FarmVille Bug Report: Rollback issue under investigation as players lose levels

Late last week, players on the officlal FarmVille forums started reporting that they had lost progress on their farms. After experiencing a refresh or out of sync notice, players would finally reach their farms only to see that they've experiences a serious rollback - grown Lambs are missing, Mystery Seedlings hadn't been grown, old crops are on their land (and withered), animals haven't been fed, coins have gone missing, and even levels have disappeared from users' experience point totals.

Thankfully, the FarmVille team at Zynga has officially acknowledged the issue, and have flagged it as "Known." While the issue is currently still "Under Investigation" - Zynga's code for "We're working on it" - they have encouraged players that have suffered any amount of rollback, no matter how minor, to contact Zynga Customer Support, so that you may be reverted to your proper and original state. Hopefully, the FarmVille team will learn from this issue, and we won't have to worry about it happening again.

[Image Credit: Adventures in Agile]

Have you experienced the "rollback" issue in FarmVille this week? What would you do if you suddenly lost a level of progress, along with all of your other earned goodies?

Quote of the Moment: 'People will get burnt out on' today's social games

Better prepare your last words, CityVille. Alright, so the top Facebook game might have longer than that in it, but Glitch developer and Tiny Speck founder Stewart Butterfield says that games designed like Zynga's best can't last forever. Speck, best known for creating Flickr, made the projection during an in-depth interview with GamesIndustry.biz.

"People will get burnt out on this," Butterfield told GI.biz. "Maybe some of them will last for a very long time, but I feel like the easy successes have been taken already, and that won't work in the long run. I mean, I could be wrong about that, and I hope I am, because that would be a lame future for games."

The social game rookie is speaking to how the majority of, if not all, popular Facebook games are designed: the Energy system. Butterfield thinks that social gamers will eventually grow tired of being forced to either wait to progress in a game after their Energy is spent or put up a buck to keep going. (Only it's slowly becoming more like $5.)

"Just my own reaction, the first time I saw that it was okay, the second time I saw that it was okay, and by whatever time it is now I'm like, 'I get this. It's transparent, and I don't give a shit about having a bigger building here that cost me three dollars.,'" the Glitch maker admitted to GI.biz. In other words, he's tired of the gated progress design in Facebook games. Actually, so should we after four years of putting up with it.

Are you sick of Energy in social games? What should social game makers do to change this system yet remain profitable so that they might keep making games?