Homestead Expansions, the Pro's and Con's.

One issue that comes up a LOT on the page is when Frontierville will open up the next set of homestead expansions. There are a number of Pros and Cons for this so lets have a look at a few.

Pros

Positive PR - The fact is everyone seems to be pulling for this to happen, it's fair to say Zynga would make themselves very popular by pulling it off, although I personally feel it's extremely silly to suggest you'd quit the game because you've got no room to put a sledging hill, some people seem to feel this way.

Space - This is really a player-only pro, we get more space for more stuff. Pretty simple. It also allows for more crops and animals so we can level up faster and do missions easier.


Cons

Neutral/Negative PR - The simple fact I think we can all agree on is that whatever the FTV devs do, someone will complain. A new mission thread likely means a new glitch or two. On top of that, which way do they go with the mission difficulty?

Arguably a Homestead Expansion mission for one as big as the next one will be would deserve difficult missions that weren't completed inside a day. But if they do this players complain about having to wait, they want their mission completed NOW! We saw with the Resolution Missions, which could easily be completed in a couple weeks, that people's biggest complaint was the waiting.

Strangely though, if they go the opposite way and make them too easy... they're also on a hiding to nothing. People complete them in a day, complain they were too easy and then, just days later, they'll be complaining they're bored and want new missions.

I wish I could remember who said this but I recall a quote from an American (I think) politician... "If I went out into Times Square and handed out money one third of people would say I was handing out too much, one third would say I was handing out too little and the final third would complain about the WAY I was handing it out".

Space - This is the real con and ironically is intrinsically linked to the biggest pro for the players. More space means more STUFF. We love it, the Zynga servers don't.

The simple fact is at least 50% of issues in Frontierville aren't caused by bad coding or temperamental Flash. It's caused by server issues, and a lot of those server issues are caused by us.

Well, that's a sweeping statement, some of us. It's fair to say the more decorations you have, especially animated ones, the worse the load on the server. However this would probably be fine and dandy but for another section of the playing fraternity, the Chicken Farmer.

I went into server issues and the perils of chicken farming HERE in a previous post so we'll just say it's a big problem for server load and leave it at that.

Totting up

So there we go, the main pros and cons of a land expansion and, to be honest, right now I can't see them happening. All the pros can be heavily outweighed by the cons, especially con two.

There's no point having a bigger homestead if we can't get onto it, and there's no point Zynga having positive PR if it's all flushed down the toilet by new batches of server errors and slowdowns.

We will see them at some point in the future, but I think more likely first will be better and bigger storage for us to keep stuff we don't want out on the homestead and some way of limiting chickens, both of which would then ease the server load and allow us to expand without the danger of breaking the game for everyone.