ChefVille Aftertaste: Zynga may finally be listening
If you're a long time player of any of Zynga's Facebook games, from Cafe World to Pioneer Trail, you're likely familiar with the widespread complaint that Zynga "doesn't listen to fans," and is more comfortable releasing a never-ending supply of new content, rather than fixing any existing problems within its games. In ChefVille, that almost seemed to be the case as well, as the game begin to drag with little to do outside of repetitively cooking dishes for mastery stars, along with the constant struggle of earning or crafting ingredients. Now, though, cooking has been made a bit easier, and new quests have been released that give us more to do than just watch the clock.
Via the release of the Second Mixer, the Tomato Sauce Rack and the Dough Freezer, we can now prepare twice as many sauces/doughs as before (including Tomato Sauce), or we can simply collect them outright from these new stalls. These particular ingredients (Dough and Tomato Sauce) may have only taken two and five minutes to craft, respectively, but by removing that crafting process entirely, Zynga has not only saved us those few minutes of time, but it has also removed the requirement to spend so many Tomatoes, Onions, Milk and Flour, which can, in turn, be used in other recipes.
Thankfully, quests have been released alongside these new releases so that we'll have more to work on outside of mastery star grinding, and the recent promotion with Food Network's Restaurant Impossible offers more content still. Hopefully, the drought of new quests and content that we've seen over the past few weeks is over, and was simply a product of the game still being so new.
Of course, with this additional content comes the need for a balance, as we could just as easily become overwhelmed with quests as we could be left twiddling our thumbs. Zynga has made that mistake before in games like Pioneer Trail, which has lost millions of players because of it. On the other hand, CastleVille was headed down the same path, with quests being released every few days. Over the last few weeks, though, content releases have been slowed to once every 7-8 days. Is Zynga finally listening? Has the top dog on Facebook finally found a balance between too much and not enough? Each game is different, of course, but at least ChefVille is definitely headed in the right direction... Perhaps, for now, there's no need to worry after all.
Play ChefVille on Facebook now --->
Were you happy to see these additional cooking stations and quests released in ChefVille, or were you satisfied with the challenge the game presented prior to their release? Sound off in the comments!
