User blog comment:Oioiaussie/Buy playgrounds? A common misconception!/@comment-5193239-20120613145255/@comment-5109847-20120613162105

To Outofmage,

It all depends on where you are at in terms of expansions, money generation, level, etc. At level 35 I was building my 1m coin expansion and waiting 4 days for it to finish. I know because it was just last week. That might be out of the ordinary, but maybe so is only being at the 100,000 expansion, who can say?

I would argue that if you have made it to level 35 in any reasonable amount of time, you are probably already looking at becoming more efficient in terms of coins per pixel. Playgrounds are great for starting off, as I have stated below, but at level 35 (and earlier, but using that because you mentioned it), particularly with such a small village if you're at the 100,000 expansion, you're probably scrambling for space to fit everything. Whenever you find yourself doing that, you have to start looking at more efficient decorations like giant gems and VFTs. Those playgrounds eventually need to give way to better items. I have like 25 of them that have been in my inventory since before level 30. They worked great for awhile, but eventually you value the XP generation of a store or the higher coin generation of say a Giant Sapphire more than the cost-effectiveness of a playground.

Personally I'd say that somewhere around level 25 is when people should start thinking about upgrading their playgrounds, but obviously situations vary widely per person/village. I'm not saying everyone should jump immediately from playgrounds to VFTs, not at all. I chose the Giant Sapphire route instead because it repaid the investment almost twice as fast (217 hours vs. 400 hours at optimal collection rate), while still having an equal coin/pixel rate (both are 25 coins/pixel/hr, at optimal collection rates). Obviously I'm not collecting my Sapphires every 2 hours on the hour, so the VFT wins out a little in that regard, but at the time I wanted the quicker payback time. Playgrounds obviously pay back much faster, but only return 1/3 the coins/pixel/hr, so if you're running out of room like seems to eventually happen to everyone, at some point they need to go. Sure, if you just completed an expansion and have nothing to put there, throw some playgrounds on it from your inventory, but eventually you're going to want something that makes more money per pixel.

As Oioiaussie said, obviously this is not a hard and fast rule. I mentioned earlier in the blog that if you started out trying to build nothing but VFTs you'd be so far behind that you'd be hurting yourself even if technically they are the most efficient thing you can buy. Sometimes you need that quick coin turnaround that a playground can provide. But by level 35 (in my opinion at least), you are probably looking more at the long-term and want something else.