rewatching Mafia Wars Live...

I finally sat down and took the the time to rewatch this past Wednesday's third broadcast of Mafia Wars Live. The broadcast is just under 40 minutes long, and if you didn't want to rewatch it in its entirety, feel free to read along for the highlights. These are just my notes, impressions, interpretations, and paraphrasing. If you have a question or want clarification on something you read here, I'd encourage you to watch the portion of the broadcast that I commented on.

With Nate this week was Jeff AKA Month. Cole was MIA this week - missed ya, Crazy Dragon! Jeff is part of the team that worked (and is still working) on the fight changes that are currently being rolled out.

He reminded me a lot of the character Spencer Reid from the TV Criminal Minds. He even kinda sounded like him!

This was the most widely-viewed broadcast so far, I believe. I noticed there were around 4,000 viewers at one point. It had been rumored that upcoming fight changes would be discussed during the broadcast, I'm sure that accounts for some of it.

The fight changes were in fact the first thing announced, as most of you now know. Jeff told us it would take about a week for the fight changes to roll out to everyone. To that, I said "BOOO SLOW ROLLOUTS!" and Jeff replied with "Who doesn't love the slow roll outs?" He was being facetious, of course :D

The upcoming Worldwide Meetup Day on June 25th was talked about. Another Worldwide Meetup Day is already in the works, planned for sometime in early October to celebrate the three year anniversary of Mafia Wars. October 8th was a date that was mentioned, but nothing is set in stone yet.

It was mentioned that the X-Men event had been well-received by players. I'm not sure that's entirely the case, though. Having to decipher a code was a neat twist, and the 7 item loot drops and mastery item were fine too. What I really didn't like about it was all the freakin' confusion, and the big annoying blingies on my homepage. I'm really ready for it to go away at this point.

But I digress - Nate indicated that they would look to make future codes harder to break. It took me several minutes to break the code, I actually liked that part, but I dunno if I want it to be harder. Maybe there should be more steps to take in which codes need to be cracked, instead.
 

 One of the questions from the forum inevitably had to do with scripts. "Which scripts are allowed? Referring to the sanction for the mock war that happened this past weekend?"

Nate's gotta be sick of being questioned about scripts and I wouldn't blame him. His response was brief. He said that there has been a lot of internal discussion about scripts, and to refer to what he said about scripts during the 2nd Mafia Wars Live broadcast. He said scripts are not sanctioned, however Zynga likes to promote positive community events.

Some people didn't like this and referred to it as double speak. Personally, I feel that Zynga acknowledging that there are scripts which are useful and beneficial to players is a step in the right direction. And so is promoting community events like mock wars, despite the involvement of war scripts. 

Nestor got a shoutout for his newly-acquired tattoo which mentions Mafia Wars and the clan/family he belongs to. I think he deserves Reward Points for that!

Jeff told us that there are no plans to expand fight mastery levels. In fact, they are looking at completely revamping that system in ways that complement the fighting update.

Stamina refills came up more than once during the broadcast. Jeff said "Words have been spoken of stamina refills as potential rewards." In no way has this been decided, but it is currently under discussion. Late in the broadcast, he said again that it's being looked at as far as how it could be implemented into the game, and hinted that there could even be 'multiple instances' of stamina refills showing up in the game.

"Best water in the whole office"

 Other topics that were covered:

• Why so many events have been released at one time recently. Nate says it's due to schedule crunching and also that they're testing out different types of events on us that happen during normal gameplay, and that they are trying to find a good balance of how to release the events.

My note: There is no balance! It's been one thing after another on top of another right after another event lately. It needs to slow down again.

• There are no plans currently for improvements to the mobile system.
• We can expect to see an expansion to Brazil and probably a new city after that.
• No new non-event missions anytime soon. "Maybe in the next few months."
• More loot items will be made giftable in the near future.
• The hitlist has not been a high priority for an update.--I don't think they understood this question. The question was, "can the hitlist be revamped to make the monetary achievements attainable?"
• No plans to exclude players from being attacking while in a boss fight, due to the potential for abuse. Jeff mentioned an idea of a separate health bar for boss fights. I like that idea a lot, actually.
• War wins and losses are not determined the same way as fight list wins. There is a set percentage chance that you will win or lose, similar to robbing.
• It was asked when the next generation of FHEL would be out. Zynga is currently looking at updating other areas of loot (such as robbing rewards, etc).
• I think we might have gotten the point across that we don't like Mystery Animals on the Free Gifts page :) Hopefully those wastes of a click will go away soon.
• It was asked "Why are there limits on helping people per day?" I wasn't happy with the explanation that it's so they can make rewards better. I'm not sure they really understood the question. It is a royal pain in the ass being limited to getting helped by only 5 people per day per property, and only being able to help out 5 other people in return. Yes, the limits on helping in jobs sucks too, but I believe the question was geared at building help requests.
• Next broadcast in two weeks on June 15th, time TBD.

I wanted to know why the icing event wasn't extended, as was asked for by many players. Jeff explained that it was actually an early roll-out, all those people that got the event 4 days ahead of the rest of us. The icing event was 'a bit of research'. To see if people liked it, and how many ices we could actually get. It was really supposed to be a 7 day event, he said.

Ok, I get that it was an experiment, so allow me to tell you exactly how pissed off I was at having to wait FOUR DAYS after a lot of players got the event and some had even finished it!

At the very end of the broadcast, Mistyfied FC Rebecca Read asked a very good question: when will fight secret stashes be fixed? In fact, I think that was quite possibly the best question of the broadcast. "What does that mean?" Nate asked. It seems they were somehow unaware there was an issue there. After some explanatory comments from users in the Ustream chatroom, Nate and Jeff said they would follow up on the issue.

And I will personally follow up with them about the issue. The controversy and conflicts over "stolen" secret stashes has been going on for over a year now, and I'm flat-out sick of it.




And of course I had to have a little fun with photo editing. Nate just makes such a good subject, with his mannerisms sometimes...it's his version of the Vogue :P

strike a pose, there's nothing to it!