Everyone knows the Golden Rule and in CityVille one of the ways you can love your neighbor is to place your Red Hearts around your city. The Love Thy Neighbor challenge and the big, red, 'Get Help' hearts are Zynga's answer to one of the most common complaints among CityVille players and it's a great feature when used properly. Like any real city, it takes lots of energy and lots of goods to keep CityVille up and running. And, just like any real city, your CityVille resources do have their limits. The challenge is in managing those resources as your city expands.
Helping your neighbors by harvesting their crops or collecting their rents is an important part of playing the game because it saves your neighbor that much more energy. But the biggest complaint has been that multiple neighbors tend to click on the same crops or collect the same rents. Since a crop can only be harvested one time and a rent can only be collected once, when more than one neighbor performs that same task it's wasted energy.
Most people who play CityVille want to visit their neighbors and lend them a helping hand. They want to save them that extra energy because then, that same neighbor, will turn around and return the favor. It's frustrating knowing that you might be doing the best you can to help someone out but someone else already beat you to the punch.
That's where the red hearts come into play. You've probably seen them in your neighbors' cities but are you placing them in your own? Using these red 'Get Help' hearts to mark exactly the crops you want harvested and exactly the rents you want collected helps your neighbors do exactly the tasks you need accomplished. It makes them feel like they've really helped you out and it saves them the time they would have spent searching your city looking for something that needs to be done. And, in the end, it saves you that much more energy by eliminating duplicate clicking.
To place the red hearts in your city just click on the tools menu - the big arrow in the bottom left corner of your screen. Then, click on the red heart to select. Now, just click on the farm plot that you want harvested or watered, or click on the house or businesses that you want collected and you'll see a little red heart appear. The number of hearts you can use is determined by your reputation rating and you can increase it by clicking in the hearts in your neighbors' cities.
Oh, and don't worry. When you click back over to your other tools the little red hearts will disappear from your screen. That's just so they won't be a distraction for you while you're working on your city. But your neighbors can still see them and they'll love you for it!
Source: eZine
