Wishful Features: Buying Varmints in FrontierVille
Perhaps now, more than ever, our newest Wishful Feature holds a lot of weight. Being an avid FrontierVille player, who has gone through, and completed, all of the available missions in the game (save for one), I've had to experience my fair share of waiting times; that is, waiting for a Snake to appear while removing Skulls or Thorns, or waiting for a Groundhog to pop up while harvesting crops planted specifically to lure them out.
With the sudden disappearance of Bears in FrontierVille stopping most users' progress with the last 12 Days of Christmas mission, this brings about the wish for a new feature that would help in so many ways - the ability to purchase Varmints.
Now, I know that many might call such a thing "cheating," or at least an "exploit" of the system, since you could literally purchase a Varmint, place it on your land, scare it off (or whack it, as the case may be), and have that count for your current mission progress, but when taking a look at the current alternatives - that being to unlock tasks requiring Varmints with Horseshoes, isn't that essentially the same thing?
Why not give users the choice as to when and how Varmints will appear on their land? Sure, keep the randomly appearing Varmints, but if someone (ie: Those struggling with the "Scare a Bear" portion of the above mission) wants to spend a few thousand (or even tens of thousands) of coins to purchase a Bear in order to finish the mission before it expires, we should definitely be allowed to.
One could argue that the ability to purchase Skulls, full grown trees, and the like from the store equates to "purchasing a Varmint" but to that "one" I would remind them - there is no guarantee that you'll receive a Snake or a Bear from clearing these newly purchased debris or tree items. You could very well be wasting Horseshoes to receive absolutely nothing in return. The ability to purchase Varmints in the game would make it an absolute guarantee, which is something I think all users would appreciate right about now.
What do you think of this issue in FrontierVille? Would you purchase Varmints from the store in order to more easily complete missions, or would you consider such an addition to be cheating? Let us know in the comments.
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Wishful Features is a regular column on Games.com - The Blog in which we talk about the features we wish were present in our favorite social games. Leave your ideas and feedback in the comments!
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