CityVille: HQ Payouts doubled, game balance tweaked, bugs fixed

Almost a week has gone by since Zynga released their first major game upgrade for CityVille, providing for a Bonus Meter that's easier to fill, resulting in more profits for users, and a streamlined storage bar, that now contains both ship and overall Goods in one total (among other changes and improvements), but they haven't stopped there.

The developer has now announced an even larger list of changes that have taken place in the game this week (including one once again affecting the Bonus Meter), with some of these actually working to hurt the very rapid progress users have been experiencing since the game's launch.

As usual, we have the full list of improvements and changes behind the break, so meet us there, won't you?
First and foremost - the good news. The first bit of good news it the fact that HQ payout bonuses have now been doubled. That's right, from now on, when collecting from your Franchise HQs (not those franchises that your friends have added to your town - the actual Franchise skyscraper(s) you have in your town), you'll earn double the coins as before. With coins being perhaps the most valuable commodity in the game (aside from maybe energy), anyway to earn bonus coins is definitely appreciated.

Next, a bit of bad news. When supplying your franchises, you'll no longer receive bonus energy. While energy hasn't really been an issue for most users, who can play the game in five or ten minute sessions and never run out, this might become a bit harder to do, as this bonus energy is no more. Zynga says the reasoning behind this alteration was to "improve game balance," so we'll have to see how that works out for them.

As for Quests, earning items for your quests will now be easier thanks to the altered time limit for posting item requests. At launch, the request window was "once every 24 hours." Now though, players can now post item requests for items (like Chocolates, Endorsements, and the like, depending on the Quest) once every four hours.

Two other improvements come in the form of tweaked train values, which sees the amount of coins required for each amount of good when sending off your trains being altered slightly, and in the form of a changed Bronze Statue Payout Bonus. The Bronze Statue is a decorative item available to purchase from the store. Now, though, the payout bonus that you receive from the Bronze Statue has been reduced, again, as Zynga says, to help improve game balance.

While this is already a lot of changes to take in, there are even more general bug fixes to speak of, ranging from improving the texts in wall posts, to lessening the amount of Out of Sync errors that a player could potentially run into while performing certain (at the time) bugged activities. Here's the list of bug fixes, straight from Zynga:

        Collections Feed Posts - Collections feed posts now correctly states "Get 50 coins".
        Bonus Meter - Fixed/adjusted bonus meter payouts, and issues related to bonus meter progression.
        OOS errors when supplying franchises - Fixed the issue that was causing OOS errors when supplying franchises.
        Friends listed on the requests page - Requests of the same type can only be sent to the same friend once per day; fixed the issue where friends were still appearing on the list, which was causing some of the gifts/requests related issues.
        Franchise HQ displayed payout bonus - Fixed the issue where franchise HQ payout bonuses were being displayed incorrectly.
        Quest: Build City Funds - Resolved the issue with requesting "Capital Endorsements".
        XP Discrepancy - Fixed a discrepancy between XP being added and XP shown, which was causing OOS errors after leveling
        Coin Discrepancy - Fixed a discrepancy between coins being added when collecting from businesses to the coins shown, which was causing the appearance of losing coins after refreshing the game and OOS errors when spending coins which were not being counted.

As we said at the beginning of this post, we can now see that the Bonus Meter has been altered yet again (seems they haven't been able to strike a nice balance as of yet). However, instead of changing the overall amount of coins that are awarded (like with the first change of the meter), we now see its progression being altered. That is, after the first week, teh meter would stick at the "Masterful," and would slowly fill, if it ever actually filled at all. This resulted in one large sum of bonus coins being awarded (in my game the bonus was always somewhere around 4,000+ coins.

Now, though, the Masterful bar fills just as quickly as the others, and once it is completely full, the bonus levels cycle back around to the first stage of "Bonus," and continues from there. In this way, you may receive four 1,000 coin bonuses instead of one large 4,000 coin bonus, which is actually fine with us. Hopefully this is how the meter will stay too, as we really like all of those bonus coins that we've been getting.

CityVille: Changes to interface make the game more hassle-free!

By now, most of us have gotten pretty used to the gameplay in CityVille, and by extension, we've also gotten used to the design problems (however few, or minor) that have been present in the user interface. Two of these problems have been fixed by Zynga, as they have announced via the game's official forums that the technical side of gameplay has now been streamlined to be more user, or at least "patience" friendly.

First and foremost, you'll no longer receive a pop-up every time you collect a collectible from a building, when that collectible is going into a collection that has already been completed, but has yet to be turned in. That is, if you're saving up all of your "Peaceful Living Collection" items, because you simply don't need any more free White Picket Fences, you'll no longer be bothered by a pop-up that must be clicked on, alerting you that you've completed the collection again and again. This will greatly help those that like to max out their Bonus Meters, as you won't have to stop clicking on Bonus items long enough to close the window, and therefore won't be as likely to lose your streak without hitting the "Masterful" level in the meter.

Another big change comes with the new ability to now use Battery (read: Energy) items from your inventory in rapid succession, without having to wait for the inventory to close, and open the inventory all over again. Essentially, this will save you from having to reopen and close the inventory ad nauseum, which makes recharging your energy that much easier when doing so with gifts accepted from friends.

Two other changes worth mentioning come with quests and other in-game items, not associated with the gameplay menus. They see a change in the Cinema Quest line, that removes a bug that would stop the Cinema from being available to purchase even after unlocking it in the previous quest, and an addition of Support and Forum links to the game page, so that all players now have instant access to Zynga's support site and the official forums, should they experience problems while playing CityVille.