Tracey and Cobweb6 years, 7 months ago
I started to play just after the gardens were introduced. A friend of mine asked if I fancied a fairy garden, and I thought I'd give it a go.
It was called My Fairy at the time, and there was no wildlife, just the fairies and the gardens. We could make wishes, play the magical mushrooms game for diamonds, cast spells, and send standard dusts on our friends. You had to unlock the ability to send the dusts and cast spells by collecting diamonds. We could also play Alchemy and Herbalism.
There was a leader board for the most blue diamonds earned, but since we could only earn them by playing the magical mushrooms game nobody earned very many each day. Your garden was private when you started it, and you could only make it public by earning 50 diamonds (it took AGES!). If you let your diamond total drop below 50, your garden became automatically private again.
We had to maintain our "wilt balance", to allow us to use all the spaces in the garden - there were only 5 spaces maximum, if I remember correctly, and if your wilt balance dropped you lost one or more spaces, depending on how low you let your balance drop. It was on a rolling seven day basis, so if you revived loads of plants on day one but then none for the rest of the week, your balance would drop. Your wilt balance was worked out based on how many times other players had to revive wilting plants in your own garden, and how many times you revived wilting plants in other gardens.
We had to grow loads more plants to level up than players do now, and there was no way to speed up the growth or change the colours to begin with; we just had to keep regrowing. Things like the bonsais took over a month to become RTH without dusting!
When we were eventually able to use gold dust to change the colours the order wasn't predictable - it took me over 200 gold just to change my last one to violet and took weeks (there was just the daily gold to collect, and it was only a few gold per day).
