FarmVille Pic of the Day: Wedding bells are ringing at lisaperry1970's farm

by Jenny Ng, Posted Feb 9th 2012 2:00PM

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Getting married on Valentine's Day isn't the most original idea in the world, but it's undeniably romantic. One FarmVille player, lisaperry1970, tied the knot with her husband a decade ago, making this year's Valentine's Day their 10th wedding anniversary. To celebrate, Lisaperry1970's farm contains a custom-built wedding chapel, tons of holiday decor from the last two years, and Lisa's avatar dressed up as a fairy tale bride (note the Queens of Hearts gown and the frogs in attendance) awaiting her prince.
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As far as we could tell, the chapel is made entirely of Heart Fence, Wedding Fence, Violet Fence, and pink hay bales. Topping that off is pretty pink bell tower and several of last year's Wedding Flower Pots, which are a different style from this year's and cost 20,000 Coins each. Surrounding the farm is a wall of Violet Fences where "BE MINE I LOVE U" is imprinted using Pink Fences. For more detailed screenshots of this over-the-top wedding farm, check out the creator's forum thread.

Check out the rest of our Valentine's Day 2012 coverage here.

Do you know the day you'd like to get married on? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment

If you have an AWESOME FarmVille farm that you want to see featured on Games.com, please email a picture to editors@games.com, Include a few words about the inspiration for your design and maybe a few tips for people who need an assist!

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Tags: farm art, farm of the day, farmville, farmville farm art, farmville farm of the day, farmville featured farm, farmville pic of the day, featured farm, pic of the day, picture of the day, valentines day, zynga

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Gift Ideas for a 50th Wedding Anniversary

The big 50. The fiftieth wedding anniversary is an important, yet seldom reached milestone in any couple's relationship. Unlike other anniversaries, this one is such a 'biggie' that other people can feel free to celebrate it too (with the happy couple's consent, of course). Traditionally, this is the 'golden wedding', and if you are into flowers, the violet is the main theme. Typically, the kids will want to take the celebrating parents out for a nice meal, but gifts too can be given. Remember that it is not the value of the gift that is important, it is the thought that went into it!

So what to give? Depending on budget, how about one of the following:-

* A photo of the couple in a gilt (gold) frame. * Get a painting done from a photo of the couple - these are not as expensive as you might think. you can even do a version yourself by scanning a photo into your PC and then using the 'Art' filters in your paint package to turn it into a work of art. * If you have more than one photo, you could create a scrapbook of them for your folks, bound up in silk ribbon. * Nice wines or gift baskets containing the things they love (especially if they are on a diet - today is not a day for being strict with yourself!) * If money is no object, how about a weekend break? You can get some nice 'getaway' cruises of city breaks quite cheaply nowadays. Just make sure they can still travel! * Do they have major hobbies? Bird spotting? How about some new lightweight binoculars? Golf? How about some new clubs or a set of top of the range balls? * If they are fans of a charity, see if you can make a donation in their name. It is possible to sponsor rare animals these days, and the WWF will happily send you details if you ask. * AVOID trying to help them directly in a financial sense, the chances are that no matter how much they would like money, they would prefer to keep their dignity more. * AVOID 'gift certificates'. This implies that you know they have interests, but can't be bothered to do anything about them. * AVOID trying to 'muscle in' on their big day. You might think it will show love to try and organize everything, cook the food personally etc, but believe you me, at this age, they need their space, and will appreciate straight gifts or restaurant treats far a more. Never outstay your welcome - they don't have as much stamina as they used to!

About the author: Louise Goodman is a new addition to the writing team at www.sorrydarling.com the web's finest source for free gifts and free gift ideas.

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Gourmet Ranch Keeps Growth Fresh With Fishing Expansion, Royal Wedding Campaign

RockYou studio Playdemic’s Gourmet Ranch is enjoying a growth streak following the release of a fishing gameplay expansion and a themed campaign that launched just ahead of last week’s royal wedding between England’s Prince William and Catherine Middleton. Both monthly active users and daily active users have nearly doubled since mid-April to just over 5 million MAU and 580,000 DAU.

The combination farming and restaurant sim asks players to maintain their own farm/ranch to produce ingredients that they then use in cooking recipes. The completed dishes are then traded with in-game characters or sold to restaurant customers for in-game currency that can be spent on more crops and animals, expansions and decorations. After acquiring Playdemic in January, social game publisher RockYou reinforced Playdemic’s game update schedule around regular releases of new ingredients and recipes.

While the addition of fishing to the game was a no-brainer given the game’s dependence on producing your own ingredients, the royal wedding presented Playdemic with an opportunity to build a themed campaign within Gourmet Ranch that clicked with the core gameplay. Like seasonal campaigns around Christmas or Easter, the goal with the royal wedding campaign is to increase engagement with players, strengthen monetization through the sale of themed items and encourage viral growth as everybody on the Internet seemed to be talking about the wedding.

In the Gourmet Ranch campaign, players could buy royal wedding themed ingredients and decorations. The ingredients went into themed dishes that were part of a quest to prepare a dish to be served at the royal wedding. The new items went live last Tuesday and are still available in-game as of today, but the quest ended on April 29 with the real life event whether users had completed a royal wedding dish or not.

“This [campaign] was hugely successful because [the wedding] was an international event,” Playdemic’s Vice President and General Manager, Paul Gouge tells us. He also credits RockYou’s experience with seasonal events like Halloween or Thanksgiving events in other games with informing Playdemic’s planning and execution phases. As Gourmet Ranch grows, Playdemic plans events farther and farther out for logistics purposes. “We have a calendar with all our annual events [planned out],” he explains. “The royal wedding got added maybe six or eight weeks back.”

Seasonal campaigns and events present social games with an opportunity to increase user engagement and monetization through themed premium items. Like with brand integrations, the challenge comes both from working the items and actions into the game in a way that jibes with the core audience and from the opportunity cost of developing special items and quests. Seasonal campaigns also present social game developers unique challenges in timing, planning and execution across multiple regions and languages.

Take, for example, an Easter campaign that features premium decorations and a find-the-Easter-bunny quest. Easter 2011 fell within a week of the royal wedding and within two weeks of Mother’s Day, presenting a developer with a possible scheduling conflict around executing the campaign. The developer must decide how far in advance of Easter to launch the campaign, when to end it so that it doesn’t drag through the other two holidays, and whether or not to make the campaign available to regions of players that may not celebrate Easter.

To the first point, Gouge jokes that Playdemic “put our finger in the air” to determine the timing of most campaigns, but added that as long as a campaign makes sense for a game, developers should keep it running. To the second point, he cautions developers against spamming users with one too many seasonal campaigns running against each other:

“You have to be careful about players burning out,” Gouge says. “It’s about making sure the user isn’t bombarded with information.”

To the last point, Gouge admits that Playdemic got lucky with the royal wedding first because it was an international event and second because Gourmet Ranch is primarily played by people in the United States and the United Kingdom, two big fans of the event. In the future, however, the developer will have to consider how to plan events that have cultural resonance with other audiences as Playdemic is currently rolling out localization for the game in other European languages.

“I think that’s really pressing with games as we move into international [development],” Gouge muses. He explains that it’s not as easy as just planning region-specific campaigns because some regions may want to celebrate certain holidays from other regions, and no player ever enjoys feeling deprived of the “full” user experience when they see other players posting on forums about an event that wasn’t open across all regions.

Another consideration in seasonal campaigns is allowing users to enjoy maximum engagement with the campaign even past a hard deadline. For the royal wedding in Gourmet Ranch, Playdemic will stop selling the themed ingredients as of today, but will let users to prepare the themed dishes with themed ingredients for another week before the campaign ends completely.

“You have to give them time to use what they’ve bought,” Gouge says. “Most people will buy something and use it within about a week.” Though Gouge avoids specific numbers, he says that certain revenue streams within Gourmet Ranch went up as much as 100% during the royal wedding campaign as users splurged on themed items. Thanks to some “retrofitting” from RockYou, Gourmet Ranch now uses Facebook Credits as the sole means of purchasing the game’s premium and standard in-game currencies. RockYou has been pretty aggressive about getting games under its publishing deals to launch with Credits ahead of Facebook’s mandatory July deadline for integration across all social games.

Seasonal campaigns and events are very much a part of the social game ecosystem as social games are seen as a service rather than the traditional video game role of a packaged product. In a rare case of turnabout, console games could actually learn a lot from social games around planning for seasonal dowloadable content. The key, says Gouge, is making sure that the campaign makes sense for the game.

“Come on,” Gouge jokes. “You can’t imagine a Call of Duty royal wedding expansion pack, can you?”

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FarmVille Enchanted Love Avatar Items: Wedding Dress now available, Tux already in market

by Brandy Shaul, Posted Apr 28th 2011 12:45AM

With tonight's update, we see the release of the piece de resistance of FarmVille's Enchanted Love / Royal Wedding limited edition item theme - the Wedding Dress avatar item. What (traditional) wedding is complete without a flowing white gown being worn by the bride? If you agree, you can now purchase one for your in-game avatar, complete with a veil and tiara, for 10 Farm Cash. To be clear, that's 10 Farm Cash for the entire outfit - you won't have to purchase the veil separately.

"But where's the groom's tux?" I hear you asking / sense you thinking. The answer to that is simple - the Black Tuxedo item is already in the game, as a permanent clothing item available to purchase. The price? 30 Farm Cash. Yeah, that's a bit steep, but if you're a male player that wants to dress up in celebration of the Royal Wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton, that's a price you'll unfortunately need to accept.

Unfortunately, where you can wait forever to purchase the Black Tuxedo, you don't have the luxury of doing the same with the Wedding Dress, as all purchases must be made within the next two weeks.

Tell us what you think. Is the Black Tuxedo overpriced compared to the Wedding Dress, or do you think it's a fair price considering that more individual Wedding Dresses will be purchased in the game than Tuxes? Let us know in the comments.
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Tags: avatar clothing, avatar costume, black tuxedo, britain, enchanted love items, farmville, farmville enchanted love items, farmville royal wedding, kate middleton, prince william, royal wedding, royalty, wedding dress, zynga

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FarmVille Enchanted Love Decorations: Romantic Cottage, Wedding Fountain, Princess Gnome & More

by Brandy Shaul, Posted Apr 28th 2011 12:34AM

With tonight's FarmVille update, we see the release of seven new decorative items in the Enchanted Love limited edition item theme, inspired by the real world wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton. However, just like the animals released this evening (the Welsh Corgi and Knight Steed), this set of "new" items actually contains some re-releases from past themes. We'll make sure to let you know what those are (saving you some coins / Farm Cash) as we go along.

First, a new building is available in the form of the Romantic Cottage. This cottage is accessorized with lovely pink ribbons along the roof line, and you can add one to your farm(s) for 20 Farm Cash. You'll gain 2,000 experience points for purchasing the building, and as it doesn't necessarily scream "wedding," you could keep this item around for Valentine's Day, anniversary celebrations or any other "love" themed event you can imagine. I don't know about you, but I love items that can multi-task, and this is definitely one of them.

Along with the Romantic Cottage, six "new" decorative items are available to purchase, with only half of these items truly being new to the game. The three completely new items are the Wedding Fountain, Wedding Bouquet, and Flower Pot, which cost 12 Farm Cash, 100,000 coins, and 20,000 coins each, respectively.

Meanwhile, make sure you check your Storage Sheds or Cellars before purchasing the Prince or Princess Gnomes, along with the pieces of Wedding Fences, as we've seen these items in the game before. The Prince Gnome and Princess Gnome go for 15 Farm Cash each, but were originally seen back in the Fairy Tale theme back in February (for the same price). Meanwhile, the Wedding Fence was also seen back in February, but in the Valentine's Day theme.

All told, while none of the re-released items have become more expensive, it's always smarter to take a few seconds to check your storage buildings before spending more Farm Cash / coins, so I hope I saved you some cash there. If you haven't purchased any of these items previously, they, along with the entirely new items, will be available in the game's store for the next two weeks. While these items may come back at a later date (three of these items are proof of that), do you really want to take the chance that they won't? Yeah, I don't either. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to buy some new decorations for my farm!

Did you already own the re-released items in tonight's theme, or will you purchase everything for the first time now? Let us know in the comments.
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Tags: britain, enchanted love items, england, farmville, farmville buildings, farmville decorations, farmville enchanted love items, kate middleton, prince william, royal wedding, zynga

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CityVille joins the Royal Wedding celebrations with new decorations

by Joe Osborne, Posted Apr 28th 2011 10:50AM

FarmVille and Nickelodeon's Royal Wedding Run aren't the only games to celebrate Prince William and Kate Middleton's fateful union anymore. Zynga has updated CityVille with four new decorations to honor the Royal Wedding. The new items include a British Flag, which for 200 coins provides a 1 percent payout bonus, and the Royal Guard that, for 8 City Cash, offers the exact same bonus. The Waving Royal People is the same story, but even more expensive: 10 City Cash for 1 percent bonus. However, the Royal Palace Gate offers 4 percent payout bonus for 5 thousand coins. Regardless of whether these prices fit with a royal fellow's lavish lifestyle, we still call foul on their utility. But hey, at least they'll allow you celebrate right along with the Royal Family ... in Facebook.

[Source and Image Credit: CityVille Info]

Have you bought any of these items for your city? How do you plan to celebrate or honor the Royal Wedding, if at all? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.
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Tags: cityville, decorations, Kate Middleton, Prince William, prince william and kate middleton, royal wedding, royal+wedding+games, RoyalWedding, royalweddinggames, The Royal Wedding, zynga

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FarmVille English Countryside Sneak Peek: The Royal Wedding

by Joe Osborne, Posted Apr 20th 2011 10:20AM

Not only will you be able to stream Price William and Kate Middleton tying the knot on YouTube, but Zynga wants you to reenact it ... on a dirty English farm. The Royal Wedding is coming to FarmVille, according to a leaked image found by FarmVille Feed.

It's doubtful that it will actually recreate the real Royal Wedding--that would just be creepy--but who says it can't source a bit of inspiration, eh? No information is available on the Royal Wedding other than, well, it exists. Don't worry, this is one we cannot afford to miss (comedy is a fine motivator), so we'll have the news as soon as it happens.

Image Credits: Ben Stansall, AFP/Getty Images, FarmVille Feed

Are you psyched for the Royal Wedding's arrival in FarmVille? Will you attempt the ultimate Royal Wedding experience: playing it out in FarmVille and streaming it via YouTube? It's OK, you can tell us in the comments. Add Comment.

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Tags: FarmVille, FarmVille English Countryside, farmville feed, farmville sneak peek, farmville unreleased, Kate Middleton, Prince William, royal wedding, sneak peek, unreleased, zynga

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