FrontierVille's It's Canning Time Goal puts you on the stopwatch... Go!

For the real hardcore pioneers out there, Zynga has added a timed Goal to FrontierVille titled "It's Canning Time." Players only have two days to complete this Goal, which you could think of a Cafe World Catering Order... except without the friends, cooking or fancy chef hats. Alright, it was a bit of a stretch, but either way you'll only have 48 hours to complete the three requirements and the Goal will expire for everyone on Nov. 8.

SundialHarvesting the 100 Tomato plants is fairly simple considering they ripen in just 15 minutes, but the 20 Cherry Trees will take some finesse as they take four eight-minute stages before they're ready for harvest. Not to mention that they can only be harvested every eight minutes after the fact. All the while, you'll need to ask your friends for 10 Canning Jars. In other words, this will not be an easy feat for the average pioneer, so--I can't believe I'm saying this--casual players need not apply.

For tackling and accomplishing this daunting task, you will be rewarded one Sundial decoration. "Wait, you mean to say 'no XP'?" Yes, my fellow trailblazers, only a mere sundial awaits you for all of your hard work. But it is a limited edition item that we probably won't see again--so let that comfort you after slaving over multitudes of tomatoes and cherries.

Zynga boosts FrontierVille performance for crazy fast load times

FrontierVille Boosts
Goals, rewards and items are always fun, but this is the update everyone has been waiting for. FrontierVille Info reports that that FrontierVille has been launched into hyper speed thanks to a supposed performance update by Zynga. We've tried it out ourselves and holy harvest is the game fast. The game loads for us in under 30 seconds while visits to other homesteads are nearly instantaneous.

While Zynga has been promising improvements for the past few days after the recent horrors players experienced during the Halloween festivities, these lightning-fast load times have yet to be officially announced. That being said, the game is considerably faster for at least a few lucky pioneers. Hopefully this trend continues across all of Zynga's games into the future. Without an official confirmation, it can't be said whether improvements were made considering almost everyone has a different computer configuration in their home.

FrontierVille: Serve your neighbors a feast for free Thanksgiving dishes

As most of us have come to learn by now, the final level of the Thanksgiving Feast missions in FrontierVille asks us to collect a whopping 40 of each food item associated with the event, those being Cranberry Sauce, Roast Turkeys, Sweet Potatoes, and Delicious Pies.

And while we all might be used to posting item requests on our walls and receiving help from friends, did you also know that you can gather some of your own ingredients, just by visiting friends? It's true, as we've come to learn that by simply visiting neighbors, and using one of your five daily actions to "Serve the Feast" at a neighbor's Thanksgiving table, you have a chance to earn one of the four main food items for yourself.

To be clear, this isn't a guaranteed opportunity, as you can also walk away with a small bundle of food, a single reputation point and an experience point. While you may not be guaranteed to receive a food item, if you're already visiting your friends as part of your daily routine or to complete an entirely separate quest, why not take a few seconds to see if you can spawn a free Thanksgiving dish while you're there? Even if just four or five friends' tables give you food items, that's four or five less items you have to wait for your friends to send.

Wishful Features: A FrontierVille animations toggle button

Ever visit that one Neighbor in FrontierVille who happens to be somewhat of an overachiever? You know who I'm talking about. Almost everyone has that one friend who is Level 150 with the biggest homestead available, every animated decoration out there and his legion of Chickens (see above) for all to see. Did I say "for all to see?" Sorry, what I meant to say was, "for all to cringe in horror as their browsers freeze and processors melt through the surface of their four-year-old laptops."

At least the first part of that vision should be familiar with a good lot of you. And it isn't just the sharp visuals in FrontierVille that are to blame. It's the animations. If you haven't noticed, just about every animal, building and holiday item slash decoration has an animation attached. Sure, most animations are simple one-second-long loops, but multiply that by the amount of items that litter most veteran players' homesteads and it's enough to send the average computer into hiding.

Sure, that Graphics Quality toggle helps a bit, but for those who have yet to--bear with me here--upgrade their primary Facebook-gaming machine in the past few years, Flash-based games (i.e. almost all Facebook games) are going to punish the average computer. It might sound ridiculous that we're talking about computer upgrades on Games.com, but rest assured this is all coming from someone who easily falls into the camp of "average computer" face first with a three-year-old HP Pavilion laptop. I will be the first to tell you that computers do not age like sharp cheese or fine wine, but more like mold on bread or Keith Richards.

With 250 million players, it should be safe to assume that the majority of social gamers are probably in the same boat. So, Zynga, why not add a similar option to the Graphics Quality toggle in FrontierVille? Make it so that players with less-than-favorable computing situations can actually pay their more technologically advanced friends a visit every once in a while. If players are already making liberal use of the Graphics Quality toggle in nearly every game they play (at least I need to), then turning off a few idle character animations isn't going to make the visual FrontierVille experience that much worse. Your fellow pioneers seem to agree.

FrontierVille Playtime II Timed Mission now available

Way back on the 17 of December, we brought you a sneak peek of a then unreleased time mission in FrontierVille that we believed would be coming to the game in the future. Well, the future is now, as the Playtime II Timed Mission is now available to complete for a limited time.

As we told you last month, you'll have just two days after accepting this mission to complete it on your Frontier. the mission requires three tasks to be completed:

Craft 20 Planks
Collect 10 Metal Bars
Collect 10 Wood Rasps

You must accept this mission by January 14 in order to be able to complete it in your game, and you'll receive a See-Saw decorative item, 250 XP, and 1,000 coins for completing the mission before your two days are over.

You'll of course need to have plenty of help from friends in order to finish this mission on time, but it definitely isn't impossible. Happy gaming!

Rumor: FrontierVille Oregon Trail expansion will open soon

Websites like FrontierVille Info are speculating that, based on recent events, the Oregon Trail expansion in FrontierVille will open its gates by the end of Mach. One of the four areas that have been "Coming Soon" since the game's launch, FrontierVille Info believes The Oregon Trail will open this month because of hints made in its teaser message and recent Goals released in the game. For instance, the teaser mentions medicine, and it's been just a few weeks since the Doctor's Office opened with Goals.

Medical SuppliesCompleting the Collection associated with the Doctor's Office grants an item called "Medical Supplies," (pictured right) which is unusable at the moment. According to FrontierVille Info, hovering over the currently useless item in your inventory will cause this message to appear: "You'll need these when you head out to open up other frontiers!"

Finally, because we already have ammo and food in the game--what the teaser for Oregon Trail calls for--all we need is for friends to send us Wagon Axles in a Goal and we'll be Oregon-bound. While it's true that the dots are starting to connect, this is all wild speculation and should be treated as such. But wild guesswork never hurt anybody, right?

[Image Credit: FrontierVille Info]

What do you think of these potential hints toward the Oregon Trail expansion? If correct, when do you think the new territory will open up?

Zynga's RewardVille: Is it working as intended?

Perhaps it's already old news, but Zynga officially launched its RewardVille service over the weekend. Players can now be rewarded with zCoins for playing the gamut of Zynga games. It appears that this new service is designed to replace the cross-promotional Goals and missions that were so popular between games like FrontierVille and Mafia Wars in 2010. But is RewardVille working any better than those did? Does Zynga even care?

FarmVille forum contributor Annabelle Smitty asks in a nine-page thread, "Has RewardVille been successful at getting you back into [games you once gave up on]?" Several players have emphatically answered to the contrary while a few admitted that, yes, it has caused them to pop in on games like Treasure Isle for more zCoins towards new items. However, another player, Shini2, sums up what I think is more likely the case: "Well, it's not as bad as I thought. For those games I can just do a few specific things, and it's not that hard to get my 80 points. By this I mean that I don't really have to get into the games. Just spend like 15 minutes each."

Money!Isn't that what you do, anyway? It's pretty difficult to believe that RewardVille has magically reignited the old flames most of you had with Vampire Wars or PetVille. It's more likely that most players behave just like Shini: They'll log into each game and play for the 15 minutes required to net the 80 points and jump right back into their main crush whether it be CityVille or something else. This is because it's an incentive-based system. Once players find out that all they have to spend in one of these games is a few minutes for those points, that's all Zynga will have them for. And that's OK, because we're human (and naturally opportunistic).

However, a multi-billion dollar company like Zynga didn't get where it is now by accident. Perhaps Pincus and his crew know exactly what they're up to. Zynga already realizes that a vast majority of its gamers simply does not have time to keep track of more than one game. That said, it's understandable for the company to make the requirements for acquiring points in other games so simple and fast.

More importantly, it doesn't matter how long a player is logged into a game--that data is automatically recorded by websites like AppData. If even half of FarmVille's daily active players cosign to RewardVille, that's a boost worth millions in "new" users for games that are miles behind Zynga's top three. That could translate into more promotional and advertising opportunities as well as even better standing in the leader boards. Maybe, just maybe, everything is going according to plan.

[Image Credit: Social Trackr]

What do you think of RewardVille so far? Do you think Zynga intended for it to work this way or the players have already exploited it?

FrontierVille: 41 x 41 land expansion goals on the move once again

After a long, and understandably frustrating process, Zynga has finally announced that the 41 x 41 land expansion goals in FrontierVille have started rolling back out to users. After being released to a small group last week, and then being delayed for the rest of the community (due to various issues), Community Manager Stumpgrinder has stated that the goals have started tolling out to a "much wider audience," which very well might include you.

Upon logging into your game, you'll be given a pop-up allowing you to purchase the expansion goals, so you'll know almost instantly if you've finally been given the goals. If not, it does finally seem as though these goals are on a regular roll-out, so you should be able to have them within hours, or at least the next day.

If you've been so caught up in not having these goals on your Homestead that you've forgotten what they actually entail, make sure to check out our guide so you can get right to expanding your land! They're not easy, but with a little perseverance (and the ability to actually work on them), a bigger Homestead may finally be within your reach!

Have you finally received the 41 x 41 land expansion goals in FrontierVille? Did you harvest any of your saved crops because you were tired of waiting for the goals to arrive?

FrontierVille: 50% off Horseshoe sale for one hour only, finally Horseshoes are affordable

You've got one hour, pioneers. One hour? One hour for what? For 50% off all Horseshoe packages in FrontierVille, that's what! Sure, we're all used to seeing the "sale" pop-up each time we login, that advertizes Horseshoes as being one sale for something around 35% off, but this is a full 50% off sale that is legitimately a sale!

Head to the game's "Get Horseshoes" tab, located above the gameplay area, and you'll see that the prices of all five packages of Horseshoes have been sliced in half. For just $5.41, you can have 75 Horseshoes, with the final package costing a still whopping $108.20 for 2,100 Horseshoes. With quite a few packages to choose from, you should be able to find one or more that fit your budget, but remember, you can always buy separate packages that cost different amounts to add up to something more in the end. Say, for instance, you wanted to spend $15. Even though there's no $15 package, you could just purchase a $5 and $10 package separately to end up with plenty of Horseshoes while still holding onto your budget.

If you're low on coins, you can also purchase coins packages for 50% off, but just remember that this is far less economical in the end, as you'd be able to earn coins faster than Horseshoes, making the deal basically worthless.

Remember, this sale is happening right now, but only for one hour (give or take, whenever Zynga finally decides to hit the "off" switch). If you've ever contemplated purchasing Horseshoes before, but didn't because of their price, make sure to hit this sale while you still can!

Will you purchase Horseshoes in this 50% off sale? What will you use your new Horseshoes on? Will you save them up for something grand, or will you spend them right away?