After being fairly quiet since early August’s launch of (Lil) Farm Life, Playdom launched two games in the last two weeks: TikiFarm (a South Pacific themed farm sim) and Wild Ones (an artillery/strategy game with pets – still in alpha).

CrowdStar and Zynga have been greatly accelerating the deployment of games and it’s possible that Playdom’s recent funding and new CFO have positioned it to focus on a similar strategy.

Wild Ones offers similar Worms-Style artillery and strategy like Playfish’s Crazy Planets, with the caveat that it’s a true multiplayer game, linking you with players who aren’t necessarily your friends. Again, it’s still very rough and a lot of iterations are likely as the game is optimized, but It will be interesting to see if they can solve the difficulties of scaling a synchronous game on Facebook, as to date only Zynga Poker seems to have been able to do so. In similar games, churn has dogged Playfish’s Crazy Planets (it has had difficulty maintaining a Sticky Factor above 10%) and German developer Plinga has recently launched Turtle Squad.

Mafia Wars Still Suffering From Technical Issues

The scheduled maintenance on Wednesday the 16th doesn’t seem to have fixed all the problems that started last week for Mafia Wars users since the new roll out of i-frame technology and anti-hacking measures. One industry person noted that trying to solve issues with “tricky JavaScript tricks is a great way to create browser-specific hell.”

While some have noted a user boycott that resulted from the problems, you can’t escape the fact that if a game doesn’t work, people don’t return. Whatever they’ve done, I had no problems after the initial roll out, but I personally get stuck in unresolved loops and can’t play at all since the maintenance on the 16th. Zynga is scheduling another maintenance period for today.

Game Friends Idea Gains User Support

In less than a week, over 110,000 Facebook Users have joined a petition to better filter their Game Friends vs. their real-life friends. The Facebook group was created by Uwe Philip Kirch and inspired by our proposal that Facebook create a Game Friends capability, which would allow you to expand your circle to people who are interested in a game, but not necessarily someone you would want to share your photos and personal status updates with.