Something to do with a miserable lack of creativity?
Worse: a miserable lack of playability.
Yes, Facebook killing the notification system hurt them, mostly because they didn't adapt to the new environment. So the "Get 3 Friends to help you expand your storage shed" task from when I played it four years ago is still there and now IMPOSSIBLE to complete. But worse is they haven't been paying attention to the way the cruft they've added to the game makes things entirely within the game difficult to accomplish. I went home to visit my mother last weekend and she still plays it (retired with little better to do, I figure it at least keeps here a little more active than sleeping on the couch with the tv on) so I tried to help her out some. Three of the most basic tasks in the game are plowing your plot of land, sowing seeds, and harvesting the grown crops. While you can us farm machines to get blocks of squares, I fell into the habit of doing each plot with a click, especially on quick growing crops. Because of jitter with the position of the mouse do to other animations on screen, I usually had to close the browser about half way through and start again. Using the machines didn't really improve the process. The jitter just wouldn't go away.
I'm not saying the lack of creativity is helping, it's just that with such poor execution on basics if they actually had anyone with any creativity the talent would be wasted.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
