I've never had to resort to a poo drive before, but I'm all for it.  Just let me know exactly what to do.

I stopped playing CF soon after buying it. It wasn't as fun as WW.
But, even though I have not experienced the muddy ground, I'm all for making Nintendo suffer for this mistake.

Poo drive? Heck yeah!

"Do you think it would be more effective if they are sent all at once?"

You mean, have people send one person the money instead of everyone buying their own poo and shipping them individually?

"How are you planning to get the word out?"

Someone can tell the people on other AC forums (ACA comes to mind) and on the AC:CF General.

"Maybe you could contact that Josh Thomas guy so he can make another Youtube video?"

Great idea!

It's a very strange thing, those e-mails coming back from Nintendo.  They send out a canned response, but if a person persists they send back another reply indicating that they will pass the info on.  This tells me that in order for them to do anything at all, they're going to have to be hounded and hounded and hounded.

As for poo drive, if I organize it, it will have to wait for at least two or three more weeks until I get caught up on some of my other stuff.  In the meantime, this gives people more opportunity to e-mail, call, sign petitions and whatever else they can do to get under Nintendo's skin about this.

The grass issue is very rough to deal with and since they are the ones to put this nice software bonus of promoting the desert obviously I can't imagine it would be that hard for nintendo to send the users a download to fix it, for those of you losing snow and grass rapidly feel some what lucky! My town from day one was barren and I had a 10 by 4 space area behind my town hall to try and roll snow balls in,there was no other areas with snow needless to say out of the 4 players in my town we got 2 pieces of snowman furniture for the whole winter season!! Now that bites...

If you want this 'Poo Drive' to be effective, You'll need to get the media involved. Maybe invite a few reporters ( with cameras ) to witness the mounds of rubber poo.

If you don't...chance are, this too, will be internalized. Then what will we have accomplished.

To set it up, I suggest a dedicated website that will pop up in search engines when CF is entered. I also suggest that partcipants have the opportunity to
1. Purchase the 'poo' on the site.
2. Write a letter to Nintendo from the site expressing their dissatisfaction with the feature.

Then the written letter should be attached to individual pieces of 'poo', and mailed to Nintendo WITH the appropriate coverage. Letter should include age and location to emphasize buying power. ( Not many 11-15 yr olds are *buying* Wii-systems & games. Usually get them for gifts. )

...might try some online reporters, too. They are always looking for quirky stories to cover.

This campaign - to be very effective - is going to take several weeks ( maybe months ).

I would believe, if you got news coverage, the first place to send the 'care packages' would be Nintendo of America. Let THEM contact the Japanese offices with concerns!

The main problem with the grass/snow loss in winter is the building of snowmen.  First you wander all over town to find the snowballs, then you have to push them around destroying the grass.

I was lucky, being in the UK I was forewarned of this problem by this site and only made a few dud snowmen so got the set in december.  Since then I no longer make snowmen.

I tend to jog around town and have lots of neat paths, this path by the town hall I sometimes run along when harvesting fruit to get to Nooks quicker yet its still one square wide.  My paths are 1 or 2 squares wide except where they go through the drt patch circles that were there from the beginning.  By planting flowers on those I am reclaiming my snow to have straight paths.  

Path bit too wide
A path by Nooks
path to town hall
paths to beach and from beach to Iggly's house

I don't time travel, any patch that wore thin I stopped using or planted flowers example to left of Satin.  It seems it grows better if you act fast, sadly not always possible.  I have 3 characters in my town, I play with one of them a day generally now as they are estabilised but to begin with brought all or 2 out each day.

I hope this gives some hope to others that it is possible to have paths and grass though the wear and tear happens so fast its daft.

Just out of curiosity (the news coverage comment triggered this), do you think a campaign to send complaints to gaming related shows/sites/blogs/etc. would be beneficial?  Not sure if G4 would consider Animal Crossing something to fit in with their hardcore gaming, but it could be worth a shot.  If a more publicized stance was taken on the matter, they might take notice.

I really think it's as simple as reversing the growth/death rates.  As it stands, snow is dying at a much higher rate than it is growing.  You take three steps back for every one step forward.  This is the part that bugs me - if it is supposed to form tracks to your most traveled places, why are people getting barren towns?  That's what makes this feature defective, in my mind.  If you kill snow in one spot and refrain from running/walking too much on that spot, the snow/grass should be completely regrown fairly quickly.  As it stands, regrowth take multiple times longer than death.

If the values were something like 1 layer depleted when you run over it, 2 layers grow back each cycle, the paths would truly only lead where you wanted.  Continuous walking from your house to Nook's would make a nice path and look like--I think--they intended it to.  Watering your flowers, going in search of fossils, or, gasp, running after a special character wouldn't leave lasting effects.  These things shouldn't cause an issue as players are not continually traveling these paths.  I have barren places that I know I visit no more than maybe once a week.

It just sucks because the only answers they have accomplish nothing.  If you plant flowers and actually want them to last long enough to regrow snow, you have to water them which inevitably kills any small hints of new snow.  Walk, don't run - walking kills snow as well.  

Although I won't stop playing because of this, it's a continual irritant and definitely depletes my game playing experience.  I don't want to TT.  I feel that for me personally, that takes away from the game and I shouldn't have to resort to that in order to have a decent looking town.

Out of curiosity, do you get a fresh start come spring?  Because although it's nice that grass is harder to kill, that doesn't help me much if I'm already starting out with a desert.  If they want to be realistic, it should be that new grass grows automatically and you start anew with full ground cover when the season changes.

G4
Well...I do know -from watching some programming on G4...that Adam Whats-his-name and his lady co-host ( canNOT remember her name! ) both like -and promoted- GC and WW. Don't know about CF. ( Got rid of the upper channels when programming went into the dumper. )

I have watched the other game-review hosts, and they were not so complimentry toward AC in general.

However...a grass routes campaign of this style -I believe- *would* get their attention, regardless of their tastes in genre.


Spring
No. You do NOT get a fresh head of grass. You do have to find a way to deal until it grows back.

BTW
I have PTS now, and got the Golden Can. I do have ( more ) flowers around town ( than I normally would...don't like the time involved to care for them ). I am noticing that those I *do* bother watering are promoting grass faster than those I just let die and replace. So...maybe the Golden Wateringcan *rumor* isn't completely false. I will say that the nine-patch watering with the G.Can is a lot easier to deal with. Perhaps THIS is how flowers promote additional growth with mininal damage!

For those that don't know...
The G.Can waters a nine-patch square when you sprinkle the center square. It doesn't *show* a nine-patch coverage. But, I've done enough experimenting to know this to be fact.

The S.Can waters 5 squares; Sprinkle the middle of a nine-patch, and the north/south/east/west squares are automatically watered at the same time.

The Regular Can still only waters one square at a time.

Anyways...
In an area, near a bank that all characters fish regularly, the grass was quite worn ( even for summer ). I planted flowers over the area, didn't water unless wilted, fished as normally would, and grass covered the area in less than a week. Can't say it's GREAT grass...but it is all green.

And here I thought I had to water with my silver can because that one had a better span.. ouch!!! Thanks for that tidbit of info..

The Silver Can DOES have a better span!

XXX
XSX  Sprinkle the center of a nine-patch
XXX

XCX
CSC Coverage automatically extended
XCX

You can't SEE the additional coverage. But, it does work.

What's the Nintendo of America email address?

werty2, I thought the regular can waters the 5-patch square and the silver and gold can water a nine-patch square? That's my experience, anyway.

Ah I didn't read carefully.. however I am not sure if it is true, because every now and then I have some wilted flowers.. I really have to test it more..

That is not what I've read in the user-generated guides. And, I have little to NO personal experience with the regular Can ( none at all ) OR the S.Can ( some ). Like I said, I don't like having to water flowers.

When I watered a flower diagonally adjacent to a wilted flower, the wilted flower came back to life, so I'm pretty sure the silver can waters 9 spaces. I'm not sure about the gold can, any confirmation on that?

"What's the Nintendo of America email address?"

You need to fill out their web form and shoot that off to them, then you will get a canned response back within a couple of days. The canned response thanks you for contacting them and tells you all of the (ineffective) ways to fix the problem.

Even so, don't not write just because you're going to get the canned response, because every message counts, and you can reply to their canned response and tell them that those suggestions don't work, and this is a problem that needs fixed, or whatever.

Werty, those are excellent suggestions for a poo drive!  It's completely outside of my scope of capabilities, so someone with much better web development skills than I would need to get it set up. Is anyone here good with things like that?

Right, well I feel fairly stupid - I had no idea the golden can covered that amount of space.  No wonder I've been feeling so much snow-related stress in regard to my flowers - I get right up on each and water

I've been watching this thread for a while and it's been pretty interesting. I don't have anything near a desert, but some weird going-ons have been happening with my grass.

My map is very basic, giving lots of room for people to run riot and start desertification, and for that reason, everyone is confined to paths in my town. I usually don't dig up fossils unless they are directly on or just next to the paths, and every month or so I go out onto the grass and dig everything up, because once a month doesn't really have any effect. Although some weird things happen.

On the west side of the map, there's an unusual amount of wear on top of the cliff, which looks very unsightly. Also there's a big area behind Nook's with lots of wear, even though I don't recall anybody walking there before. I've been trying to regrow that area for months, since I got the game in December and there's still a few brown holes left. Then there's the area leading from Nook's to Able's... there's such a big gap inbetween, that there's literally a thousand routes to get between both of them. I eventually had to lay down paths to guide me from one to the other, and the wear underneath those patterns have become unusually wide. The path ran through a couple of natural dirt blotches too, so it looks rather ugly. Just to the west of the gate and the east of the waterfall there's also a weird area with some half-worn grass that I don't recall walking on either. And you see that really thin area on the east side of the map? I walk down there every day and the path hasn't even fully formed yet, there's still snow spots in the middle of it all. This feature is messed up.

I've actually thought about trying to get some media attention of some sort on this too. I sent an email to the HotSpot guys at gamespot.com a couple weeks ago and never got any sort of reply from them.  Seems to me it would only help our cause if we could get that sort of attention.

Now I'm irked again and want a fix, even if it's something silly as grass seeds.

To help save the 60 or 65% of the grass I have left, I keep my Wii on Sat. afternoon and evening while I'm sleeping.  That way when I get my song at night, I don't have a second load for the day and go thru a round of trampled grass.  

I stayed up late yesterday for me watching the A-rod roids coverage on ESPNews (3pm).  And while we had record breaking temps in Mi yesterday, we also had winds.  So while drifting off to sleep at 3:30pm, I notice my noise maker is off and I have no power for about a minute or less.  

My watching TV and gaming TV are hooked up to a power strip/breaker and I turn them off via a wall switch.  So my stuff is okay.  But I leave my Wii & Gamecube on a breaker that stays on.  So when the power went down, I lost my 2 hours of fishing, digging and wishing Tammi well on her move.    

And to boot when I loaded the game up for my song, I had to deal with Resetti angry little speech.  This is why I loath Resetti.  95% of the time when I deal with him, it's cause of power outage or mistakes.  Very rarely will I restart to try and stop something, I'd much rather deal with it than try and redo.  But since Resetti thinks I'm some kid trying to avoid a bad thing in the game, i have to deal with that.  

So it looks like I'll have something new and different to talk to my phone buddies at NOA headquarters on my weekend.  

drew

Drew,

Next time you leave your wii on, walk up to Copper at the gates, and tell him you want to go open the gates. He'll save the game, and then you can leave the gates open while the wii is on waiting for K.K. to arrive. If you don't want to risk leaving the gates open to visitors, you can tell him you want to go out, he'll save, and then he'll pop a list of towns. As long as that communication is open to nintendo, if the wii resets due to a power outage you won't have to deal with resetti, and the game will be saved so you won't have to lose your work. Additionally, saving with Copper at the gates does NOT cause grass more grass wear for the session.

TreeSprite

Keep in mind that several brown patches appear at the beginning of the game anyway, and when animals move, they leave a LARGE brown patch behind.

I think it's funny that Nintendo mentioned neighbours leaving behind patches of ground when they move as a feature of the game. They said something about the patch left behind was a reminder of the animal that lived there and the memories you had of them and as the grass grew back and the patch faded so would thier memories.

That's a lovely idea and everything but when there isn't any grass around the house to begin with it's kind of hard to notice a difference.

That's just priceless!  Were they actually serious??

Thanks for the tip Treesprite!  For Sat this is pretty much my only option if I want to both get my song & play that morning/early afternoon and not have another shot taken at my grass.  Maybe if my grass looks better in Spring & Summer, then I can turn it off.  

drew