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!

Broken Heart Promotion revisited

It's been a few days since the "broken hearts" promotion has been released. A lot of bugs have been reported but from the action in the news feed I would guess we are all getting lots of broken hearts!

So what have we learned:

1. It seems you can get 5 hearts from the feed at a time, then another 5 later in the day.

2. You may be able to get a few more than 10 hearts per feed source.

3. Hearts drop at a low rate. I don't know if this has affected your play, but having an ad-blocker seems to dramatically reduce (eliminate?) hearts dropping from jobs. This could be coincidence!

4. Hearts dropped as gifts from the Zynga Messaging Service routinely bring up the mini-game or a stash of five hearts. I haven't seen any from gifts accepted from my wall.

5. Extra hearts become mystery bags. It's been my observation that the overwhelmingly most common item from these bags are boosts - especially the hobo. I have seen very few wishlist items, XP bonuses, etc.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

Free Attack Point

Attack point http://zyn.ga/2sY

Mafia Wars Loyalty Program and Rewardville

There is a lot of function about the loyalty program, but I think I've got this figured out. Today I went up a "tier." Every day it seems if we max our loyalty points we can go 10% towards the next tier. The key item is: can we get to gold and platinum? At gold there is better loot that can be redeemed. At platinum level there are several awesome items that each player can buy once. At the emerald level there are no fantastic items to buy, but several items that are useful - especially for lower-level players.

I have friends who have gotten around the limit of the number of loyalty points you can receive a day. They were told, with the earlier version of the loyalty program that without buying points you cannot make the jump to gold or platinum. I'm waiting to see if that is still the case.

Please note that the Mafia Wars loyalty program is separate from "Rewardville" - Zynga cross game loyalty program in beta.

Rewardville uses the lotto infrastructure and lets you accumulate levels by playing multiple games. As I log in, my level 14 lets me get items of around 70 for their best score.

At level 20 I could get items at about 75. At level 40 items of around 90 are unlocked.

If people are allowed to actually advance all their levels, it seems that in both of these systems it would take about 3/4 of a year to get to the maximum levels.

Shot Through the Heart, Free Skill Point, Free RP, Broken Hearts

Today Zynga and a number of other groups are hosting "Shot through the heart" - a clan war for anyone who wants to join in. Each person in the war is on one of two teams and everyone participating is entered into a prize drawing. For more information see

http://www.facebook.com/LoveHurtsMockWar

There seem to be a number of subtle bugs in the Broken Hearts promotion, but so far I like it. I think a fair warning is that I've had problems getting hearts to drop from jobs when I had my ad blocker active. I've also noticed that hearts are not dropping today when you use Brawler (yesterday they did.) However, you can easily get 20 from gifts and 5 from the feed, which is over half the number you could get if you max'ed out on all categories. Over nine days that's almost enough for two great items. Maxing out - assuming you didn't win a LOT of random hearts - you could get three great items.

I'm curious - what do you think of the mini-game?

Free Reward Points (I think 1-5): http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.com%2F4tnyn44%2520&h=9026e

Free Skill Point: http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fzyn.ga%2F2sX&h=9026e

Valentine's Day Promotion

Zynga's upcoming Valentine's Day promotion involves collecting Broken Hearts. Mafia Wars will have a new mini-game for getting Broken Hearts. You can also get them through jobs, fights, gifts, and robberies. Luck will be involved in that the drops for Broken Hearts will include a door for getting additional hearts.

In addition to Broken Hearts there will be Golden Hearts. Each Golden Heart is worth five Broken Hearts. How sweet!

Collection limits:

10 Broken Hearts can be collected per day from each source (Fighting, Robbing, Jobs)

20 Broken Hearts can be collected per day from gift requests

1 Golden Heart can be collected per day

So this means you can get an equivalent total of 55 Broken Hearts a day.

What does this buy? Hearts can be exchanged for Valentine Loot Items:

25 Broken Hearts- Lovebird (52/36) Animal, Common

50 Broken Hearts-Bullet Proof Heart (42/67) Armor, Uncommon

100 Broken Hearts-Total Eclipse (76/45) Vehicle, Rare

150 Broken Hearts- Cardiac Arrest (51/89) Weapon, Superior

What should you get? Traditionally the best single offense or defensive value is worth spending the extra cost, be it in reward points, jobs completed, etc. However, if you don't have many high value inventory items that could change your choice. Also, the event is going to last for about three days, so you could feasibly get one Cardiac Arrest, assuming you max out on items, or a Total Eclipse and a Bullet Proof Heart, or many Bullet Proof Hearts.

If the Lovebird helps you a lot, ask me and your other friends for loot!

Personally, if I rate my top items from 1 to 501 for each category, the Cardiac Arrest is beaten by half as many items as the Total Eclipse. I also like defensive weapons. I'm going for Cardiac Arrest.

Bugs with mini-energy and stamina buffs

Today I encountered a bug with mini-energy packs that I've meant to share. It's important, because I misplayed it today, losing over 1000 energy.

You can get a mini-energy pack, stamina buff, or energy buff from the Zynga toolbar. There are a few scripts to get this too. I like to use the toolbar because it keeps a countdown of when I will be able to get this. However, the checklist script may work well for you too.

A common occurrence is you click to get the buff but it takes you above you maximum. The problem is if your window redraws you lose everything above your maximum. So what can you do?

First, don't change cities. If you do, the window redraws and the buff maxes out.

Second, try to change the screen as little as possible. If you are on the fight page, go to its options to use up the extra - don't go to otherpages (like the home page.)

I've used this approach to use up hundreds of extra stamina successfully.

Free Energy Point

http://zyn.ga/2sV

Today's Free Point, Brawler Update and Job XP Changes

Zynga is offering a free health point today

http://zyn.ga/2sU

I never add to my health, or try not to, so I don't recommend taking this. This is good for people that want to ride the hitlist or have trouble with bosses. But for me, I'll pass.

On Brawler, Brawler seems to be behaving inconsistently today. Brawler is the script that will fight hundreds or thousands of times with a few mouse clicks. Using Brawler there seems to be a bug where the amount of health you have after a fight is wrong. Applying the patch allowed you to use Brawler after Zynga's last changed; without it people were dead in the water.

Lastly there are slight changes to XP for some jobs. A spreadsheet of the changes is here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Avcbz-TePEUTdHRJaWpGck9XRXJubENxdFVwSWJMZGc&hl=en&authkey=CKHbk_IJ#gid=0

Daily Take - Lessons Learned

I've been studying the Daily Take to use it to it's fullest advantage. Here are a few key observations that lead to a near-perfect strategy. Why is this important? Because it lets you use the Daily Take like an extra "refill" (either stamina or energy) once per week. I predicted mine today, and it will give me an extra level.

Today I almost completely drained my character just to test the hypothesis: down to 50 stamina and 800 energy. I should have drained a little less energy to allow me to use the Cleto job if I could, but it was near perfect. The refill gave me over 3000 stamina - nice!

So what is the formula for the Daily Take? These are my observations:

Consecutive Day 1: You get money (or something immediately convertable into money)

Day 2: 2 Crime spree safes or parts for a "shop"

Day 3: Daily Chance ticket

Day 4: Boosts. Note: on farmers I have seen +20% energy here

Day 5: Collection items

Day 6: 120% stamina or energy. This also drops golden keys instead.

Day 7: 5 Attribute points (15 if you are given health points)

Do they agree with yours? I would guess that players with fewer than 501 mafia get free mafia members: where does that fall?

Happy Hunting!

Free Defense Point

Free Defense Point

New Loyalty Point Program

Zynga has released yet another wrinkle to its loyalty program: tiers. If you keep track of your points, I've noticed my "percentage towards Gold level" has ranged from 29% to 81%. The reality of this: if you don't buy points, you are an Emerald player.

Let's dig into this.

First, I am a high-level Emerald player: I get the maximum number of loyalty points per day by sending and receiving dozens of gifts and helping on up to 200 jobs a day. As such I wondered "why am I tier 13?"

Take a look at the tiny print.

² Social Loyalty Points from feeds, tier earnings, and exclusive earnings have 1/10 the weight of full Loyalty Point earned through purchases

I estimate that I earn 300-500 loyalty points a day. However, since these are not purchased points, that amounts to 30-50 points per day.

What do these points buy? There is a lot of interesting, inexpensive loot for lower-level players - like chop shop parts. For high-level players the Green Mamba has been the best buy almost since the program's inception.

My real question: can we NOW, if we play ENOUGH, get to Gold an Platinum levels? There are items under the platinum reward level that make a "credit card player" untouchable!

Happy Hunting!

Two reward points

Two free reward points, probably just for today

http://tinyurl.com/topmafia2011-02-07

Brawler Work Around

Zynga's changes to the attack screen have broken Brawler. Brawler is a bookmarklet that lets you attack and attack and attack until you run out of stamina, logging the loot, XP, etc., gained over thousands of fights. Spockholm came up with a workaround:

javascript:%28function%28%29%7Bvar%20a%3Ddocument.createElement%28%22script%22%29%3Ba.type%3D%22text%2Fjavascript%22%3Ba.src%3D%22http://www.exellerate.com/mafia/others/Brawler.js%3F%22%2BMath.random%28%29%3Bdocument.getElementsByTagName%28%22head%22%29%5B0%5D.appendChild%28a%29%7D%29%28%29%3B

Free attack point

http://zyn.ga/2sS

Free skill point

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://zyn.ga/2sP&h=be467

Limited Time Missions

Zynga has just introduced limited time missions. The first of these is "Brother of Mine." I am on the last of the six parts so this article discusses what some of the latter parts require, if the mission is worth it for you, and how to finish the mission.

One of the first things you will notice in starting the mission is that you need the help of your mafia. As you progress in the mission, you will need more and more help.

On the first part of the mission you need five people to help you. On the final part you need 25 mafia members to help you. You also will need to build items, fight, declare wars, etc. Mafia Wars has changed over time to force characters to be more well-rounded. This is especially true in this mission.

Fighting is everywhere in these missions. You get normal XP for fighting an enemy. However, later in the quest some of these enemies require a lot of stamina to fight. So here are the screen captures.

The above screen capture is from about the fourth part of the mission: part one has as its hardest part your needing the help of three mafia members, part two has collecting from your dockyard as the hardest part, part three requires more help from mafia members - but here you really need to fight. Each person you have to fight takes 15 stamina. This can affect leveling: you get 1-2 xp to fight a person taking 15 stamina to fight.

These fights stem from the screen shown next.

As you can see from this you are fighting a lot. As part of this quest you fight people in NYC and Las Vegas. You fight progressively harder henchmen: 1 stamina, 5 stamina, 15 stamina. But the XP is in general good for finishing parts of the mission. The next screen shows my one possible mistake.

Part 3 or4 of the mission requires you to build two cars. Combined with collecting from the dockyard twice, you can spend more than two days just waiting to complete these parts. Not knowing the remaining parts of this mission, I spent the RP to build a second car. I also should have waited though; I did this late at night, built the car giving a +6 stamina bonus, so I didn't need to build immediately.

The lesson here: time is important in these quests, but you may not need to rush that much.

So what is the end game? Below is the last mission. You need to fight for it and get a lot more help from your mafia.

So what advice can I offer to finish this?

First, start early. Whenever Zynga starts an event you need to start it and keep up with it almost immediately. If you fall behind, you will pay for it.

Second, you need stamina. Until about September of 2010 Mafia Wars characters could be all energy. However, these missions require you fighting almost 100 people, some of which require 15 stamina at a pop.

Third, if you start when the mission begins there is more than enough time to complete the mission. The mission would have taken me 4 days, perhaps 5, without using any RP. However, I didn't know what the mission parts were ahead of time - you do (from this article.) If there were a lot more "collect" or "build" parts to the mission then you would need to speed things up for these tasks.

Fourth, you need the help of your mafia. People will get tired of helping others - I get 50+ requests a day for "crew." But when you need that 15th person's help, you may need to send out 50 invites to get that 15th person.

Fifth, something that may mislead you is that the XP for these missions is level-dependent. Where I get 2000XP for a mission a lower level character may get 500XP and a higher level character may get 3000XP. Conversely, lower-level characters get easier (lower stamina) targets - but not MUCH easier.

Sixth, pay close attention to the wording of each mission. For example, some missions require you to fight - not win fights. It is easy to fight if you don't have to win. Others require you to win fights.

Happy hunting!

Free energy point and Winning at the Super Bowl promotion

I'll cover a few things today. First, Zynga has been giving a different skill point each day for a while. Today is an energy point:

http://zyn.ga/2le

Second, the current Super Bowl promotion is a little harder than most of Zynga's. Big Game Faceoff gives you three days to get one or both of the Super Bowl teams "worth" of players, i.e., to collect 22 "Steel Curtains" or 22 "Green machines" from your mafia per team - or both - to have a chance to win an item based upon the Super Bowl winner.

For every Green Machine team (up to 3) that you have you get the powerful ring if Green Bay wins the Super Bowl.

For every Steel Curtain team (up to 3) that you have you get the powerful ring if Pittsburgh wins the Super Bowl.

This event is harder than most because of the limited time. To be sure to win 3 rings you would need 134 items - or 33 a day.

I might be gifting LOTS of these tomorrow to finish but I did a check of the Free Links that people post. 45 Steel Curtains and 47 Green Machines have been published by my mafia in the last 8 hours! I believe, you can only accept one gift per person, but that is still TWO FULL TEAMS. So tomorrow I will finish my teams through free links! Use the Spockholm tools to find the free links - and good luck!

Undocumented Item in Italy

I'm finishing Italy with my extra energy packs and just came across an odd item: a Swiss Guard. I checked the loot from jobs - nope! Not there! So I have enclosed a screen capture of him from my inventory

.

The loot drop rate in Italy is VERY small. Of the Superior items, one of them has been around. From the screen capture below - guess which one!

This inventory reflects that I am done areas 1 - 5, and almost half done 6, 7 and 8.

Happy hunting!

Building Items and the Chop Shop, Zoo, etc.

As a high-level, every day player I build items every day and cringe when people send me ammunition. Analysis shows that almost any item that you build is dwarfed by the skill points you get while building, so many items are more deceptive marketing than attractive for game playing. I'll cover the few exceptions here to this as well.

Analysis shows that every skill point you get is worth about 20 points of improvement in attack or defense. If I buy six skill points from Zynga it's like getting 120 points of improvement. By improvement, I mean that if my total attack skill is 100,000, a 120 point improvement brings it to 100,120.

The following picture looks like it offers great ideas to buy. However, these items offer really good stats but few skill points. Personally, these add about 4 points to my total fighting skill. Which one do I build? Neither. I build the +6 attack, +6 defense, +6 energy or +6 stamina cars - any are worth 120 points of improvement.

Who should build these? If you have a low-level chop shop build them. If you have very low-end items build them. But keep in mind, too, that skill points are always useful and items are worth less and less constantly.

A year ago Cuban items were very valuable and Russian items seemed priceless. Now items with a 42 attack seem like "junk", that no one would by, compared to the items that you can get from any mission.

People who collect items for the sake of collecting them also might build them - to collect every item in the game there are lots of items!

So are any of the new items worthwhile? I am about to build my first. The Giant Octopus!

Why the Giant Octopus? It offers +3 stamina. That is comparable to the shark and other +3 items.

The astute observer should ask "why don't you build the +10 health items if they are worth that much more?!?!?" The answer: I don't build "health". Health is useful for people that ride the hitlist intentionally (I don't) and for some boss fights. A high health, though, means you take that many more hits - and if you aren't careful lose that much more money - when people using tools like "brawler" attack you!

Happy hunting and building!