There have been a few changes in HKO farming, and I’m not entirely sure I agree with some of them. The flies don’t bother me, you learn to tune them out quickly enough, and I don’t know if their presence has an adverse affect on your production.

There is pesticide you can purchase, but I haven’t figure that out yet. I got a stack of 30, and clicked on an infested tree, but it had no apparent effect, and did not consume the pesticide. I’ll toy around and see.

As for the disagreeable changes, that has to do with the now-present gathering timer. In “old” FB, gathering on your farm was “free”. It was instant, and cost no stamina. Now, gathering has a timer, which ultimately increases farming time by about 5-fold. There is no stamina hit, so I’m not sure I understand the purpose of the timer.

Right now, it turns what was a pleasant and enjoyable activity into a boring and artificial timesink. Farming was always a timesink, but it was nice and relaxing. Now with the addition of time gathering bar (0 to 99, approx. 5 seconds), there is an artificial imposition to the activity.

There are some other related changes, planting seeds now has a progress bar, and you need to be within distance of the square you are planting. Those make sense. Before, I could plant any square on my farm from any location. And the planting timer isn’t an imposition.

Take the gathering timer with the Christmas quest, and it’s a terrible timesink. One quest involves 100 snowballs, which requires 1,250 snows. That is almost 2 hours for gathering alone. (1,250 snow, 5 seconds per is 6,520 seconds to gather; or 104 minutes). That’s assuming a contigious gathering period, which is not feasible, since you need to give time for the “plants” to ripen to harvest. The harvest wait is fine, the gathering wait is tedium at best.

Sorry for the long post, but I needed to vent a little. One bonus is that I was able to finish my house during my snowman farming period.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 20th, 2008 at 8:25 pm and is filed under HKO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.