Here’s the first batch of questions (and answers):
i want to be first when is PT going to be released
Wow that’s a good question, I never would have thought anyone would ask that one 
The very safe answer is that I can’t really say. It won’t be June 2011. There, I think that’s safe…
We’re working really hard on it, but we want this to be a great experience for y’all, so these things can take time to properly gestate (oooh I used a cool word). We’re not able to give a precise date, but when we start ramping up our launch activities I think y’all will have a better idea of what we’re aiming at.
I would like to know when or if ever, the devs are going to organize our inventory… the more stuff we have the more of a nightmare it becomes to find what we need!
This is a question I’ve often heard from everyone since I came on board, and I have to admit my Inventory is a bit cluttered too. We’ll see what we can do to make it a lot easier for you. It may be a bit too much to add tabs, but I think a search box would work wonders (if you play Farm and saw the addition to the search functionality for the Gift Box and Inventory it was super-amazing just by itself).
but i also want to know if anyone is working on stoping newbies being overwhelmed but tons of missions as soon as they start playing?
One of the things we’ve been working on is the new user experience and the best way we can present quests to the new user, but it’s also important that you have those quests early on and quite a few are storyline quests that you’ll absolutely need. The other idea is to possibly make these quests super easy so you can get them out of the way faster. Finding a decent balance is the big part of the problem we’re wrangling with.
all i wanna ask, do any of you have a Mustache? im afraid no pioneer Trail if you dont have a stache’, yes thats you mr Stumpgrinder
Every time I even try a ‘stache it looks awful so no I try to keep either clean shaven or at at least slighly scraggly.
I’d like to know if there is going to be a visible wedding or not. And Thanks for this forum!
I think you’ll find out next week!
I read in the Bugs section a great question….. How come the little guy that congratulates me and offers me a discounted price on Horse Shoes works like clock work (every 5 min) but the “blasted internet keeps goin all quiet” in the middle of tending to my buildings full of animals or trees, or when I am turning in several collections.
Ah well.. those are two very different systems.
Another expansion – I am greedy for more land
Well we’ve been “hinting” at a 41×41 expansion since 39×39 came out, so I think it’s fair to say it’s in the schedule…
Is anything nice planned for 4th of July?
Yes!
Known problems with this issues are that your process is lost after getting a Blasted Internet message, accidently purchases cause of lagging, windows doesn’t open etc.
Isn’t it possible to get this game run smoother and without the lagging problems?
This is something we are continually worrying about and some of the issues that causes loading and/or lagging can be extremely complicated and complex. The “blasted internet” message is what is termed an “Out of Sync” error, meaning something occurred where whatever actions you’re doing on your homestead is not what we think you’re doing. Worse, as soon as it actually happens, we no longer any idea of what you’re doing–and you may not get that message that you went out of sync for minutes, if not longer (sometimes you may go out of sync and not even know it at all, so when you come back to the game an hour later everything is “rolled back” because you out of sync’d and we didn’t know what you did after that occurred).
So finding the exact cause of when this happens can be tricky, because what you were doing when you got the “blasteted internet” message may not be what actually caused it–it might have happened a minute ago or two ago, and the game essentially just realizes it. Some browsers are better at reporting those kinds of issues than others, which is partially why we ask you to change browsers. Anyway, you can see that uncovering the cause of these can be difficult.
We know there are quite a few of these going on at the moment and yes we are endeavoring to get them fixed.
New features for buildings.
This is definitely on our list, to circle back at existing buildings and provide new ways to use them that fit within what we’re trying to accomplish. And I think you’ll start seeing more of this soon.
The begging. Why isn’t there a possibility to help our neighbours on the building construction. I have a lot of neighbours which have unfinished buildings on their HS and everytime i think “why can’t i use my five actions on the unfinished buildings to help them?”. My suggestion is an option to give your neighbour one random item for the construction per action you do on the neighbours unfinished building. You may ask for items or ask neighbours to come and help on your buildings. Isn’t it a social game?
This is a pretty cool idea. I like it.
I would like to know why the Unwither Crops got changed to one section instead of all withered crops? Is there anything we can do to get it changed back?
Yeah we’re looking at why this was changed. I don’t think it was intentional.
I know they’ve been looking at using weather a bit differently for the Pioneer Trail but I don’t think they’ve come up with a good solution yet.
With the amount of work we’ll be doing on the PT, have the devs considered adding all 5 Family Member icons somewhere within the game screen for quicker/easier access for switching vs. inside the My Stuff menu
Hmm I’m not to sure about this–they’ll be with you, but you’ll be using your “trail crew” a lot more than your family members for doing stuff.
Any updates to the Horsepit ? Now that we have several ways of receiving boosts and helper items (beehive, well, rodeo arena, etc) have their been talks to change things to make it at least possible to complete the badge or will this continue to be the one Badge that will be improbable to complete
I do think we’re going to circle back on this at some point. Don’t have any real details but it’s something the developers want to do.
With all the new/great looking animals, have there every been thoughts of giving us the option to “freeze” animals at the 4 various stages (esp. for those who like to create a family look for a group of critters) Could also be useful for keeping the Ugly duckling…well, Ugly (which many people love)
That’s a nice idea, I think from an art perspective it might create a bit more work (you have to have two different “states” of art for the animals) but I know it’s something you guys love (like the Ugly Duckling) so it’s definitely something we’ll be asking for going forward.
I heard some rumor/chatter of adding a social chatting aspect within the Saloon. Was this all just rumor or will we see this come to fruition (or has the idea been scrapped to focus more on the PT adventure side)
We’re examining different ways of “social chatting” and each are fraught with their own unique issues and dangers. We’ll see what happens
oh stumpy what time zone
Pacific!
Can we have a “turn off animations” option? Lots of moving animals + maximum size homestead + integrated graphics = low framerate, getting those animals to sit still should improve it…
I believe this is actually in the works, or something very similar.
What are the odds that you’ll cut out all the “mandatory requests to non-players”? Not everyone has understanding friends that are willing to get into a game just so that some other player can advance. Also, having the servers track all these “started but never used” farms = more lag…
I know, y’all hate it. We’ll see.
I’m curious to know why some things are only visible to some groups. For example, I can’t remember the last time I saw a weather forecast.
It doesn’t give you the pop-up anymore, but you can still click on the icon to get it. We did this to reduce pop ups, actually.
Aside from some of the obvious things already asked above (PT, particularly), I would like to know if more missions like the Canning Mission are in store. I miss a long mission that doesn’t involve asking for endless amounts of items from our neighbors but actually lets us work on our HS and requires planning and strategy. More of these, please?
Hmm, do you want to be able to repeat the canning mission????
I dunno, he looks kind of untrustworthy to me.
hey stumpy which level are u in frontier ville ?
Five mil. Really!
You all have some awesome images used in collections that would make for really neat decorations on our homesteads – any thoughts on making some available as decorations?
Yes, in fact we have a whole list of stuff we’d like to see in the game that we’re about to request.
p.s. still wishing for stream/river tiles and birch/willow type trees too!
Pioneer Trail has a bunch of new trees and stuff; I dunno if you’ll be able to get the river tiles as of yet because they take up a lot of room, have a bit of animation in them, and might take some work to get the tile-joining to work properly.
Last time we met the team I asked for in-game art that could be downloaded. And we got a few images on the fan page… Can we get more please?
Yes I can see if we can’t get some more for everyone.
Something unrelated to game play… Have you guys & galsever thought about merchandising? There are T shirts that can be won as prizes, but how about some figurines to collect?
If you’re asking about a Frontier Jack action figure I’m going to leave this thread right now 
Not long ago you sent out a message asking if information could be stored on our computers.. if thats what it takes, can you add MORE to our computers to stop the lag, crashes, blasted internet messages…
Well this didn’t really have to do with stopping crashes or “blasted internet” (out of syncing) but it was performance oriented.
Are there any plans to release new crops soon? Or more animals (both regular and mystery)?
Yes, definitely. And soon.
so are they also plans of new critters? (any teasers please )
There might be a new cow on the horizon.
Feed: “really” don’t like the max. of 50 we are allowed. Often I have used that up in a couple of hours only to have a quest released and I am then unable to collect items that I need.
Oooh, yeah. Unfortunately we don’t actually have power over that.
Building bonuses: now hesitant to collect them in case a quest is released that requires collecting a bonus and would then have to wait.
Ouch. Well, that makes sense.
Floating coins/xp – really annoying – always in the way, unable to move screen until they are off.
Are you talking about the coins/xp that just stay there permanently without fading, or the ones that get big and fade when your mouse is on them, but they don’t fade completely? I hate that when I’m mass-clicking to pick up my goodies and I have to move the mouse around to get it to go away.
Are there any plans in the future to be able to buy gifts with horseshoes and send them to friends and family like you can in Farmville? It’s really nice to send someone a birthday present in the game.
Good idea! We’ll see if we can make it happen
Stumpy have you guys considered updating the free gift page and some of the collections as they are really outdated
Yes!
will out homestead be paused when we are out on the trail ? like in FVEC?
I might cry into my pillow every night if they did this.
That’s… weird. I’m not sure if this was intentional or not, but can ask.
When is the problem with collections tab going to be fixed
We’re looking into it. The last I heard (a day or two ago) was when a programmer looked at it he saw that it was doing some very odd and disturbing things in order to load, and was doing some more investigation. Then he fell into a pit of despair.
I was kidding about the last part. I think a fix is in sight so it’ll load up a lot faster (it was taking 20-30 seconds for some people), which is the bulk of the problems, but don’t have a timeframe yet.
Why can’t I get rid of those stupid trail marker signs? they get in the way, and they are totally useless.
I just put mine out of the way where I can’t see them.
Last but not least… What happened to the quick post button? I liked it.. It gave me the option of posting feeds with out interferring with my game play.
There were some external issues causing problems with quick posts, not just for us but the rest of the Zynga family. Don’t have a resolution for it yet, but it’s definitely coming back.
Someone posted earlier that they would like some longer-lasting multi-part quests that are more of a challenge – like the coins and food ones. Can we expect anything like this in the near future?
You mean some big long-term goal quests like the canning one? From what I’ve seen in my short time here a lot of you hate that mission. Or is it because it eats your food after you complete? (If so I think we have a solution for that.)
A repeatable canning mission sounds kinda good! 
lol. As I mentioned above I think we’ll be slightly revising quest stuff a bit, and giving the ability to repeat more missions in the future. I don’t think anyone considered the canning one for this, but I can ask for that
Will there be a major difference between male en female animals on the shedule? Like Rams for sheep etc.
I don’t think so.
Will there be a Veterinarian or something else, which might allow you to breed animals directly (with the chance of getting those rare colorfull animals aswell)?
We might see something Veterinary in the near future, combined with something else folks have beeen asking for.
Will there be more animals some time soon (like the duck)?
Definitely!
Will there be more crops some time soon?
Definitely!
How many people will we need to have on our team when the PT begins? This is such a fun game but gets kind of boring between quests/ Love those missions
You won’t need to have anyone on your “trail crew” but there will be definite advantages of having them for each of the positions.
Also how about doing something in not allowing less then 100 levels in returning the dinners us over 100 level people send. I would drop them but they are to lovely old ladies and they just don’t get it.
If I understand this correctly you’re saying you don’t want gifts from people 100 levels below you?
will we able to send left over stuff to our friends that need them for thier missions??
Hmmm… well, I dunno. We may have a use for those parts later. So for now I’d say… probably not.
I think MaPa means that when someone is below level 100 and tries to send back a dinner from the ZMC and the bear eats it
Oh that. Ok. Not sure what’s going on there; might be a ZMC thing. I’ll make a note of it.
can we have a baby that we can keep as a baby with customizable crib plz =)
Wow you want babies now? Maybe they can do chores on the farm too!
Can we store flintlock and get a sherrif/jail instead i like that better dont liek the agency much =( sorry lol
I think we can accomodate you soon.
question about pond upgrade do we have finish fowl pond mission before we can upgrade the pond?
Hmmm I don’t think you do but don’t quote me on that. Can check to make sure.
when can we get the option to choose our reward when responding to neighbor request on fb
Ah hmmm you may have to wait a really long while for that.
Yes, would be nice to heal animals without constant begging. Hopefully this is where the veterinarian that Stumpy has alluded to will come into play.
Oh well I don’t think that mechanic is what I was referring to. I think begging is going to stay.
Tools: we have a feeding and harvesting tool. Are you going to give us a “planting” tool?
I think they want to have it so you have to look into the Market in order to plant, instead of having a tool for it. Although I suppose if you click on the tool and click to plant, it could bring up the Market page…
Not sure if you did a quick jump over my question and the one from Crisis City (immediately after mine) or if we truly “stumped” you. But I’d still like to know how the game gets planned out–how far ahead, how much connecting of the story dots, and who’s setting up the master plan, etc. My original question & Crisis City’s was on page 5 of this thread. Between doing another canning mission and curiosity about Lt. Flintlock.
Ah okay I think I missed about the question about planning. We have a rolling schedule of stuff that goes through a series of milestone dates between the time it hits conception to when it’s fully rolled out to everyone in the game. Generally we want to have “good visibility” as to what we’re doing roughly 5-6 weeks ahead of time at least. This gives time to flesh out the design of each feature, assign it to a programming pod, apply art resources, and get it properly timed into the schedule. The designers usually have a pretty good feel where they want to go with the story and the characters, and that process is done with a couple of months “visibility”.
So the only ways for me to get them, are the inn collection and leveling up.
There’s a couple of quests if I recall correctly, as well as the Rodeo Achievements.
hey are there any plans so that we can also harvest trees on our homestead with the harvester?
and also are there any plans so that we can also feed the ride-able horses with the feeder?
Hmm I think probably “no” for both; for the ride-able horses, since they are a part of your character you can’t really “feed” them (how the technology works).
What about a dismantle-able FJ-af? *blasted internet pops*’Again?!?’ *grabs FJ-af, rips head off, flings it across the room* Then later you can put the head back on (or not) to be able to rip it off again tomorrow.
Or one of those stress relief squeezy things. It’d be nice to strangle on
I’m all for that. Or something kinda Stretch Armstrong-ish. Haha the more I think about this the more I like a FJ Head Stress Reduction Ball.
I really don’t get the feed limit thing. I know FB wants limits to prevent spam and that’s why we have to wait 2-12hrs to post for something again/in the same ‘family’ of items. That makes sense, BUT the limit is kinda encouraging spam. I’ll use the pondscum kit for an example. I used up all my requests yesterday and needed 2 more pondscum kits. I had 2-4 neighbors post for them afterwards. I still had to post myself after sending them theirs b/c I reached that limit for the day. So what could’ve been 2 posts turned into 4.
It’d be nice if the bugs were worked out of that pick a reward thing I’ve heard about there.
(& I do like that it is 50 instead of something lower though. Another game I just started playing only allows 1 reward a day!)
There’s a max limit that can alter per product, so it’s not always the same (and the product itself can drop that to a smaller number). As I said, not a thing we have any true control over unfortunately.
I think the question about the dinners is this- When players over level 100 send dinners out to players under level 100, can they be allowed to send a dinner back to us? If that is not how it was meant, is it possible?
I dunno why this is happening so I can’t provide a really good answer. But yes I’ll look into it. It’s possible that kind of exchange was meant to be one-sided (cause Level 100+’s won’t need it), but I am purely speculating at this point.
Is it in the works for us to collect the bonus from the barn, orchard, livestock pen, and pond and collect the xp, etc for the things inside? Like the chicken coop?
I don’t think so.
seriously, what about rollbacks, is this being looked into, since my last posta bout them I have had to redo the same things 5 times because of them
I mentioned rollbacks in one of my answers above regarding “blasted internet” messages (which may be kinda/sorta related).