After nearly two long years, Zynga has removed the "Beta" tag from the FarmVille logo. More specifically, it took one year and 10 months to raise the game up from beta status, but it begs the question: What pushed FarmVille over the edge? According to a production letter released by Zynga on the forums, all signs point to the release of English Countryside. After releasing an entire new farm, we think you're good on removing the Beta label.
The production letter contains a long list of changes and highlights from the past few months including the exciting removal of News Feed item throttling, or limiting players' ability to collect lots of items in a short amount of time. Now, there is a solid limit on the amount of items players can gather from News Feeds daily. Here's Zynga's official statement in full:
The sun is back out (here in San Francisco, anyway) and the FarmVille Team is reinvigorated with the energy of the warmer weather, the English Countryside expansion and the fact that we have the best player base on the planet in all of you! Speaking of all of you, we have, as always, been listening to a great deal of your feedback and suggestions. We hope you'll echo our sentiment when we say that the past three months or so have brought many improvements to FarmVille. Let's take this moment to reflect on a few of the things we've accomplished together over the last quarter of a year...
English Countryside: FarmVille players everywhere are discovering an all-new land with new adventures and benefits in FarmVille English Countryside! This has certainly been our largest feature effort since FarmVille first launched and it wouldn't have been possible without your ideas and imagination. We hope you're all enjoying it and are looking forward to the possibilities it brings as much as we are!
Farm Switching and Pausing: We want to thank you all for expressing your opinions on this matter so articulately and persistently. As a result, we're recently implemented the ability to choose whether or not you want the farm you are not active on to pause while you are away. You will be prompted with this option each time to switch from one farm to another. We think this is a great addition to FarmVille and we hope it leads to your further enjoyment of having multiple farms!
Bug Fix Output and Memory Issues: The development team has been extremely focused and dedicated to making FarmVille better. In addition to increasing our bug fix output significantly, we've also made a recent breakthrough on our memory usage and implemented changes that resulted in many players with heavily populated farms able to run FarmVille smoothly again. This isn't perfect yet, we're still diligently pursuing ways to keep up with your endlessly imaginative ways of beautifying and personalizing your farms, but we hope many of you are already seeing the benefits.
Feed Reward Throttling: After extensive research and experimentation, we have decided to repeal the throttling of rewards collected through feeds. We want to thank you all for being so vocal throughout the process as it really helped us to pinpoint problem areas and react accordingly. For now, the throttling has been removed and we are enforcing a cap on the amount of rewards each player can claim per day. We are continuing to explore alternative means of keeping the FarmVille playing field even for all.
Japan Relief: In yet another incredible example of humanitarianism and compassion, FarmVille players were one of the first groups worldwide to spring into action to help Japan in their hour of need. Words cannot express how fortunate the FarmVille Team feels to be involved with such a giving and helpful group of players. It adds an overwhelming sense of worth to the work we do here to know that the players who make our game great also strive at making the world a better place.
The Beta Tag: You may have noticed that we removed the "Beta" tag from our logo with the release of the English Countryside. We felt this was the right time to remove that tag but we also want to be sure that this is not taken as a claim to a "bug-free" game. The internet is alive with changes stemming from every direction and FarmVille introduces new content multiple times per week. No game can avoid all of the growing pains that are inevitable with new content – especially on such a large platform, with so many players interacting with each other, in so many different ways. Rest assured that we are dedicated, now more than ever, to continuing to create new ways to ensure your game experience is everything it can and should be.
We're thankful for the strides you've helped us make this past quarter and are eager to share whatever the future brings with all of you. We have all sorts of surprises up our sleeves and the fact that we get to bring them to all of you drives us onward. Thank you for always being willing to share your ideas and opinions with us and for being the best player base in the world!
-The FarmVille Team
These are all exciting developments, for sure. However, as Zynga said much needs to be done, like improving FarmVille for iOS. Sure, the game runs plenty faster than it ever did after the 2.0 update, but it still suffers from "Out of Sync" errors and could use some more functionality. We should be able to do more to our farms like interact with our buildings through mobile, but also take advantage of mobile's unique advantages like geolocation and Bluetooth.
Imagine booting up FarmVille mobile just before a movie starts and seeing that a few other movie goers are playing nearby. Request them using either Bluetooth or over 3G and WiFi and you can immediately start playing together ... just put it away when the movie starts. Everyone hates that.
[Source: FarmVille Freak]
Are you excited to see the improvements and changes Zynga has made to FarmVille in 2011 thus far? What else do you think needs improvement?
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