Mafia Wars, this week and next

Better late than never! I thought they were going to start doing these weekly updates on Fridays, but at any rate, here it is. I'll skip over this past week's events, as I think we all already know what happened. 

This Week's Major Bug Fixes
BUG: A quest boss' health would sometimes regenerate before the 8 hour timer expired.
FIXED: Quest boss health now only regenerates if the player runs or the timer expires.
BUG: Players were sometimes unable to buy items from the Brazil jobs page even though they had enough money.
FIXED: Players with enough money are now able to purchase the necessary items.
BUG: Certain tasks in Mission: Blood Money were showing up completed and players were unable to collect the associated rewards.
FIXED: This is no longer a problem for players.
BUG: The fight window was displaying incorrect attack and defense stats when turning boosts on & off.
FIXED: The fight window now displays the correct stats. It is important to note that this was just a display issue that made it appear that the boosts remained enabled even though disabling them really did eliminate their effect. Since the correct stats were being used by the fighting system while the wrong numbers were being displayed, no player actually ever had an unfair advantage in fights.

Coming Next Week
Steal Of The Summer - this was mentioned in the last Mafia Wars Live broadcast, a "super blowout sale" for many items in the Marketplace. Purchase 15 items and get a "mastery item" for free.

Death By Ice - an icing event for the Families out there. If the family ices enough players during the event, everyone in the family receives "four levels of mastery items". Extra rewards go to the ten top families.

New Mission: Black Market - mission event, I presume. The mastery item will be the Widow Knife, with stats of (52,150).

New Mystery Bags - oh boy, more boosts.

New Operations - new operations, new op loot?

Fourth Of July Items - "Red Hot and Blue" items will be available through July 5th, in honor the July 4th American Independence holiday.

Availability of Limited Edition Items improved

It seems that in response to people complaining that the limited window of availability of the Collector's Edition Items favoured certain time zones, Zynga have responded by now having 2 windows of availability.

24/2011 10:24pm PDT UPDATE: To give Mafia Wars fans around the world a better chance at obtaining the very rare Collector's Edition Items, we'll be making them available twice a day for the remainder of the promotion. Starting tomorrow, Saturday, 6/25, we're going to make 2,000 available at 2 am PDT each day and 5,000 available at 10 am PDT each day, for a total of 7,000 of each Collector's Edition Item. They will never be made available again, so be sure to get them while you can.

Can't say it concerns me at all, but thanks to all who are paying for these for keeping the game free for the rest of us!

Saturday, 6/25: Dragonfish

Saturday, 6/25
Dragonfish
(71/120)

Catch of the day! Today's limited edition item will be going on sale after 9am Pacific time today for 35 reward points. As usual, there will only be 5,000 made available, and it's first come, first serve. 

Daily Chance lost your tickets

I'm seeing a lot of people saying that they lost tickets in this week's Daily Chance drawing.

It's being reported by some that the Daily Chance has been changed to a bi-weekly drawing, instead of weekly. It's still showing up as weekly in my game though.

Is your Daily Chance timer at one week or two? Did you use tickets this past week, and if so, did you win anything??

Family Chat back online

For those families who are beta testing the Family chat feature, the chat is back online now :)

Thanks to Nate and Don Perog for the quick work resolving this!

Family chat TOS box issue

For the families that are beta testing the Family chat feature, we're finding that Zynga REALLY wants us to read the TOS again. And again. And again. And again. If you are in a family group that is checking out the feature, you'll notice that it keeps loading the TOS box when you try and enter the chat. The issue has been turned in.

Big Payoff completed!

Yes that's right, a Mafia Wars God has done it again, and already completed the Big Payoff! Amazing! Thanks Matthias E for sharing this in the group.

Big Payoff or Big Ripoff?

Here is my first energy run at this Big Payoff job. Based on the initial results, I'm thinking it's less of a payoff and more of a ripoff.

When performing this job, there is only a *chance* that you will earn experience points - something that we take for granted when doing jobs. There's also a chance for +5 attack or defense.

I blew through 24,000 energy, and got 8,000 XP and +5 attack. That's a return rate of .33 -- that's terrible. And I could've gotten +5 attack from leveling up very easily with the 24,000 energy that I had. Oh, and I guess I got a little less than half of a Thin Ice mastery item :-/

So I loaded up on an energy pack, putting me at 30,000 energy.

Here are those results. That's .27 xp return this time, although I did get more attack and defense points, which I would _not_ ordinarily have gotten with 30,000 energy.

So 54,000 energy later, and this puppy is still only 77% mastered.

Sooo...I went ahead and got an energy refill.The returns from this run of 24,000 energy were pretty abysmal.

Finally, with only 1,000 energy to spare, I mastered the job for the first time and earned my first Thin Ice! We can master it up to 25 times I think, but if it is going to take me 78,000 ....I dunno if even I can pull that off.

The Big Payoff is here!

 FOUND: Rio de Janeiro, Centro. You can't miss it from there. It will only show up if you have at least 2,000 energy capacity.

Located: BRAZIL - Rio de Janeiro: Centro
You have 3 days to complete
You get a chance at 1-9% mastery for every 1K energy
You get a chance at +2000EXP, +5ATT or +5DEF each hit

Hmm, so you might not even get any XP for all that energy you put into the job? Well, let's go see how fast someone can master it :0)

Captain Jack's biography

 

Someone at Zynga had a little fun with this boss, Captain Jack Coltello, as there's now a bio on him over on the Mafia Wars blog.  A Sicilian-born smuggler and gun runner with ties to the Neo Imperium, Jack loves whiskey, rum, loose women, and...backgammon? 

Born along the northern coast of Sicily, Coltello was raised on the Mediterranean Sea. He is a water rat grown into a shark, acquiring much of his wealth by operating smuggling rings at international harbors. His reputation for betrayal is wellknown. When the Neo-Imperium, a powerful crime organization in Brazil, reached out to Coltello, he demanded a submarine to carry out the jobs they requested.

You can read more about him here.

Secret Stash Success post still broken

This must be a glitch :D

 I actually finally got one of those stupid secret stashes, and won a headless Tundra Commando.

Of course, Sharing your success still does nothing. You can generate this post to your news feed, but it does absolutely nothing when your friends click on it.


*thanks Karin C. for helping me verify the stash post is still broken

Captain Jack at a glance

The Mafia Wars Gods page has posted another good reference image, this one on the Cpt. Jack Coltello boss fight. All of the information at a glance!

Friday, 6/24: Serpent Skean

Serpent Skean
(118/72)

 

Today's limited edition item will be the Serpent Skean ~ as usual, there will only be 5,000 available for 35 RPs each. You can get the item from the marketplace, and there will be a home page banner for it as well.

 

All you collectors out there should be having fun with these LE items!

FAQ: Boss Fight Captain Jack Coltello

The FAQ on this new boss fight was posted last night on the customer support site. You can find it here.There's not really much new information on it.

The event will end late on June 30th. 

• This boss does not regenerate health (I don't think any of these bosses have, actually). 
• Shotgun blasts will not be as strong as other ammo. 

 

 

Bronze mastery – 128 attack/96 defense
Silver mastery – 149 attack/104 defense
Gold mastery – 168 attack/116 defense

The usual limits on consumables apply:

Q:  Are there limits to the number of Ammos that I can collect?
A:  Yes.  Each consumable has a daily limit that can be collected. For the Job, Fighting, and Robbing Ammos, you can collect a maximum of 50 each day.  For the gifting Ammos, you can only collect 40 a day.

Daily Checklist sightings

For several days now I've been seeing comments about people seeing an empty Daily Checklist for a moment, and then it disappearing. MWM even has a post about it. I still haven't seen it myself, but I heard about it again from two different people this morning. 

It's hard to say what this means. Daily Checklist has been gone for too long for it to randomly be reappearing in the game like that, so I suspect we may a return of this feature in some manner. 

FOUND: Vengeance Boosts!

The vengeance boosts that we've been hearing about for awhile have started to make an appearance in at least one place in the game that I know of.

Feature Contributor Nick Greig got one of these as a gift yesterday, and he later found out that the person obtained the boost originally from a robbing mastery post. So when I saw this robbing mastery post of James' in my news feed, I thought I'd try my luck.

I was in luck, as it turns out!

The boosts don't show up in inventory, so I was a little mystified as to how Nick got one sent to him as a gift. I DID find that they are giftable, and can be sent from the gifting tab in the game. 

 

No idea yet how these are activated, though. Turning boosts on while fighting does not at this time let you use the vengeance boosts.

FIXED: unable to remove Family members

Several family leaders will be relieved to know that they should now be able to remove family members. And this time they should stay gone! If for some reason group leaders still cannot kick out and remove members, a workaround that has worked for most is to log into the game from mafiawars.com and remove the member from there.

ANNOUNCING ~ CPT. JACK COLTELLO

In this corner we have Cpt. Jack Coltello.

Here are the combos for the fight. (Thanks Mike)

Cpt. Jack is loaded with 5000 Health & a 7 day timer.

For an easy take down, we get a nice reward with 128A/96D.

Round 2 Boss has 20000 Health.

Round three to follow. Good luck to all the fighters.

Families tag showing in Player Updates

Check out your ingame newsfeed, the Player Updates, and you'll see one of the issues that Zynga has been working on and finally fixed: getting Family tags to show up in the Player Updates. I bet we'll start seeing those tags updated to show up elsewhere, too.