Family Properties

 When Family property items hit the Mafia Wars inventory last night, we knew we would be getting the Family Properties very soon. This was something I've been very much looking forward to. As Jon, one of our admins recently commented, it sounds good, but he wondered how Zynga would mess it up. When I woke up this morning, another great admin of ours, Ann, told me I should drink my coffee before trying to get a grip on the new Family Properties feature, which was released last night. I knew that couldn't bode well, but trusting Ann, I took her advice and waited awhile before delving into this...mess.

Sigh.

That gives me a headache just looking at it. That doesn't look fun. It looks tedious.

Protect your Family's shared property and rob your rival's families.

Build Property – Upgrade and repair your property with consumable parts. Parts are available from robbing properties (max.30/day), requests & gifts (max. 20/day).

Rob Property – Successful robberies cause damage to the opposition's property and has a chance of awarding crafting parts. 

Defend Property – Health/Defense is determined by items allocated to property by individual players (higher defense stats = higher defense). Allocated items will be consumed. Each player can contribute 5 items per property. Items of all classes may be contributed, excluding limited or restricted items; try combinations to earn a bonus.

Upgrade/Repair Property – Upgrade or repair property by individual contributions of property parts and part requests. Properties can be upgraded up to Level 10; damaged properties can't be upgraded until repaired. Parts will be consumed.

Family Property Bonuses – Bonuses are calculated based on shared property level and damage status.

So we're supposed to protect it from other Families, and attack the properties of other Families? That sounds like more work to me. The only "good" thing I read here was that we can get rid of unused loot items by tossing them into our Family property. But that bad thing about that is, if you want to get rid of junk loot, it's not going to benefit the property much. 

You can heal your Family's property by using those Artillery Shells, which are giftable. I'm sure there's some asinine limit on how many you can accept per day, and there's a whole lot of health on a property. 20 Artillery Shells a day isn't going to go far.

This thing really needs a better way to scroll through your inventory. Maybe even a search box. It takes a lot of clicking to scroll down to items you actually want to donate. Being able to specify the quantity would nice as well, instead of having to choose 5 times in a row. And every single item you'll get prompted about whether you're "sure". Too much clicking, ahhhhh!

It says you can change the items, which takes you back to the annoying scroll box. I doubt that replaces the previous items back to your inventory, but I haven't checked. Maybe, with the right script, this could be a good way to get rid of that crap loot that's been sitting around your inventory for years.We've long wanted a way to rid ourselves of junk loot....this isn't exactly what we had in mind, though.

I'm not sure exactly how the robbing works. Obviously you can rob the Artillery Stations of other Families. They incorporated an annoying feature in which the stamina cost of each attack goes up, and comes with a cool down timer. Ugh. I was only able to rob a few times and then it wouldn't let me rob more. Maybe there's a limit on the number of times each member can rob. Not sure. And I'm fresh out of interest.

This feature looks purely annoying. It's tedious, and if I lost patience trying to read about it and figure it out, I can bet that half of my Family is going to feel the same way. I had hoped for something fun for our family, not more work, not something that is intended to keep us busy defending, not something that is complicated to figure out. I had hoped for something requiring cooperative Family effort for maybe XP and/or GOOD loot items, or Family XP. This is not what I hoped for. I was really looking forward to this; now I can't wait to get back to studying for final exams :-/

What do YOU think of this feature? I think it's going to be just another thing to ignore, without major changes to it. Just my $0.02 worth.