I love this game and greatly appreciate the time and energy that goes into the creation and the up keep of it. There is seldom a period of more than two hours - during the time frame of 9 am to 10 pm CST - that I do not cast. Of course, I am sometimes gone and this doesn't happen. Yet, when new announcements are posted I often do not see them posted at the top of the page until 5, 6, 7 hours have past. Even when I reload the page they don't always show up until hours after they are posted. Sometimes, they don't show up at all. This is what happened with the petal contest postponement and it cost me a ton of gold, premium seeds that I had stashed away and good luck potions. If I had not decided that something was weird and gone looking for an answer I would have wasted even more of these resources and time. Somehow the announcements need to be more efficient. If this game is to be played in the back ground, then I think that refreshing the page should not be needed. Even if that is what is required, then the announcements HAVE GOT TO SHOW UP IMMEDIATELY when the page is refreshed.

Before people jump on my comments as ungrateful or say that I am getting to play the game free and shouldn't complain, let me say that I realize that this is a beta program and that wrinkles need to be ironed out. That is the purpose of releasing a beta edition. Feed back is part of that process. The current players are providing a vital function for the programmers who, no doubt, hope to someday release this game as a money making venture. Certainly, we are enjoying the game free of charge, but the programmers are reaping the reward of our participation. Without beta players they could not de-bug and develop this future profit producing game. It is quid pro quo.

I feel that Dude and Keith and the EI elders are doing a good job and are responsive. I am not among those who are simply whiners - and there are plenty here. I do, however, feel that negative and positive feedback are both needed. So I am providing feedback that I hope is useful.

I just now got the announcement about the toolbar. It is 5 pm on Wednesday, March 10. See what I mean about announcements needing work?

I use a Mac and run Firefox - both updated to the latest versions.

RevJ - the yellow announcement for the Toolbar was *Just* posted a few minutes ago. You saw it nearly as soon as it was posted.

I am going to venture a guess that this Yellow-bar announcement was held off until a few off the bugs with the toolbar itself were ironed out. So those who check the announcement section read about the toolbar, but there are always bugs that show up in real-time that don't show in the pre-testing. To me - it makes sense that now more of the bugs are ironed out, to make this option more visible to players (verses an immediate yellow-bar for everyone)

Not ALL announcements show up in the yellow bars at the top of the screen - it's not an automatic thing. Although - I do agree with you that the Petals Contest Postponement probably *should* have been made into a yellow bar (to my knowledge it was not), but the elders have tried to compensate for this, among other things, in altering the contest itself.

RevJ - the yellow-bar announcements are still fairly new to the game. Can I ask what other Major Announcements you have failed to get?

A couple times I have missed getting seed announcements. You know, when Perston gets a limited supply of one seed or another. The Petal postponement announcement, obviously. If I am remembering correctly, I also didn't see an announcement about the latest seed - snowflake - until 36 hours after it was announced. I found out about the new seed in the forum and after I had been growing it a while the announcement popped up.

I admit that I was assuming that the latest announcement was tardy because as soon as it appeared I clicked through to read it ad found the initial posting from Dude to be 2 days old. I didn't realize that it was in the announcement postings for a while prior to being posted in the yellow page-top banner.

Does any of the above help? If I find that it happens again, I will contact you directly Lauren with details.

RevJ - it does help explain a bit - thank you :) I hope my explanation made a bit of sense as well.

Feel free to contact me directly if you think you Missed/are missing/notice other missing announcements, or post again here as sometimes I do not make it onto the island everyday. Another TO/Wizard may be able to help/answer faster!