My Investigation into the Newspaper Issue
As many players have already reported, supported in part by screen shots posted in another thread, there has been a significant pattern of rehashed or stale ads in the Daily Dirt. When a level 7 player is selling 10 nails for 1 coin, has over 2000 followers, and daily visit record of 50,000 or more, this is not to say that such things are impossible, but they are HIGHLY improbable, therefore suggestive of a major bug in the "fetch" sequence of Hay Day's code, or evidence of some compatibility issues between Hay Day's code and that of jailbroken devices.
Before I record my own results of investigation, I am calling on the newly arrived Community Manager to address this issue as our "advocate" by maintaining proper communication on the following:
1) Is the Hay Day team aware of this bug/problem?
2) Is this currently under investigation (especially since it was reported as far back as May of this year)
3) What would be the reasonable timeline in expecting this to be resolved?
As we know, this bug presents a considerable problem for some players who rely on the Daily Dirt as part of their game-play, and given SuperCell's stated interest in ensuring proper "game flow," it can be argued that this bug/problem impedes said flow, therefore making it of some interest to them to resolve.
THE INVESTIGATION
As a test, I decided to follow a player whose ad for one grey sweater had recurred at least three times in one hour. It was posted at 44 coins. Of course, when I visited, the item was gone. That is fairly common with either high value items, or common items sold at discount. Upon the third posting of the ad (identical to the previous two), I saw the ad repeated twice in the same issue. It was then that I decided to use one of my remaining follower spots.
The farm was untended; the animals had not been "harvested," and there was no evidence of any activity at this farm. That is not enough in itself to prove anything since some players leave well enough alone and focus solely on selling items.
I parked myself at this particular level 9 farm (with its improbable statistics of well over 90,000 daily player visits record and 335 followers), periodically returning to the Daily Dirt to see if this farm was posting an ad. After a few hours, and having parked myself at the farm where there was no activity in placing a sale item, I saw the same ad in the Daily Dirt. I quickly tapped on the farm to return to where I had parked, no grey sweater available for 44 coin.
In order to ensure that this wasn't simply the player releasing another grey sweater at the identical price on multiple occasions, and I simply just missed seeing it, I repeated the experiment for two days with no difference from the above results.
CONCLUSION
At best, I can only speculate as to the cause of this bug/problem. The high number of daily visits would most likely be on account of the repetition of the same ad in a short time period, most likely refreshing with every issue, and in different batches concurrently (as different players are exposed to different sets or batches of ads). The vast majority of farms that come under this particular anomaly have evidence of inactivity. Anecdotally, I saw one such farm whose name was "Happy New Year 2013!" (which is not enough to prove anything definitive, but does give us pause to consider that there are "ghost ads" in the Hay Day server being reprised). Without access to the proprietary code of the game and its internal server algorithm, I cannot fully verify the anomaly. In going forward, and as a fan of the empirical method, I would encourage other players who have experienced the same problem to repeat this experiment.
Dissatisfaction with certain elemnts of game and newspaper....title too short so.....
This is a very sophisticated game and one I enjoy very much - for the most part. I cant believe that the developers of this game, cant fix it so that when someone buys an item, it disappears. I am so fed up of constantly turning the pages of the newspaper until the "new edition" only to find that everything that I need seems to be there......and appear to be available....until I click and then suddenly I get the message "someone already bought this item".
Now I am starting to think this is a key part of how the game has been set up. Sudden shortages of key items.....never available. "Buyers" who sometimes buy everything in your farm shop.......but they never have anything to sell.
Make it difficult and challenging.....but play fair too.
Please game developers - I will get frustrated for a few times, but then the game will be deleted. One player lost isn't a great loss I know, BUT....I think I am fairly normal and average and I know of at least two more players who are towards the end of their tether, and I am also quite sure that that translates to a large number of players.
