CityVille a Scam?

No, you’re not reading one of those affiliate marketing trick blog posts to get you to buy something.

I’ve been playing Cityville and FarmVille for a few weeks. And, despite CityVille’s 25% higher ratings than FarmVille, I think that CityVille takes advantage of game players. If you love the game, you’ll hate this off-the-cuff review

Reasons Why CityVille is Scammy

Like Farmville, but worse, it uses up your Facebook pages with colorful pictures and words promoting Zynga, its manufacturer, to recruit new customers. It reminds me of CNET who, today, made me opt in to “like” their Facebook page before I could “listen” to the live blog of some important person giving a speech. Or, worse, like Amway or a multi-level scheme.
CityVille’s pop-up ads keep reminding me to send gifts or, worse yet, send out public messages telling others who belong to my town–and even all my friends–how I just gave money to poor little children in town or became mayor or won 100 in change.
Some programmer at Zynga must have worked for an oil company before realizing he could make more money with mobile games. It’s “energy” or, rather, lack of it. I earn so much energy each time I play. Invariably, just as I start collecting rent from a slum district I built, I run out of energy. Up pops another window telling me to ask my friends for more and, while I’m waiting, as if my friends have lots of energy, why not buy some with real money.
How I use energy is interesting too. I LOSE energy every time I collect the rent or harvest a crop or do anything that’s good and noble about running a town. That’s after another popup window warns me about running out of food supplies for the local restaurants. I should GET energy when I harvest a crop. After all, it’s a lot easier to harvest than to plant.
Like FarmVille, I can’t throw up buildings until I get enough residents in my town or reach level 20 or such. The Zynga folks get me started with a few cheap bungalows; then I’m on your own, recruiting, recruiting, recruiting my friends to move to “Brian’s Town.”
Same’s true about setting up community buildings, like the local library, city hall and such. I’m encouraged to throw them up. Then I’ have to recruit more people to fill the offices: police captains, librarians and city hall clerks. (Back to Amway, I really think that Zynga hired them as a consultant.)

As you can see, I could go on and on about why Zynga’s CityVille is a scam. But I gotta get back to FarmVille and CityVille to take care of the withering crops and collect the rent.

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