Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Test Realm: Disappearing Plants!

Before I begin with my post for the day, it's good to see Fred Howard out and about spreading the word about Gardening yesterday. There was a one/two punch from MMORPG and Massively. Both are great articles that you should read. (a special mention to Fallon from Diary of a Wizard in the Massively article btw.)

Anyway, what I really want to talk about today is the infamous Disappearing Plants Bug. Anyone involved in the test realm for Gardening will tell you that the number one irritant has to be this bug. I've already given most of my complaints, but the disappearing plants thing is about 180 degrees opposite on the fun scale as playing with the real-life disappearing plant (used to mess with these back in my Botany class at the University) Mimosa Pudica. (*insert excuse to show you this youtube video of Mimosa Pudica*)



Careful there, mister! There's a sticker on those plants if you get digging too deep. (touch 'em too much and they'll die . . . real-life glitch! ;-))

At one point my Wizard101 garden was going GREAT! I had five plots of lush plants growing: my happy garden, my desaparagus garden, a plot of about five or six snap dragons, a plot of stinkweed, and a plot full of helephant ears and baby carrots. In this picture you can see me looking at my desparagus plants from over in my helephant ear and baby carrot garden.



What ended up happening was I harvested a bunch of dandelion elder plants and all my elder desparagus and my snap dragon and baby carrot/helephant ear gardens POOFED like magic. POOF! As you can see in this picture all that remains is a clump of dirt. yay.


It kind of sucked the fun out of the test realm for me especially since at this point I ran out of money and crowns. (I spent most of my crowns discovering my Jellyfish's hidden talents were crafty, death-shot, death-giver, and pip o plenty.) But that's what the test realm is all about . . . finding the bugs and annoyances and fixing them before it goes live. (although I have to say my favorite thing about the test realm is, yes, finding out my pets' talents in advance. It's such a time saver.)

The best advice I've read came from Amber Unicornflower's blog . . . don't harvest your plants until all of them have turned elder. Her dad works at KI, so when she says, "Kingsisle is going to fix it soon," there's no doubt that Kingsisle knows about the bug and is working to fix it. Apparently she also found a way around the bug and is going to report her trick sometime in the near future. (I'd pay attention to her blog over the next couple of days my dear test realm people. She is an expert gardener after all.)

Hopefully I can catch the fire to garden on the test realm some more here soon, but for now I feel like I've bug reported or complained about as much as I could at this point (One more though that comes from a discussion over on Twitter with @uppoppedafox . . . seriously, they need to make the gnomes non-collision so we can run over the top of them--ANNOYING! :)).

Let me know about your bugs and complaints with Gardening! I'm interested in hearing about it.

Happy Dueling!

3 comments:

Sierra Starsong said...

I thought that was odd too, we can run over huge plants all we want but a little tiny gnome may as well be a wall. My lion's tired of stubbing his toes on them! (Also, I hope they come out with more gnomes in different colors. Not too fond of red.)

Vikki said...

Thanks for the shout out. Yeah, I'm tripping over gnomes at my place.

Panglou said...

I've had this bug so badly that I can't even garden, when I put down my seedlings, leave, port back to my house and... POOF! They disappear one by one.