Click to Harvest!

You might have seen some headlines last month stating that CityVille had surpassed FarmVille to become the biggest game on Facebook. This was technically true. On the day the news dropped, CityVille had 61 million monthly players, compared to FarmVille’s 56 million.

But I felt that the stories were a little misleading. CityVille had only surpassed FarmVille because the farming sim has been slowly but steadily losing players for the past 10 months or so. At its peak, around March 2010, FarmVille had nearly 84 million monthly players. So CityVille owed its #1 status as much to FarmVille shrinking as it did to its own growth.

But as of this week, CityVille can drop the asterisk from its World’s Biggest Social Game title. The game now has an astonishing 90.6 million monthly players. This surpasses FarmVille’s peak player record by a wide margin. Even more amazing, the game is not yet showing signs of slowing down. As of now, CityVille is on pace to surpass 100 million monthly players in just four or five more days.

While this is incredibly good news for Zynga, there still might be a small cause for concern. Monthly players (players that check in at least once a month) are certainly important, but daily players is the stat that truly matters. And in a comparison of daily players, CityVille isn’t as dominant. It is still the biggest, with 17.6 million daily players compared to FarmVille’s 15.5 million, but the stats seem to indicate that more players are checking out CityVille once and not returning, when compared to Zynga’s other titles.

Right now, 19% of CityVille’s monthly players are checking in per day. FarmVille, in comparison, enjoys a 27% DAU/MAU ratio.

This still takes nothing away from CityVille’s incredible feats. We’re excited to see just how high the game can go!

* Thanks to AppData for the player stats.

Treasure Isle developer Zynga has introduced the ability for players to upgrade the treasure chest that washes up daily at their home island. The higher level the treasure chest, the better loot it will contain.

The initial upgrade requires one of each gem, with prices increasing successively from there (2 of each gem, 3 of each gem, etc). If there’s one thing Treasure Isle players have been clamoring for, it is more items that require gems! Kidding, kidding…

In any case, there is no way to know specifically how a higher level treasure chest is influencing the loot players get each day. Our level 3 treasure chest awarded us a special Dragonfruit (+45 Energy) today.

FarmVille developer Zynga has released another edition of their weekly podcast. As usual, FarmVille community manager Lexilicious has managed to cram a tremendous amount of FarmVille news into a quick six minute package. Readers can listen for themselves below, or read the podcast transcript.

Hey Farmers and welcome to this week’s installment of the official FarmVille podcast. My name is Lexilicious, and I am here to bring you all of the latest news and information about FarmVille from Zynga. This week, we will be discussing our latest releases, and you guys will all be getting sneak peek of things coming to FarmVille in the near future.

Now, before we get into discussing all of our newest features, I would like to give a quick thank you to all of the players who participated in the FarmVille Dessert Contest. We challenged everyone to bring FarmVille to life with ovens, flour and just a sprinkle of creativity. Well Farmers, you rose to the challenge like true baking champions. The cooks in our Dessert Contest whipped up some of the most creative and edible works of art we’ve ever seen. Choosing the winners of this contest was no easy task, but after much deliberation, the FarmVille Team decided upon the most creative, delicious and well presented FarmVille desserts. If you would like to check out our winning entries, please visit the official Farmville forums and congratulations again to our winners who will be walking away with 1000 Farm Cash and 1,000,000 Coins. Remember Farmers, these contests are a great way to showcase your talent and earn some extra farm cash, so make sure to enter next time for your chance to win big.

So the past couple of weeks for FarmVille have been absolutely packed with new features. From great new Winter Holiday themed items to brand new features, FarmVille has been going all out to celebrate the holidays this year.
First up was the release of the Winter Workshop. This new constructable building is the first major step to our FarmVille holiday season and soon enough you’ll be able to harvest special Holiday Gifts from the Winter Workshop for special use later. But first, however, just worry about getting them built as much as you can.

You’ll get the base for the Winter Workshop for free the first time you play FarmVille, and you will immediately be entered into Placement Mode. You can place the Winter Workshop base on your farm now, or you can choose to place it in your Gift Box for use later.

You’ll only be able to have one Winter Workshop at a time. If you sell yours and want another, you can find it in the Market for 5,000 coins. You’ll need to be level 5 in order to place and use the Winter Workshop.

Now, the basic Winter Workshop looks pretty but you’ll need to level it first before you can start using it to collect Holiday Gifts. To level your workshop, you will need to collect parts like our other constructible buildings. You can acquire these parts via the free gifts page, farm cash, special delivery boxes and neighbor requests.

Harvesting for Holiday Gifts will begin soon, so make sure to finish constructing those workshops soon.

Our other big feature this week was the release of quests. Now, this feature is currently only available to a randomly selected group of users, but I want to give everyone a quick explanation of how this release works so users who do have it understand the benefits, and players who don’t can be better prepared once it arrives.

Coupled together with the introduction of the Winter Workshop, the Winter Wonderland Quest is a mission to make your farm into a beautiful wonderland and earn some cool gifts along the way. To get started, click the quest icon located at the lower left-hand side of the game.

Clicking on this icon will bring up the quest window, which will display your current quest, your quest progress and objectives. Your first quest objectives are to Place a Winter Workshop on your farm and buy one Candy Arch from the Market.

You’ll see a green checkmark by the objectives you’ve already finished. Once you complete these objectives, you will be awarded a prize. The prizes will automatically be awarded to you and you’ll return to your farm. You also have the option to Share the special gift with your friends by making a post to your feed.

A new icon will show up if there is another quest to complete. Your next quest’s objectives are to change your landscape to the snow blanket, place 4 parts in your workshop and acquire holiday lights from your Neighbors. Once you complete this quest, you will receive a special reward. Now, the rest of the Winter Wonderland Quests are all similar in structure to the ones I’ve just explained. Now, I don’t want to give away all of the surprises, so get out there and start questing today. If you are in need of any additional information about this feature, or you have feedback that you would like to share with us, please make sure to visit the “Game Updates” section of the Official FarmVille forums.

Alright! So this week’s coming soon segment will actually give you guys a little bit more insight into a feature I know everyone has been waiting for. This year’s holiday tree will be making an appearance in FarmVille soon, but it works a little bit differently this year.

You will need to collect holiday gifts from your Neighbors and place them into your tree. As you add more gifts, the tree will grow and change in appearance. As you collect gifts, you will be able to redeem your gifts for special prizes along the way as you unlock them. Similar to how the Haunted House could be used to collect Candy, the Winter Workshop will become harvestable for holiday gifts once the tree is released.

Keeping with the holiday spirit, when you redeem a special prize, instead of sharing an extra one via your feed as per usual, we’re going to let you pick which friends you would like to send it to as a present. Players who participate in this feature may also see a special present from Zynga this year, so make sure to keep an eye out for this release in the near future.
And lastly, we have the new snowman feature coming to farmville in the coming weeks. Players will be able to have snowball fights with their friends by visiting their farms or joining in on other friends snowball fights. With all of that snow being thrown, you will eventually end up with a big pile of it. You can use this pile of snow to build a Snowman, that may even dance for you if you can find the right item for it.

Alright folks, that’s it from me this week. Again, my name is Lexilicious and I will be back on December 17th to bring you all of the latest news from around the Farm. Happy Farming everybody!

Mafia Wars developer Zynga kicked off the holiday season a few days ago with the introduction of a new Secret Santa mission. The task is labeled as a “Secret Mission” but it doesn’t really seem that secret to us, since it is advertised right on the Mafia Wars home page. Secret or not, there is plenty of exclusive loot up for grabs, and that’s what truly matters, right?

To complete the mission, players will need the help of four of their friends. By making a Facebook wall post, players can give friends the opportunity to fill in as a Demolitions Expert, Bagman, Driver, or Electronics Expert. Players can also automatically fill any of the four slots by paying 10 Reward Points.

Once the roles are filled and the mission completed, the exclusive loot is then divided among the participants. The two rare items are a Field Raider vehicle (21 Attack, 71 Defense) and a D-07 Proximity Mine weapon (70 Attack, 39 Defense).

Social gaming juggernaut Zynga has finally flipped the switch on their long-awaited town building title: CityVille! Is the game destined to become a mega-hit like nearly every other Zynga title, or is it merely a re-hash of the town building concepts others games have introduced? Social Game Central is here to give you the full scoop.

The first thing we noticed about CityVille is that despite being a town-building title along the lines of My Town, Social City, and Millionaire City (among others), the game actually has more in common with Zynga’s own FrontierVille than any of their competitor’s titles. Players have an energy bar that refills over time, and must spend this energy to complete most in-game tasks, including constructing buildings, chopping down wild trees, and supplying businesses with raw goods.

Also like FrontierVille, gamers are guided through the game by a lengthy series of missions. Some are quite simple (Harvest Four Carrots), while others require more preparation and more help from neighbors.

Although CityVille is still quite easy to pick up and play, the game is probably the most complex Zynga has ever made – to progress, players will need to keep track of all aspects of their city’s health. The bulk of CityVille’s gameplay revolves around smoothly managing a chain of supplies. All elements are interconnected. For example, to raise their city’s population, players will need to have enough money to build homes. Players earn money via their town’s businesses. These businesses only produce money if they are supplied with raw goods, which are collected from farms.

It is certainly more complex than FarmVille or FrontierVille, but it never feels overwhelming. Players produce goods via farming plots, turn those goods into cash via businesses, and spend that cash on homes, decorations, and everything else they need for their cities to thrive.

CityVille’s social element is a major departure from other social games, including Zynga’s own. Rather than lean on news feed posts, CityVille instead has players reaching out to their social graph on a one on one basis, asking individual friends for help via notifications. Players need 7 employees to staff their police department, for example. Rather than making a news feed post asking for employees, players can instead bulk send notifications asking for help to up to 60 of their friends at once. We’re still mulling over the ramifications of this major change, and will have more thoughts on it soon.

Our first impression of CityVille is positive. Like all Zynga titles, it is very polished, and already has lots of content for players to experience. We’re disappointed that the game doesn’t seem to make much effort to break new ground in the way FrontierVille did earlier this year, but we don’t think that will stop this city building title from becoming a big hit.