One of the more recent and successful Facebook games that came out was CityVille. It had approximately 50 million players worldwide and even more in the Facebook confined environment. The game was all about expanding your own virtual city by building rental houses, housing, and even stores and businesses. However, like any good virtual online community, one of the most important aspects is acquiring and keeping your population happy. And, as any good virtual online community often says, that job can be just as hard as anything else.

Like a real city, creating a virtual city can be an incredibly frustrating experience at first. Just visiting neighbors and checking the information on their cities leaves you bored and frustrated. As a result, most players will end up creating their own city, either little squads of neighbors which constantly visit one another to trade business or a big sprawling map project using a custom design software. But even with this relatively large beginning investment, some players will eventually hit a snag that can be difficult to escape.

Populating your city can be an incredibly expensive task in Facebook. Building houses, finding businesses to rent and sell, and creating community buildings all take a significant amount of goods and also require a significant amount of land. Incopoly would be a popular game on Facebook, utilizing the large landhold of the typical offline family and friends who participate in the game. It is extremely difficult to compete against these families and friends who earn their game currency in Facebook. The land registry in Cityville is basically a central file that holds all land bids and offers that are submitted by players.

It’s difficult to compete against people who own, operate, and have grown their own cities much faster – there is a significantly bigger investment to make. Keeping up with these players can be a daunting task and also lies in the area of game economy. It’s incredibly difficult to out compete something that is so extensively used on Facebook. However, a sizable population of players means that there is a well of competition.

Finally, one of the biggest factors for a Facebook city to become fully utilized is if the community loves the game. If there is a huge majority of players that loves playing CityVille as much as you do then there is no way you will run out of players to talk to and add as neighbors.

In addition to talking to friends and competitors, becoming a neighbor is probably the best way to help your city grow. Your neighbors will also help you get resources and coins which will in turn help grow your city. And, as your city grows you’ll be able to talk to others and find out how they’ve done there amazing CityVille city.

The game with its great popularity did dissappear and many wondered what had happened to it. It was a great shame that it was taken down because it proved very popular.