FarmVille "Allow Walk" Option Expected to Return This Week

The cows, sheep, ducks and other assorted livestock of popular social game FarmVille were set loose last Thursday night when developer Zynga added the "Allow Walk" option in each animal's drop-down menu. Once enabled, the animals wandered around the farm on their own until the "Stay" option was selected.

Or at least, they would have wandered around on their own if it weren't for a few kinks that arose -- according to some users (including FarmVille tips and tricks blog, Harvest Guide), the animations were jerky, animals ended up walking backwards and many "out of sync" issues were reported (this happens when the state of your game doesn't match the version that FarmVille servers have stored for you). The feature was disabled late Saturday night, according to FarmVille's official Facebook updates. As of this posting, we were still able to see the "Allow Walk" option in the drop-down menus, although nothing happens when it is selected.

We reached Zynga for comment, who told us that the feature will be turned back on after they resolve the syncing issues on the game, which they expect to happen by the end of the week.

"As you can imagine," said Zynga's Lisa Chan, "sometimes it's tough dealing with all of the bugs that come across when serving over 15 million players a day, but it's all part of the learning process."

Did any of you get to try out the "Allow Walk" feature before it was turned off? Did you experience any of the syncing or animation issues? Let us know in the comments!