Save Our Grass

Dear Animal Crossing Staff / Nintendo,

Animal Crossing City Folk is without a doubt a great game and in many ways the best version of Animal Crossing to date. There are many great features the game offers. One new feature to the Wii version of Animal Crossing City Folk however is causing a great deal of frustration and problems with most everyone who has enjoyed the game for over just 1 week or so.

The feature which is causing so many issues is the "Path Creation" feature which literally kills the grass in a town simply by just walking or running on it. In theory this is a fun interesting idea, which sadly was seemingly tossed in the game without much research or testing at the last minute of development. The problem at hand here is that in a very short period of time a player's town will turn into nothing but dirt! This creates not only a depressing ugly atmosphere for players, but also creates gameplay issues within the game itself. One example of how this effects gameplay is that players who started playing the game in Winter of 2008 will literally not be able to create Snowmen in Winter of 2009 due to a year's worth of destroying their grass / snow. Without the ability to create a Snowman in a town you cannot receive the Snowman set of Furniture.

This is not a process that takes a long period of time by any means. I myself have a Japanese town as well as an American town. My Japanese town has had very little play time, and even with only a couple hours of gameplay every other day the town is becoming very muddy, very fast. The main issue here is that there seems to be next to no way for players to fix this problem. Below is a list of ways myself and others have tried to regrow snow / grass back into our towns. Each of these options does not work in any way.

-Time Traveling the Wii clock ahead several years. This does not work as you have to start up the game 1 day at a time and not walk around anywhere to even begin to get grass to regrow. This has been tested and it would take 15 weeks for a players grass to fully regrow. Nobody in their right mind wants to set the Wii clock ahead 1 day at a time for 15 weeks. Even if this did work, Time Traveling is not and should not be a way to fix this.

-Planting Trees & Flowers. This does help speed up the process of getting your grass to grow back, but it still takes far too long to even work and only regrows grass close by the flower or tree. Trees will regrow the grass near them 5x's faster, Flowers regrow grass 3x's faster. But if flowers die without being watered, how can I water the flower without killing the grass that is around them? The process basically defeats itself...

-Only walk on the pathways where the grass has already been destroyed. This does help keep grass in other areas of your town from dieing, but what good is having grass or snow in your town that you can't walk by or on? Also I can't really be expected to tell every one of my friends who stops by my town over WiFi to "Only walk in the dirt pathways!" can I? When a players has many friends visit on WiFi the depletion of a town's grass is insanely fast.

So what can / should Nintendo do to fix this issue? With the Wii Shop Channel and Animal Crossing City Folk's ability to receive new updates and items it seems very plausible that Nintendo could release a free downloadable patch that refreshes a players grass / snow and gives us the OPTION to keep this feature in the game or not. Game hackers have actually made a patch which does just that - it prevents the grass from dieing in a players town. If a hacker can do this surely Nintendo could. If Nintendo does not act on this it is only encouraging upset players to look into hacking their Wiis, which I am sure is not something Nintendo wants as it can lead to piracy.

In closing myself and others do appreciate Nintendo's efforts to add new unique features to Animal Crossing City Folk. Having said that this concept of killing your own grass simply by walking or running on it is not working by any means for almost every player I have spoken to. It creates a claustrophobic feeling while playing the game. Everybody is so worried about their grass dieing they aren't able to enjoy exploring any area of their town.

Please Nintendo create a solution to this problem so Animal Crossing players can get back to making their Snowmen and enjoying a fresh, clean looking town.

Please sign this petition as your way of telling Nintendo you would like a solution to this problem in the game. You can also provide links to video or images of your town to show just how out of shape your town is due to this feature.

--Josh Thomas
WiiFolder.com