Wishful Features: Tools as a free gift in FrontierVille

How many times have you had this situation? You get a new mission in FrontierVille - you have tons of food, animals to sell, trees to chop down - the works. You think you're set for whatever Zynga can throw your way, and suddenly, you realize that the quest calls for having a certain number of Tools, that you likely don't have.

What do you do in this situation? The default response is to do nothing, since we are currently unable to flat out give a Tool to another user in the game, and therefore your friends can't simply send you some Tools when you need them from their own inventory. As many of you already know, you can only earn Tools by being hired by one of your friends to work on their homestead. After they hire you, it's an entirely voluntary (read: easy to skip) extra step that your friends must go through to post a free Tool to your wall.

What if your friends think you don't want the Tool? What if they simply don't like spamming friends' walls? What if the post has been sitting, hidden on your profile for so long that you forget to click on it and it expires? As you can see, there are a lot of "What if" situations that can arise when talking about something that really should be quite simple.

Instead of personally begging your FrontierVille neighbors to hire you on their land, and then to share the Tool with you on your wall, Zynga should update the FrontierVille free gifts page to include this highly valuable item. There's no sense in a player being stuck on a mission due to something that is entirely out of their control (that is, they can't control who their friends hire at any one point in time), and then losing out on the appropriate rewards because they simply couldn't finish the mission in time.

Perhaps with time, Zynga will come to understand this fact as well, and we'll be sure to let you know if and when they do.

What do you think about Tools in FrontierVille? Do you think they're useless, or an underappreciated gem in the rough? Let us know in the comments.