ChefVille Aftertaste: Will the Zynga.com ticker ever come back?

Over the past few months, ChefVille players have found a great gameplay partner in Zynga.com, as playing the game on Zynga's home away from Facebook allowed players to earn help from strangers as well as friends for wall posts. Posting a request for a news feed item would cause that request to show up not only on your regular Facebook wall, allowing all of your actual friends to respond, but you'd also gain the help of potentially thousands of players on Zynga.com via nothing more than a simple click.

This post "ticker," that appears on the right side of the screen, works well in games like CityVille and FarmVille 2 [pictured], and it worked great in ChefVille as well, until a few weeks ago, that is. Sometime in December, players started noticing problems in getting their news feed posts to work when playing ChefVille on Zynga.com. Not only were they not appearing in the news feed ticker at the side of the screen, but they weren't being posted to Facebook either (or, the posts that were there didn't work). What seemed like a relatively simple bug was ignored for a few days by Zynga, until the development team decided to step in and make a post acknowledging the problem. Sometime during the shuffle, the ticker vanished entirely from ChefVille's experience on Zynga.com, and it hasn't returned.

This isn't to say that news feed posts aren't working, as players can now jump back into ChefVille on Zynga.com and make progress as though they were playing on Facebook, but the ticker is nowhere to be found. Why hasn't it been reactivated? The ticker never stopped displaying news feed posts during the bug, but players simply couldn't activate them since the news feed posts themselves were broken. Are the two connected? Is there really a bigger issue going on in ChefVille's backend that Zynga still needs to repair?

While I'd love to give Zynga the benefit of the doubt, I can't help but wonder if the developer used this bug as an excuse to remove the ticker and stop players from making so much easy progress. After all, the harder it is to complete something, the more likely (in theory) a player will pay real money to skip the hassle. Could this be the real cause of the ticker's removal? If it shows back up, we'll let our suspicions fall to the side, but if we're still having this discussion a month from now, I doubt very many players are going to be happy.

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Have you noticed a slowdown in your game progress since the news feed ticker was removed from ChefVille on Zynga.com, or do you never play game the game on Zynga's hub anyway? Sound off in the comments!