Fatal Bugs in Mafia Wars

I've recently posted articles on how to finish the timed missions. I hope you found them useful - but the loot from the missions has now disappeared! I wonder how other people are finding customer support? This is the canned letter that I received over a dozen copies of:

The first 10 times I got the following response was probably enough; is anyone getting any OTHER response than the following? I've gotten it 10-20 times, for problems ranging from 2 months to 2 hours old. Is there even a point in calling this customer support?

This is Zynga Customer Support with Zynga Customer Support for Mafia Wars.

Over the past 72 hours Mafia Wars has experienced a number of user facing issues which may have prevented you from completing special events and/or earning regular game progress through social feeds and gift requests.
I’ve been touching bases with some of the customers that we haven’t had an opportunity to offer support to over the last few days and explaining exactly what has been going on. Here is an explanation of the two main problems effecting Mafia Wars and exactly what is being done to correct the issue at the moment. Since these issues are widespread and effect many users it is important for all users to understand what is being done to address outstanding problems effecting Mafia Wars. If your concern is not specific to trouble with missions or gifting, please respond back so your concern can be appropriately addressed.
Cuba in Crisis Mission: Player’s have experienced trouble accessing this mission as well as successfully collecting the rewards once all missions and tasks have been completed. Both problems have been identified and a recent fix was applied for players who haven’t been able to access this mission. If this event expires and you did not have an opportunity to successfully complete all related missions, please respond so your profile can be reviewed for mission completion.
Gifting Errors: Some recent miscommunication has occurred between gift requests sent by users and the information stored in Mafia Wars. This miscommunication has resulted in different error messages when accepting gifts often preventing players from earning progress in the Ancient Relic Gift Event or collecting any other item available on the Free Gift page. Common error messages are: ‘something has gone wrong’ or ‘this user is not in your mafia.’ Both of these incidents are being reviewed and a recent fix was applied to improve the communication of gifts sent between users.
Trouble with gifting is an ongoing problem continuously being reviewed. If future problems with gifting arise it is important to submit specific information about the problem you have experienced. Please refer to the article “Have a Problem with Gifting? Programmers want to Fix it! Help us, help them” located on the Mafia Wars support page:

http://zynga.custhelp.com/app/home/gameid/43/

Thanks for your understanding. The Mafia Wars Support Team will continue to email these updates when major issues are effecting a large number of players.

Kind regards,
Zynga Customer Support.

Time Mission: Cuba in Crisis

Zynga has introduced a new timed mission, there are about four days left in it, so I'm presenting what to expect in the mission and how to beat the mission with plenty of time left. I try these missions with different types of characters, so the experience you get may not match what is displayed here; lower level characters get more XP and higher level characters get left.

When the mission started one of the more difficult things was to be able to even declare a war: everyone had to do it so 90% of people you could fight were in wars. Two of the missions in the larger sequence required declaring a war, so that is the first thing to watch out for. Just be persistent.

One of the nice things you notice form the first part is that several of the missions offer loot. The XP is nice, the three pieces of loot are great.

The second part requires robbing tobacco plantations and collecting from your bordega twice. Collecting from the property adds at least eight hours to the completion time - and that can't be lessoned. Try to collect it as soon as possible once the mission starts. You might avoid collecting from it for days until you reach this mission, just to save time.

The other thing I found was that robbing tobacco plantations was much harder than useful. Why? Because as properties are robbed and robbed, the difficulty for robbing them increases. For weaker characters with lower attack values, you might need to go through 20 robbing boards to finish this part - or more.

The next mission in the sequence required both building cars and icing characters. You car pay 12 RP to build immediately. Building cars is one of the best uses of RP in the game - but the car I got when I built was not the one I clicked on due to a Zynga bug. If this affects you WRITE TO CUSTOMER SUPPORT.

Why build cars? At 12 RP for a car you can get 6 stamina, 6 energy or 6 attack points along with the car. Compared to spending 10 RP for 4 skill points this is a bargain - at a lower cost per skill point.

The next part of the mission should pose little problem - you just need to wait for ten people to accept your mission requests. Robbing any twenty properties is much easier than robbing the tobacco plantations earlier in the mission.

The final mission in the sequence requires winning a declared war. If you are running low on time, you might avoid declaring a war until you reach this mission. For small mafias winning a war can take the better part of a day. Other players also look for players with small mafias to fight wars against. If you have a small mafia and keep declaring wars, once you get to this mission it might take a day to complete - or even start - which could ruin the mission.

Characters with large mafias, high attack values and large amounts of stamina will not have any problem with the overall sequence of missions. If you have less than 500 stamina or fewer than 200 mafia you will find the missions challenging. You can use the rivals list to help with icing people. You can arrange declared war participants ahead of time. However, you may need to level for no other reason than to get more stamina to rob more boards or fight more people.

Happy hunting!

Limited Time Mission: Dead Man Talking

Zynga has given us the second limited time mission. I should finish this one later today, so it seems a good time to blog with a few items I have learned: tips in here on how to save messages, how to do it with with a small mafia, and how to do it more quickly.

A few things can trip you up in this first part. First you need support from your mafia - but only five helpers, so this isn't bad. I'll discuss how to do this easier later in this article. Second, you need to declare war. This seems trivial, but with a new mission thousands of people will be scrambling to declare war. When someone declares war on you that prevents your declaring war for hours and hours: getting the war declared should be your first priority.

This part of the mission is the easiest part. It requires stamina - and that's it. If you have a small mafia, though, winning 25 fights can be difficult. I have worked with people with tiny mafias. In this case you need to find others with very, very small mafias. Add them as a rival and fight and fight the same people - even if they have been iced - to get through the 25.

The part of the mission shown above is the longest. Unless you spend RP you will HAVE to wait at least 18 hours to build the second armor. If you have built one already, this could take you several days to do. Similarly, you must make sure you get a winnable war done - if people keep declaring war on you, this step might never succeed.

One thing I am doing is delaying building as long as I think I will complete a mission. This lets me build when I think I will need to build. While it pushes back builds by perhaps an hour, it lets you finish the mission a day earlier.

The step above is another easy step. Nothing should slow you with this one.

This step requires a lot of support from your mafia. Here I made a mistake that I will avoid in the future: all missions assistance is reciprocal, so as long as other people send me requests, I don't need to ask them for help! I sent out 16 requests for this - none of which were needed since I had plenty in my inbox.

Conversely, finishing this fast was important because...

Most people won't finish this, last, critical mission! Why? Collecting from the hotel occurs every 48 hours. When I started this I had 34 hours until collection. Collecting from the hotel twice requires at least 48 hours.

A key for many players here will be to not collect from Las Vegas for a while so that they can collect from the hotel as soon as they get this mission. That enables them to collect again in two days.

Without this approach, let's assume you are an "every day player" who collects from your properties every day. You log on and have two days until you can collect. Two days later it isn't ready to collect at the time that you log on. So collecting the first time may take three days. If you don't time collecting, you could be making your second collection after another three days. With six days for this mission, most people will fail this mission - unless that watch the collection timing. Timing is critical for this mission - hence the reward is big! Good luck!

Mission Bug

Take a look at the XP for this mission!

Secret Drops 2x Loot Issues

Secret Drops have been around for many months and I've received thousands of them. But rarely have I actually ever received "2x the loot." I am not sure if I have ever received twice the loot - in thousands of attempts - until today. Maybe I have just forgotten about getting it in the past - but it also raises some interesting issues.

This picture shows receiving "twice the loot". But few players need these low-level loot items. Has anyone received like multiple +1 attack/+1 defense bonsses? After all they aren't loot per se! So maybe we should send new secret drops, instead of gifting them back!