- more performance improvements. You will find a new setting for graphics quality – Optimized and High. The differences are really small in terms of quality (we ourselves can hardly see the difference), but the Optimized version uses about half the video memory. We highly recommend you leave it on Optimized, and only players with medium or high performance computers that can keep 60 FPS easily use the High setting. Again, we still have a few more ideas regarding performance improvements, but now players with low performance graphic cards should not get the black/grey screen or “game not loading” issues related to this or Swiftshader.
- Easter event will arrive a bit late this year, but will be here. We focused on the performance issues, so you can have a smooth experience playing the game, and it took a bit of time.
- added Frank’s Exchange Office as a tab in your XP bar, if you have too much of some items and too few of others. Don’t ask us about the rate. It’s Frank.
IMPORTANT NOTE: A few players wrote us about Joe requiring too much Energy, with all the new activities, that you have to wait for Energy, and that it’s hard to keep up with all the new stuff. We wish to address this issue:
1. You ARE NOT required to do all tasks! The game is not designed in a way requiring you to do all tasks.
2. The game is designed to give you more activities to choose from, to complete in the same amount of time as before (planting/harvesting, processing crops plus an extra activity with Joe (logging, mining, digging)).
3. Increasing Joe’s Energy so that you complete all activities would be presumptive of us regarding your time. Some players wrote us complaining they don’t have time do do all the new activities. That is precisely the reason Joe’s Energy is kept at 60! If you had energy to complete all activities, it would take up a lot of your time, because you would feel compelled to do them all.
4. Increasing Joe’s Energy would also ruin the balance of the game. We designed activities with Joe to give nice coin rewards, and adding more Energy would make things unbalanced. Many games that are unbalanced would lead you to do only the activity most rewarding, and that will lead to low amounts of fun while playing the game in no time.
5. You don’t have to wait for Energy, as it’s not required. If you choose to do so, or if you want to progress faster, there’s not much we can do about it, of course. But, if you feel that waiting for Energy is not fun we would suggest you wait until your crops are ready, and then, with the Energy you have, choose to do an activity that seems most fun for you at that moment. This is the best way to use Joe, in our opinion.
6. HOWEVER – we think we understand where the problem is: that no matter what you do with Joe, you never have a sense of completion like you have with crops. With crops, you can say “ok, all my crops are done, job finished!”. We have plans to address this issue. That is why we have Joe’s skills (the data is being logged thing). We will implement that as soon as we can.