Exploring Farmville ..

Recently I started playing Farmville internet game on Facebook. Initially the game seemed boring but the graphics and animation attracted me and after 2 days I found the game really interesting and started playing it for nearly 1 hour per day.

Yesterday I tried to analyze my decision making regarding my crop selection in Farmville. Initially I thought why should I waste time in analyzing it and just visited my neighbor farms to see what they are growing but was unable to find any similar pattern in them. It might be because of variant individual likes and dislikes for different fruits, vegetable and flowers. Finally I decided to do some analysis on crop selection myself and found some really interesting patterns.

As I had reached level 11 only few crops are available to me for cultivation. I did the hourly profitability analysis based on real cost price (Cost price of crop + Ploughing charges)/crop and compared it with the selling price. Experience gain per crop is also an important variable in the game and hence it is again required to be used as a active decision variable.

Now if we refer to the table here we found that Bell peppers provide us gain of $ 2.25 Coins/hour in comparison of wheat which has low return per hour of just $ 0.9 Coins/hour. It will take the wheat farmer to harvest 2.5 crops to match the earning of one crop of Bell peppers in the similar time and on top of it one will even earn more XP/day.

Soyabean might just provide 1.38 Coins/hour but it provides good XP/day(3) , hence as per the need of the hour one can pick and choose any of them.

If someone can login to play the game after every 2 hours in the day he can cultivating Raspberries and can grow 12 hour crops rice in the night, by this process one can make maximize the profits and also earn maximum experience credits. If putting so much time in the game is not possible, one can choose Strawberries for slightly reduced profitability but more comfortable 4 hour cycle.

Getting ribbons also bring lot of money and XP in the game so one should carefully plan to hit them to increase the earnings and becoming a good farmer.

Similar profitability and experience analysis can also be done for the plants, animal and other interesting variables in the game.