One of our dear readers DraXoin has posted an in-depth guide on how to deal with FrontierVille glitches and problems, speed of loading the homestead and basically everything that makes our pain so big in the game. I have decided to share the entire article with you here since it is so useful (it was initially posted as a comment here on FrontierVille Info).
So read on and enjoy – and thank you so much DraXoin for writing this amazing guide!
Zynga is not going to change how they do things nor will they take too much notice of people complaining, they will try and compromise by replacing lost items etc.
I have been doing a little bit of reading from articles and publications as to loading issues and glitches with frontierville.
What intrigued me the most was why some people have lots of issues and few have none at all while others only have a few small ones like myself, although I do have a educated idea as to why.
I write a lot of logic control software for automation in industries as well as writing and coding software, flash is a brilliant way to interface with it. It gives the user a lot more capability and control on what’s going on in their processes.
After going through a few homesteads looking for roses the other day, I found some homesteads cluttered and items rammed into each other that you can’t get too because they are way to close to each other. These farms where painstakingly slow to load and 9/10 times didn’t have what I was after.
So after reading what I could, I found why a lot are having loading and bug issues and some have little or no trouble at all. I will try to explain as simple as I can and hopefully resolve some of your issues. PLEASE NOTE: I have been playing this game from the first day it started over two years ago. The following is a collection of user experience, dealing with support staff and reading articles from reliable sites. What works for me MAY NOT necessarily work for everyone else excepting the items on game play.
Read this at your own discretion, I don’t really want negative comments from people who think they know better, the last time I posted a helpful article, and copped flack from idiots who I knew for a fact had not a clue. Which made me reluctant to post any more help articles. I have no problem with trying to help people or answer questions but I certainly won’t tolerate idiots saying..” I don’t think that’s right”… Don’t think it. KNOW IT!! And explain why and don’t disappear and never respond. If you like your farm cluttered up and stuff that looks like a nuclear cyclone has been thru it.. THEN don’t read any further……
The support site is constantly changing and the current one atm is:
http://support.zynga.com/CP_SearchResults_WebFull?custlayoutid=1&gameId=67&k=contact+support&layout=WebFull&layouttmpl=Tmpl_WebFull_1&loc=en_US
When frontierville loads, it aligns everything to an invisible grid, that’s why things can only go in certain spots. The loader loads each item separately and calculates its position from the user’s database. The flash platform was never designed to have so many items at once let alone thousands of users accessing the standard base game at the same time, but Zynga just keep adding more and more and more when the platform itself is somewhat limited.
With a computer, less is more, the less you have on it, especially with windows, the better. Windows itself never really finishes loading. It is always looking for modified files, looking at existing files such as photos, movies etc. This all takes memory, CPU time and is always doing this in the background.
Some items take longer to load depending on size and graphic detail. The more graphics and size, the longer it takes to load.
When items are placed too close to each other, the loader has to determine which grid reference it’s placed in and the loader can misinterpret them as two items being one, hence you can’t access it. This happens a lot on cluttered homesteads.
Cows, horses, animals are fine as they are a pre set definitive but once they get too close to an edge of a decoration, statue or building etc, it can tend to overlap into that item, a good way to describe that is bleeding over, the loader can’t make up it’s mind whether its an animal or a building and spends a long time trying to work it out and mostly continues to try and work it out…while this is happening, it’s of course, using resources, CPU time and memory both on your end and the server end. This is happening at incredible speeds but put that and all the other items together, it’s going to slow things down.
Statues, decorations and other items as such take the longest to load as there is lots more graphic detail and uneven edges so the loader spends a lot of time estimating the edges and where to place them in the grid. So, the less you have of these. The better.
The bonuses and XP points you get from some statues and items as such are not really worth having unless you have tons of them and then it reverts back to the above. Catch 22
Having multiples of the same buildings is not necessarily an advantage, some you will only get a bonus from one building,
I see some farms have 6 or more chicken coops when the max is four. These where able to be done, before Zynga put a limit on them, some do slip thru the limiting software. Zynga put a maximum limit on items to try and stop the loading issues and server loads.
Crops are pre defined so there are no worries as to how many you have.
Animals that are stored in barns etc do still have to load but because it’s not displaying the graphics, it will be quicker
The ones that can’t be stored such as moose will load slower and the user has to determine how many to have. Fifty is a good average number. Some animals are not worth having. Rare animals and the ones you have to buy will not always be in missions such as brown moose that was in the mastery mission and was a dumb idea, I just left that, it doesn’t affect future missions.
A few days ago, I managed to get Zynga to remove all neighbors between levels 170 to 100 as that was where most of the cluttered homesteads where, in their infinite wisdom, they removed everyone. However, I found to my delight, that this also removed my ghost and dead neighbors and my homestead speeded up dramatically. Zynga said that ghost neighbors etc don’t affect game play but being a code writer. I knew better. Zynga should or probably can remove these neighbors but they won’t probably for statistic or figure purposes. Must look good for investor reports. Don’t take that as gospel, it’s a theory but that would be most likely as to why they won’t remove them. Or perhaps they might be allowing for those users to come back and play later without having to start all over again. Thankfully I was able to remember most of my good neighbors and very quickly re added them. NOTE: although I had no neighbors, to them, I was still there because I had not dropped them as a friend or removed frontierville as an application. Some I was able to re-add some had to remove me as a neighbor and then re request me as one. For some unknown reason, it had to be done both ways for some neighbors.
A ghost neighbor is a user that has stopped playing frontierville and is identified in your neighbor’s ladder as a gray square with a question mark in it where a picture should be; little or no details on that user and usually has neighbor request pending. Sadly these take up neighbor slots. They are caused by that person not removing you before they remove frontierville off their facebook or they have removed you as a friend, or both. Some do have pictures and info but they are not in your friends list. The best way to source these is to visit their homestead and when you go to state that you have been there by posting a free brick etc, you can’t post to their wall. Some people have this turned off so you will need to work out who is active and who is dead. Incidentally, some people post the news stand items and have the wall post capability turned off.
Zynga don’t control what the user puts on their homestead except limiting buildings.. they also won’t remove users buildings that are there as that would cause major havoc and major fights. If you follow the above then hopefully it will remove a lot of issues.
Below is a basic guideline as to what works for me.
I have a minimum of 10 of each basic animal, crops, and trees. I use 10 to allow users using raging buffalo or loyal pioneer drink to access 10 items to work on. 5 is a good standard if you don’t have room.
Animals being Cows, sheep, pigs, goats and horses
Trees, apricot, apple, peach and cherry
Crops, cotton, flax, peanuts, wheat, corn
thankyou so much for your advice i have a cluttered farm i also have more bugs and loading time for the game is 10 to 15 mins zynga has been of no help other than finishing missions which i would rather do my self as there is no point in them doing it, i to have been on the game since the start but i am only level 101 because of all the problems i have. I will go back to my farm and take your advice and hopefuly see an improvement, thanks again
The moose and badger can now be stored. I got a message from a friend on this the other day and then I tried it and it worked. I stored my moose in the animal hospital. I didn’t bother with the badgers. I hope this helps other players with a lot of moose.
thanks for this info. i will clean up my homestead and hopefully this resolve many of my loading issues.
hope you have a nice day!
ty so very much for the advice given, i am sure if alot take this information and use it.. that it will help in the long run. i for one will be doing a clean up on a few of the things you have pointed out…contacting zynga on ghost neighbours will be one of the biggies . again thanks for the much needed information..
Thank you so much!! I have often wondered about the loading issues when I have visited farms where there is literally stuff everywhere. I am now at level 200, and I have kept my farm clutter free since the time of storage sheds. I have to say that I really don’t have too many loading issues either, although, occasionally I do have other game issues that I take up with Zynga. Keep up the great posts! I sure appreciate it!
This was a great article Thanks so much for sharing the info
Finally someone said (out loud) what I’ve felt all along. Clutter is clutter! I believe so many people leave their possessions visible to show the rest of us how successful they are. If they would only learn that once a missions requires tending adult cows, to put 5 – 10 out for visitors in an easy to find spot. This is how to be a “good” neighbor!
When we go to visit, it isn’t to observe all they’ve done, but to get what we need and move on.
Thank you again for your advice. Hopefully participants will take it.
I keep a fairly ‘clean’ homestead. but I have several ‘ghost neighbors’. I have asked Zynga for help and they told me to remove them as friends first then remove them as neighbors. Problem being – they are not on my friends list. They are definately DEAD WEIGHT. I cannot do anything with them and I cannot add more neighbors as I have my 500 limit and keep getting the message ‘remove neighbors before adding new neighbors”. Cannot do. . .
Is the answer to hassel Zynga until they remove all my neighbors and start over with my currrent friend list? They were not very helpful the first couple of times.
Loved the advise – posted the link on my fb page for others to read. And you are right, higher level players have clutter – NOT ALL (so don’t yell at me) but most truly do.
Just think how the game would load if EVERYONE cleaned house.
Any suggestions on ghost neighbors greatly appreciated.
excellant article and very usefull l am glad to say my stead is not to bad but some of my top players are as u say damm cluttered and take ages to load.
Thanks so much for the information.I’m going to try it and hope it works for me.
Thank you for such an informative article from someone that is so much knowledgeable than I am. I have been playing from the start of the game too, and just from playing around with my farm, I’ve removed every fence, flowerpot, and other useless decorations. I store every animal possible, only putting them out when they are needed for my neighbors on missions….A lot of what you said, I have stumbled on from trial and error, but other things I did not know….Thanks so much and I will be waiting for any other words of wisdom you have!
Dee
Thanks for the information! I don’t have trouble with the site loading, but what I DO have trouble with is receiving gifts (specifically those that you have to publish to your own wall to get to finish a mission). Thoughts? Suggestions?
Thanks!
Cindy
i dont mind the ghost neighbors, i like having them those i use for missions that require tree chopping or weeding, those you can rob forever without worry of messing up their scheme, if you play everyday like i do i keep my debris level down, then here comes a mission needing them, well there are the ghost neighbors to go visit to get what you need, id like to keep mine around as long as possible, at 1 point during the canning mission i had 2000 ox on my homestead to finish that 1 in a timely manner, it was great having the ghost homesteads to go rob, because i had no trees or weeds to get
thank you this is very helpful.
Everything you said makes sense to me, you are right in your statement, “anyone with a negative comment, does not have a clue”. I appreciate you wanting to help us. I agree with Mary (post 1/9/2012) I use my “ghost neighbors” for tree chopping, weeding and clearing missions”. Thanks again for all your helpful advice – I am going now to get ride of some stuff
Thank you for the comments, when I get the time, I would love to sit down ( with no kids )and write a document on how you can really speed up your browsers. Unfortunately, I have no info on Internet explorer as I don’t use it and never will use it. I keep it on as some websites are not written for anything else. But the best browsers I have come across atm is Firefox and chrome. These ones are open source ( can see the programming and how it has been written ) and the authors just love feedback on them. The other day, as I mainly use firefox, the neighbours wouldn’t load so I used chrome which had no problem. I have never fully understand why it does that but it works so I leave it at that
When you start to get posting issues and request issues, you may find that zynga or facebook is slow…or both. This is and can cause what is termed, “packet loss”. Before I forget, A packet is data that is wrapped up and sent, the internet doesn’t actually stream although it appears that way because it is fast. What it is doing is sending and receiving packets of information at a very high speed. One packet will contain data that is in the next and previous packet sent/received, so in a sense they are all linked. When you experience packet loss, the browser can freeze for a brief moment or longer..then suddenly away it goes again. Your router creates packets to send off to your ISP, then the ISP creates a new packet and forwards that on to where you wanted it to go. It can get complicated on how to explain this. Just think of it as a GPS. All the data is included in the packets on what it is, where it goes and what it needs to do. When you get loss, the server has several attempts to recover the previous packet. 9/10 times it is successful but that 1 is lost forever and this is where you will tend to get timeout errors. When you reload, it creates another packet the same and has another go. If you are accessing a slow server btw servers have a time protocol. This means that that server has a x amount of time to recover/process that packet. If it is not completed in that time frame, it will discard it otherwise it could be there for years trying to process it and this also slows things down.
Zynga does have flaws and bugs, but nowhere near the amount to which most people think. if you are on a 256/256k speed, you may tend to experience a few errors. 512/512 or 512/256 you may not have as many. so that speed as an example, I would recommend no slower than 256 but in Australia I think most ISPs’ now have minimum 512 speeds on their plans, I am not sure, they vary from company to company.
So getting back to the main part to which I seem to have turned off without indicating signal, One thing to check is your connection speeds.
A really really good site to check your speeds is
http://www.speedtest.net/
When you go here have nothing else opened/running like windows live messenger or any other application that accesses the internet as this will make your results a tad inaccurate.
Just have this site open and nothing else
A ping reply of 40 ms is not that bad but less than that is really really good. Any higher than that then the data transfer speed is tending to be slow and congested. If you get a speed transfer rate of about 12k/sec or higher it’s pretty good.
If interested I can keep going with further information that may help you
Sorry, forgot about the ghost neighbours.
To be honest, I think it’s two things. 1. they want all those long gone people there for statistic purposes.
2. They don’t have the slightest clue on how to fix it
All mine disappeared when they removed all my neighbours BUT now after a week, I see a few coming back and some that I never had originally. So for the time being. This one has me stumped. Except for reason number 1.
I hope that I did not miss this info as I am reading while on my lunch break at school (still have students with me though). My major problem is getting the box to pop up and say it detected a bug. Then the next box pops up saying I need to refresh my game. Somethimes this happens before I even get to do the first thing!! Mosr days I spend more time refreshing than playing. Is there anything I can do about that?
Thank you for the article. If anybody does figure out how to fix the ghost neighbor issue please share. I to have tried to get help from support removing them and they were unable to help me. Thanks Again!
They can remove them, but they won’t. They say they are fixing it but of course..never believe anything they say. This issue has been around for at least 2 years now.
They won’t remove them as that will destroy their statistics perhaps or other reasons but one thing is for sure. They can be removed
As for the constant refreshing and bugs message, that usually means a bad or really slow connection OR an issue with your account, more than likely bad connection. They can adjust your account with better access but you will need to contact them
Thanks for this…as an autocad user, this makes complete sense to me! It’s too bad we can’t have a cute AND efficient homestead!
since i have a pc for heavy graphics use, i don’t have near the amount of troubles others have, but still get crashes occasionally…not gonna give up all my gee gaw decorations!
I can’t open my collections and haven’t been able too for many months. My flash crashes when I try. This is annoying as I could use things that you get there for my game play. Any help would be appreciated. I tried zynga but they told me to clear my cache and I replied that it didn’t help. Instead of further help I got a survey from them and I filled it out saying no my problem wasn’t fixed but never heard back.
Thanks for that, it sound logical, logical enough that Im off to do some uncluttering. Watch this space
Firstly I loaded Google Chrome. Then got rid / sold unwanted junk on my farm. I also stored buildings, animals, trees and anything else that could be stored. Not over loading my storage ie barn, pond etc I sold.
Everything is much better loading normally but its not perfect. There are the odd times that is loads ridiculously slow but I found returning to the home page and going back into Pioneer Trail helped.
Thanks!!!
After all, what a great site and informative posts, I will upload inbound link – bookmark this web site? Regards, Reader.
When frontierville loads, it is loading every single file associated with the game, trees, animals, buildings.sounds….EVERYTHING!!!!. Now the biggest killer here is that it does this even though you may not have those items or animals, decorations etc. it even loads the animal growth stages pictures and building stages as well.
Zynga could stop it doing this but to be quite frank, I don’t think they care. It would take some complex tweaking and programming on zyngas side to do and this is causing what I think most of the loading and bug issues. While your CPU and memory is having one hell of a time trying to process all this data, it’s also starting to time out as the RAM and CPU are 100% full up working, therefore it hasn’t any left to keep the connection alive. My system is incredibly fast and runs multiple CPU’s. it used to run about 2% use until they released the new missions and now it’s sitting on around 8% and for a multiple cpu server…that is a lot.
People with average domestic machines are going to get hit a lot harder so what I did was write the article below to help speed things up a little bit better.
Since Frontierville is getting more and more into having us play good neighbor, I thought it might be a good time to revise and reshare the information for Adblock Plus for Firefox
This plug-in allows you to control visible content from websites by filtering your browser’s requests for data sources and images. Its base services will allow you to avoid certain websites known to contain viruses, popups and other harmful, offensive and otherwise undesirable content.
With a little tweaking we can make this plug-in work for us by blocking certain graphics that Frontierville (or other games) asks for. What it does is catches the request for the graphic, then it stops the request from being made to Frontierville’s asset area.
You can block all graphics from a directory, of a type, or by specific name.
So lets begin. You can find Adblock Plus at http://adblockplus.org/en/ . The download site includes the installer and a tutorial on how to set it up to block the commonly unwanted stuff mentioned above.
After you set it up, you then have the option for blocking game content. The first method allows you to always block certain things. Say for instance that you never wanted to see chickens again; you could add the filter frontier.zgncdn.com/*animals*chicken*.swf
This filter prevents firefox from asking for any file at the zynga site for frontierville that is in the animals directory having the word chicken in it. Cool huh? Now you can visit those neighbors that uses 1000 chickens to get lots of xp per day, and never see the chickens. But you also cant tend their chickens. Who cares! Using the interface you can toggle this on or off so when you want to see your own chickens, just turn it off and refresh. Pow, chickens are back.
What to do:
1. Find your adblock icon, it will be a small red icon in your browser window with ABP written in it
2. Right mouse click the icon and select FILTER PREFFERENCES
3. Select ADD FILTER GROUP and rename the new group to whatever you like ( I called mine frontierville neighbour filters )
4. Copy the filters below ( copy & paste method ) then paste them into the group window on the right
5. exit and reload/refresh and if ENABLED is ticked on that group, it will be active next time you load frontierville
Frontierville is constantly bringing out new items and most of them useless so what you do now is load frontierville, right click on the ad block icon and select OPEN BLOCKABLE ITEMS That will bring up a small window and will display ALL the items that can be blocked. Highlight the item you don’t want, then select BLOCK THIS ITEM ( be careful here ), a list of options will open and you can select this item independently OR you can block multiple items within that server folder using wildcards * e.g. *.mp3 will block ALL mp3 sounds loading. ( I keep that ticked all the time )
Below are some basic filters that I use when visiting neighbors, if I wanted to tend. say cows…I would tick off
frontier.zgncdn.com/*animals*cow*.swf ( this will load ALL types of cows )
or if I just wanted cream cows to load I would tick off
frontier.zgncdn.com/*animals*cow*cream_cow.swf
I AM NOT GETTING CREDIT FOR THE FLUFFY SHEEP THAT I HAVE RAISED. NEED TO RAISE 20 BUT I DON’T GET CREDIT WHEN I GET THEM RAISED. ALSO WHEN I CLICK ON A REQUEST TO SEND A FRIEND ON THE NEWS FEED I DON’T GET A GIFT WHEN I SHOULD. WILL NEVER GET QUESTS FINISHED AT THIS RATE.