two and then write a few paragraphs based on that/those. Composing a blog post takes up a good part of the day too.
With Twitter, on the other hand, I can just toss up anything at the spur of the moment without worry that it has to be some sort of short prose. I like that sort of freedom.
Anyway, let’s talk about the pesky event lucky bag draw from Com2uS’ free-to-play mobile game, Tiny Farm, and how using it can get expensive.
In 2013, Com2uS, the game’s developer, introduced the Heroic Animals. They’re the fifth and final animal needed to complete a regular (re: not event-specific) collection. Unfortunately, even after 4 years, only 14 out of the 60 collections waiting for a Heroic type can be completed.
These bunnies have been around since the beginning of the game 5 years ago and, like many collections, are still missing their Heroic companion.
For some reason, there are also these impossible achievements that no one can fulfill because the requisite fifth animal doesn’t exist:
Collect them all … somehow!Imaginary cats and dogs are needed for this.
Perhaps they’ll eventually be doable but it would be nice if they could remove these in the meantime. 😛
I believe Com2uS didn’t consider the bigger picture when they created the Heroic Animals since, unlike the typical ones that just roam around the map or fill speech balloons popping up above their heads with inane statements, they possess skills that can usually help gameplay aspects such as allowing animals to instantly level up or increasing the chances of successfully obtaining a higher tier animal through breeding.
Inserting a bit of a tangent here: There’s one oddity among the Heroic types. The Heroic Bearded Pig, also known as The Crazy Doctor, can actually harm crop efficiency by tacking on a negative percentage value to crops causing the player to lose out on profit and experience. Thankfully, its skill effect can be cancelled before any damage can be done. However, this would mean that the player wasted Hearts on the Heroic Bearded Pig for nothing. 😐
It could be my luck but I do end up with the negative result more often than the positive one. Unless you have Hearts to spare, I advise against gambling on this nutty pig.
Here’s an image of it, by the way. 😀
One of my favourite heroic animal designs, but it also has one of the most annoying skills.
Anyway, new Heroic Animals used to come out on a consistent basis, but it’s not surprising that this stopped a few years ago. After all, it takes time to think up useful abilities that will keep the game in balance. Still, this lull feels rather lengthy. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt since they did eventually come up with third dog for the Dog collection years after the first and second ones. (It’ll probably take another couple of years before the Talking Dog shows up. :P)
In the interim, Com2uS has opted to keep churning out new limited time and event-based collections with increasingly insidious money-making ways.
Update on April 30th, 2017: As of version 4.6.0, there are far more ways to obtain Village Points than what’s listed below. Please refer to the “Village Point” button on the screen that shows Weekly Village and Individual Daily Goals for a list, or the new FAQ accessed through the Notice/News section in-game.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written about Tiny Farm. I tweet about it now and then though, especially when I have screenshots to post. 😀
There’s really not much to talk about since most things are straightforward, but there’s something I noticed in the village I was previously a part of — it seemed like some members didn’t know how to accumulate Village Scores.
In that village, we never made the Weekly Village Goal. There was only about 7 or so members and I think 2 of them weren’t around most of the time. Active members would have had to come up with about 1,000 points each and I don’t think anyone ever got past 600. The majority didn’t even complete the Individual Daily Goal.
In contrast, the current village I’m in blows past the weekly goal with ease since most members meet the their daily goals.
Tiny Farm – Villagers’ Contributions For the Current WeekTiny Farm – Village Score Weekly and Individual Goals
So what are the ways to build up Village Score points? The question mark next to the Weekly Village Goal header in the image above provides a breakdown. Otherwise, a general list can be found in the Village FAQ that can be accessed through the Notice button.
Here’s the screencap of the details found in the Village FAQ:
Players who have interacted with other Tiny Farm members via Com2uS/Gamevil’s HIVE community or the unofficial message board at Proboards would have most likely come across the claims that breeding in front of the original Love House — the one with a pair of lovey-dovey cows on the sign — will up the chances of successfully obtaining higher tier or event animals.
The Original Love House. Screencap edited from an image from the Tiny Farm Wikia
The origin of this belief comes from the fact that either the Talking Cow or Talking Dairy Cow said something about breeding in front of it will make dreams come true or something. I don’t know the exact words and no one remembers them but they all claim that it was something to that effect. (The dialogue has been removed or changed for some time now.)
I do recall that, for a while (and maybe it’s still going on), the animals DID give legitimate gaming hints such as where to go to find the option to redecorate the map. But those kinds of tips were perceivable and the Love House claim being something that can’t be seen is what makes it dubious.
Almost a month ago, users from other Gamevil and Com2uS games decided to throw common sense and etiquette out the door and mindlessly bombard the companies’ message forums known as HIVE clubs with “Add Me” friend requests to fulfill in-game friend invite quotas to obtain special goodies and bonuses.
If you check any of the clubs, you’ll find that they’ve all been infested with these Goodies Hunters. (I brand them as such because sincerely doubt most of them are remotely concerned with actual friendship.)
For Tiny Farm players, it’s rather frustrating since we use the message board to find information about event quests/objectives and also to seek help from others to tame special animals visiting our farms. The barrage of “Add Me”s end up pushing all the questions, informative posts, and taming requests way down the page and due to the club’s ultra archaic and backwatered design, it’s impossible to quickly locate them as it has no search function or a log that lists all of your own posts. In short, you are forced to scroll through the entire slog of useless crap.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, however! While there exists another fan-run message board, it’s pretty much been abandoned since the creator, johnnysilver, has quit the game a long while back. Now a new unofficial message board has been created in the wake of this mess thanks to frequent club users, Eluzyion and Animal House. You can find it at http://tinyfarmcommunity.freeforums.net/ 😀 At the moment, it is free from obnoxious friend requests and it’ll most likely stay that way since unless spam bots start creating accounts, the forum requires registered users to log in before they can even view it. The whole reason the HIVE clubs were subjected to the abuse is the sheer ease of accessing them in-game and the fact that you don’t need to register again to use them once you have a username or auto-generated account number from the game you logged into.
So if you’re tired of how useless the Tiny Farm Club has become, consider joining us at our new home! :3
This gimmick may be annoying to see but it allows Com2uS to keep the game running.
A lot of Tiny Farm players probably groan at the sight of seeing a notice like the above upon starting up the game. Given the dismal chances of succeeding in meeting those objectives, such a response is expected. After all, considering the rarity of legendary & mythical animals like the Oceanic Bird, players vying for limited edition animals in the short time frame allotted should be prepared to spend a lot of money on event eggs and pray that one of them will hatch the bird. (One can also obtain it through lucky bag draws but it requires longer waits.) I truly wouldn’t be surprised if the success rate of getting one was set to 1%.
As much as these limited time gimmicks are a bane to non-IAP-paying Tiny Farmers, it’s actually not a bad thing that developer, Com2uS, make use of them. I’d like to think that for the duration of the availability of an LE animal, there’s a spending spurt from habitual hardcore money-spenders as well as some gamblers that want to try their luck. This influx of money contributes to keeping this long-running, fan-favourite farming and animal collection simulator going.
So fellow Tiny Farm players, while we despair that we may never get these rare creatures, be glad that we have acquaintances paying Com2uS to maintain the game. :3
There’s a bit of anger and frustration going on with the Tiny Farm community lately thanks to Com2uS’ brilliant strategy of releasing two HEARTS-EATING events within days of each other. The first is the Valetine’s Day event which runs from Feb 11th 6 PM until Feb. 25th 11 PM PST. Shortly after the debut of that event, the Lunar New Year event made its appearance. This started Feb 15th 6 PM PST and will end on March 4th 6 PM PST.
Double the events, double the UNfun.
Simultaneous events are nothing new in Tiny Farm, but the problem is this: Hearts, which can be viewed as a form of virtual currency in Tiny Farm, replenish at a rate of 1 per 10 minutes. You may be able to imagine how terrible it is to try and meet a requirement that reads “Give 50 Hearts to a rabbit” for someone that has a pool that maxes out at, say, 21 Hearts. 😛 Incidentally, that 50 Hearts crap is something the game asks for in the Lunar New Year event and it appears MULTIPLE times.
Now imagine having to deal with that ALONG with needing hearts to buy gifts for neighbours so that you can obtain cookies which are then used in a lottery draw that MAY grant you a Valentine’s Day animal! Unsurprisingly, the chance of getting an animal is dismal and it costs 10 – 20 Hearts for one gift. These gifts can either give you 1 cookie, 2 cookies, or 8 cookies, depending on the type of gift you buy. It also shouldn’t be a surprise that a single draw = 4 cookies. 😛
I haven’t posted since early November. 😦 Sorry for the laziness! Nothing much has happened since then that I can remember. Well, at least nothing worth mentioning.
I won’t be doing a year-in-review since I can’t recall much. 😛 However, here are some random reflections that come to mind:
Sorry if this post shows up strange. I’m posting through the iOS WordPress app. Anyway, I completed the event already since I own all the sheep so I nabbed this screencap that shows a completed chart~! The heart between sheep indicates which sheep to breed to get the ones in the next generation.
I’m not sure 2 weeks will be enough for those that weren’t around for all the types of sheep that were part of special events because getting the 2nd and 3rd tiers all filled requires a ton of hearts and gold. I suppose it’s one way to get players to buy gold and Bells. :B
Before anyone starts raging about my selection, let me remind you that this is all opinion. It’s only natural that what I consider cute or ugly won’t be the same as someone else’s idea of cute or ugly.
I’ve been meaning to do this post for a while but have been lazy when it comes to screencapturing and editing the images. Well, here they are! XD These are my picks of ugly and mildly uncute animals from Com2uS’ Tiny Farm. The percentages below the animals indicates how many of those types I have in possession.
Horse
Zebra
Unicorn
Donkey
Highlander
Cat
Sea Turtle
Penguin
Emperor Penguin
Among the types of animals shown above, there are some exceptions like these. ^^~ They’re not oozing of cute but they’re not as hard on the eyes as the others. (The Fat Cat has a medal next to it since I’ve maxed out its Mastery gauge.)
Talking DonkeyFat Cat
Finally, some of the Legendary Animals fall under the eew category too such as the pegasus and heavenly unicorn. The dragon’s kind of meh as well though.
Legendary Animals
So why are they ugly to me? I think it mostly has to do with their eyes. I love cartoon animals (and even plush toys) that are chubby, fluffy, and have beady, dotty-eyes. ^^
For example! Tiny Farm sheep are super cute … unless you count the basic adult sheep which look kind of weird. (See first screencap here.) But these adolescent types are adorable~!
Bell’s in the middle of blinking. ^^;
These bears are another example~!
Tiny Farm Bear Family
They’re already cute without clothing but their costumes make them even cuter. ^o^~
I didn’t include the bearded pigs, boars, or hamsphires since they’re all right in my book. I definitely like them more than butt ugly unicorns.
…. I forgot to screencapture the fish. .____. I really wish they could get a makeover since so many of them really don’t fit the cute theme of the game. 😦
Speaking about makeovers, Tiny Farm held an election a few weeks ago and one of the candidates was a bearded pig whose campaign was all about revising designs for unpopular animals. The other two candidates were a unicorn vying to keep things as is (I think? I can’t remember) and a cute little bird that chirped about bringing MORE cute animals to Tiny Farm.
The bearded pig won. :E I’m not sure what Com2uS has in mind or what their staff consider uncute but I’m hoping there’s some sort of voting system for players before they roll out new designs because I’d vote the hell out of that gross donkey.
Honestly, Com2uS has so much they can do with Tiny Farm such as opening up that last map area. I could seriously use the space since animal certificates are so costly for every map I have right now. But I guess designing a whole new section takes a lot of time. Then again, maybe if they’d stop constantly generating new animal sets they could focus more on it? I suppose from their point of view, they have to keep putting out something new every week or two to keep the game fresh. The thing is, there are already SO MANY ANIMALS to collect. It won’t kill them to take a breather once in a while so players can “catch up”.
It’s a good thing they’re expanding storage space with every few updates as I need to keep putting away older animals to try and accommodate the newcomers but I’d really like to see them finish up some older collections. 😐 There are still a bunch of Heroic Animals that have yet to visit Tiny Farm after all.
Boy, I totally went off on a tangent there. Well, there’s not much to say about unappealing animals other than to show them and kind of explain why they don’t click with me. ^^
Unless you have Hearts to spare, I advise against gambling on this nutty pig.
koukoupuffs 