The Farmville Discovery: Mastery Billboards

When it became obvious that the combination of Dairy Barns, Stables, and the Nursery was simply not sufficient to contain the farm animal population for the average farm, additional structures were added to the game, including the Aviary, Pet Runs, Animal Runs, Paddocks, Pastures, Pens, and most recently the Bunny Hutch. This solution worked so well that the dev's looked for ways to implement it for other objects, with the most recent manifestation of the trend appearing in the form of the newly-added Mastery Billboards.

Constructed as an object that can contain and display the player's collection of Mastery Signs, the Billboards are placed either in kit form (for the free versions), or as completed objects should the player be willing to pay for the version with the in-game currency of "Farmville Bucks" (which are obtained through the exchange of real-world money for in-game currency), and then have the Mastery Signs of the appropriate type inserted into them. In effect they function both as an alternate but compact display for Mastery Signs, and also as a container in which a large number (up to 500 when the object is upgraded to its maximum capacity) of Mastery Signs can be stored.

Creating a container for Mastery Signs that also functions as a display system for them was thought to be logically necessary due to the incredibly large and diverse selection of plant types, trees, and animals that are now present in the game, most of which also happen to be part of the Mastery scheme and so have a Mastery Sign associated with them. To put this in perspective for you, each specific animal type (as opposed to animal class) may have a sign, so using Ducks as an example rather than one Mastery Sign that represents all Ducks, there are individual Mastery Signs that represent Mastery of the specific sub-types, so on my farm I have the following signs:

-- Belted Ducks

-- Ducks

-- Cayuga Ducks

-- Goldeneye Ducks

-- Indian Runner Ducks

-- Muscovy Ducks

-- Orange Ducks

-- Party Ducks

-- Rainbow Ducks

-- Red-Billed Ducks

-- Warder Ducks

-- Wood Ducks

As you can see these represent a significant number of sub-types in the Duck family -- now imagine all of the different types of Cows, Pigs, Birds, Game Animals (such as Deer), Horses, and the like, and you can see how Mastery Signs alone could easily come to dominate a large area of a farm should the player feel the need to display all of the signs that they own!