Crack The Safe will not die!

Crack The Safe was supposedly pulled from the game a long time ago, but it seems that the job was never finished, and remains incomplete to this day!

I've written about it in the past myself, and I just LOL'd when I saw this in my news feed from another player. Will Zynga ever remember to remove Crack The Safe from ALL accounts?

Crack The Safe loot not available from Crack The Safe

According to this post by David R. in my news feed, he still has Crack The Safe, but no longer gets loot from doing so. He tried cracking the safe again, but apparently it doesn't provide the loot items now that they are available from operations. In the post, it only lists a dash - in place of the item name.

My old account still has Crack The Safe, and I now for a fact it was working earlier, because I cracked the safe with it.

And I can still add people! But if, as David's post suggests, we can no longer get the loot this way, I'd like to respectfully ask Zynga to get Crack the Safe the hell off my account!

#14 - Adding friends for events gets us 'Pinked'!

Next up in response to the 16 points addressed in the recent Zynga Q&A blog, we look at the concern about adding new people for event in MW.

14. Some Mafia Wars events require that I add hundreds of friends so quickly that I risk getting pinked/banned by Facebook! This is ridiculous!

We removed the biggest issues with this and have been working with Facebook to improve player communications with each other. To our knowledge, this is becoming less and less of an issue.

Please share your feedback regarding Being Pinked/Banned By Facebook.

It's fair to say this most directly relates to the recent "Crack the Safe" event where we had to add 5 new people to our Mafia in order to receive a number of decent loot items. It also used to be a feature of some of the limited time missions where you had to add new crew in order to receive more consumables per day for the duration of the mission.

Although Facebook is of course the biggest single platform for social gaming, and many games actively encourage the addition of new people by design (I mean, who has 500 real friends who play Mafia Wars?), it is technically against TOS to add people you don't actually know:

Unwanted contact: Our systems detect when friend requests you send to others are being ignored at a high rate and volume. Using Facebook to contact many people you don't know is not allowed because it may make them feel threatened, harassed, or unsafe.

As is apparent from their quote addressing the point, I think Zynga already know this is an issue, as they pulled Crack the Safe following feedback from people regarding the amount of "pink-slipping" that was going on, and realised that it's not really a great idea to encourage such intense friend adding linked to an event. Nor have we seen the "crew" function in one of the limited time missions for a while. All in all, I think Zynga have learnt their lesson on this one. Until next time of course :P

Crackin' from the grave

Crack the Safe ended at least three weeks ago. About a week after that, I noticed that my old account still had Crack the Safe.

Today I happened to log in for something there and noticed that it still has Crack the Safe! lol.


Crack The Safe still haunts other accounts too, or so I've heard. I guess this is the reverse of a slow roll-out.

And speaking of Crack The Safe, didn't Zynga promise that there would be another way for players to max out on the loot offered by that event? I think they did. And I think they probably better get on that pretty soon, if the loot's going to be worth anything.

Crack The Safe haunts some accounts

Although Crack The Safe was retired on May 25th, it still lingers in some accounts -- including an old one of mine.

 

I had noticed over the weekend that the account still had Crack The Safe, and it was still fully functional. I cracked the safe here, 3 days after Crack The Safe was pulled. 

 

Today, it still has Crack The Safe! 

I accepted some friend requests, and sent out Mafia Wars invites. I checked again a few minutes later, and found that I could still Crack The Safe.

Yep, still works! :0)

RIP Crack The Safe

Crack The Safe has made a quiet exit, with the introduction of the new boss fight, as Feature Contributor Rebecca Read noticed. Many will be happy to see it gone. Zynga did say that there would be another way to obtain the balance of the loot items, but it remains to be seen how that will be handled yet. Stay tuned.

ETA

The Mafia Wars blog has updated their post about ending Crack The Safe, saying "We have officially retired Crack The Safe. We want to thank everyone who enjoyed the feature while it lasted and also those who let us know what they thought about it. While we can't necessarily respond or react to it immediately, we always appreciate your feedback."

More info on Crack The Safe ending

The Mafia Wars blog has added a little information about Crack the Safe ending that should be good news for many players.

The date of next Wednesday, May 25th, is the last day to crack the safe.

"Don't worry if you are unable to crack your safe before then, however, as we promise to find other ways for you to obtain the valuable items currently hidden behind the vault doors."

Crack The Safe ending soon

One announcement that came from this evening's Mafia Wars Live session is that Crack The Safe is ending soon. Game Designer Cole told us that it is 'scheduled to go away sometime next week', and Blue-Eyed Nate said there would be more information forthcoming on the Mafia Wars blog.

During the first Mafia Wars Live session, the guys found out that players were getting blocks and bans from Facebook for sending too many friend requests due to this feature, which I imagine is a major reason behind this getting pulled.

Many players will get a little anxious over this news. If you aren't close to finishing Crack The Safe, and you know others are and already have finished, you may feel that this will leave you at a disadvantage, loot-wise. One player in the Ustream chat during Mafia Wars Live already cried foul against players (like me) who used the 'Crack The Safe trick' to finish already.

Bearing in mind that there is a 100 item cap on the loot you can get from cracking the safe, I have to wonder how Zynga will balance this one!

more on non-mafia gift errors

A little while ago, I posted about errors in receiving gifts being the result of welcome gifts from new mafia members who are not Facebook friends.

 This is continuing to hold true, and I've been able to duplicate it. When the "trick" is used, you are able to send mafia invites to people who you are not directly connected to on Facebook. Those mafia invites show up in the ZMC (Zynga Message Center), and when accepted, gives you the option to send a free gift to the person whose mafia invite you just accepted.

 As you can see here, it bypasses the usual list of Facebook friends and allows you to send directly to the other person even if they are not a Facebook friend.

 

When that free gift request is sent to the non-friend, it shows up in their own ZMC, and also on their Facebook requests page.

 If the gift is accepted, it gives an error, both through the ZMC and if the request is accepted from the Facebook requests page.

 So I guess now we know that error code af-77 is due to not being Facebook friends with the person who sent you the gift.

errors accepting gifts due to crack the safe trick

If you're someone who, like me, made use of the Crack the Safe trick, you may be noticing that you're getting an additional number of errors when trying to accept free gifts. This appears to be because all of these new mafia members who are not connected to me on Facebook are sending "welcome" gifts, and the error occurs because we are not Facebook friends.

I made use of the Remove Non Friends feature, and it removed only 48 people. I know I added a lot more than that. I also tried Spockholm's Remove Non Friends bookmarklet, but it didn't find any additional people to remove, so I guess I'll just try again in a couple of days. Hopefully removing that first 48 will help.

the Crack The Safe "trick"

 

In recent days, you may have heard people talking about 'the Crack The Safe trick'. I heard about it too, that you could add mafia members for Crack The Safe without actually having to send Facebook friend requests, but I didn't get motivated to check into how to do so until today. Many players, myself included, have been hit with blocks on messaging and sending friend requests by Facebook. In my case, I got slapped with a 4 day block, for sending fewer than 15 friend requests, all of which were accepted by the people I sent them to!

Facebook's logic for this is questionable, and I've seen many players complaining that Zynga shouldn't have an event or feature that works solely by making us add new mafia members. One person even said I should punch the developer that came up with the idea, lol. 

Personally, it hasn't bothered me. The loot rewards were worth it, but nevertheless I wasn't in a hurry to crack the safe a hundred times as fast as possible. As Nick put it, I was happy 'just plodding along'. 

Then today, Holger Massa wrote to my inbox asking if I knew of this workaround and included instructions. Ironically, I had just been wondering about the "trick", so I decided to follow Holger's instructions. 

 

Click on the image for a larger view.

You will need at least two accounts. To add mafia to your main account for Crack The Safe, you will be using mafia invites from another account.

1. From your main account (or whichever account you are wanting to crack the safe for), log into Mafia Wars and UNFRAME the page. 

2. Open another tab, and log out of your main account. Then, log into a secondary Facebook account. 

3. Return to your original tab, where your main account is still unframed in Mafia Wars. 

4. Go to the My Mafia Tab, which takes you to the recruit page.

 

 What you will see is a list of people to invite to your mafia, but the list is from the secondary account that you logged into. 

Select friends to invite until you get the message that you've reached the limit, and then send the requests.

When you go to send these requests, it will appear that you are sending from the account that is currently logged into Facebook, but those receiving the requests will see that they are from your main account, and will get added to your main account's mafia. 

 I even got a mafia invite from myself, which amused me more than it should have. 

I noticed that if you send an invite to someone from your secondary account that is already in your main account's mafia, it doesn't credit you with a mafia add (makes sense). I went through three accounts that I have access to, and sent a ton of mafia invites. I started early this afternoon with having cracked the safe 42 times, as per the Crack The Safe bookmarklet by Spockholm.

You'll have to remember to refresh your Mafia Wars home page frequently, to crack the safe when enough people have joined your mafia each time. But it does work! By the end of tonight, I reached 100 times. At that point the Crack the Safe module disappeared entirely from my home page. That might have confused me, had I not known how many times I had cracked the safe.

The only downfall that I can see to doing this, is your ingame news feed will become cluttered with updates from people that you're not connected with on Facebook. If that bothers you, you can always utilize the Remove Non-Friends feature after collecting all of your Crack The Safe rewards. 

new Spocklet posted

Cracked da Safe?

Spockholm's new bookmarklet is now on their experimental bookmarklets page.

 It'll show you how many times you cracked the safe (bearing in the mind that the limit is 100 times), which loot items you got, and how much attack and defense were gained in equipment stats.

The information box is also moveable and resizeable.

no need to get banned over Crack The Safe

"To prevent you from contacting people against their wishes, your friend requests and your ability to send messages to strangers have been blocked temporarily."

I would hazard a guess that a LOT of Mafia Wars players have been seeing that Facebook message lately. I've even gotten it!! And I don't send that many friend requests ordinarily, unless I'm doing a loot giveaway on our fan page. Add to that, Facebook doesn't even stand by its own bans, as I was back to accepting and sending friend requests a couple of hours after getting a 4 day block. Meh! If people are accepting my friend requests, I hardly see what the problem is, but I digress. 

An excellent point was made by a fellow PAC member regarding this situation: there's no set date for this feature to end, so don't be in such a rush! 

If you refer to the 411 regarding Crack The Safe on the Zynga Customer Support site, it tells us this: 

Q:  When will the event end?
A:  There is currently not a date scheduled for this event to end as it is still in the limited release stage.

So chillax :)

More feature rollouts

If you haven't yet completed Vegas, be sure you take advantage of the 3x mastery event this weekend and coming week. The 3x mastery event will end before next weekend.

Yesterday, we saw that many more players were finally receiving the Crack The Safe feature. Today, when the fight loot event was kicked off, it looks like another large batch of players were given the the feature that they've had to wait weeks for.

 Additionally, I'm seeing that a few more players have gotten the golden promotions.

If you are one of the players still waiting, the good news is Zynga seems to be speeding up the "slow rollout" so hopefully you won't have to wait much longer.

Crack the Safe - update?

If you were one of the many who did not have the Crack The Safe feature, there's a good chance you may have now or will be seeing it soon. Many players are reporting finally getting it.

This particular issue has been a bit of a personal crusade of mine. I've had Crack The Safe since it was first rolled out, and yes, the loot is pretty good. While I hear there's a cap on how many you can ultimately get, so those just now getting the feature should be able to catch up with those of us who already had it, it still really sucked for those players without the feature to watch the rest of us cracking our safes all this time.

Zynga's excuse was that it was a "beta" feature and on a "slow rollout to ensure stability". I'm sorry, but that's a bunch of crock. I can understand a slow rollout taking a few days, but not a few weeks. It's an excuse to do nothing about it, knowing that thousands of players were getting really pissed about the issue.

I've been nagging and flat-out bitching about the issue for over a week now. I didn't think it was unreasonable for me to ask "What is the cause of the delay in some players receiving the feature?" and "When can they expect to get it?"

Am I finally getting an answer? Keep me posted.