They're BACK! Rob squads return! 7/24

Rob Squads have returned!

This is how mine looks now versus how it looked two nights ago.

Let's get to robbing!

Rob Squads Missing

2nd ****UPDATE**** Missing Rob Squads 7/22

**** UPDATE #2 ****
Zynga is aware of the missing Rob Squads, but it appears to be unintentional
Missing Rob Squads: We are aware and investigating this issue
Please go to that page and click the Bandage so they will *fix it*!
**** UPDATE #2 ****

Now that we have the exciting new Robbing Spree Event our Rob Squads seem to have disappeared.
*UPDATE*
From a reliable source, you can still use Rob Squads in Spockholm Robber BG v 1.08 beta
*UPDATE*

We still have burners, and *yes* the Rob Squads did say "Limited Time" for a very long time, so maybe we just forgot that the time was limited, the way that Zynga forgot that the Third Family Property is still "Coming Soon". 

I did find that I still have all of my Rob Squads in my Boost inventory, so we still have them. Maybe they'll come back later.

Zynga Union Hall Survey

With the rollout of Union Hall comes not only a convenient place to collect all of your properties, but also finally, the option to collection Brazil properties separately - and thus have more control over when we use the extra stamina and energy we collect.

This IS on a slow rollout. I have seen plenty of people saying they don't have this. I myself don't have it yet either.

Soon we'll be able to use Rob Squad boosts to collect additional cash and consumables when clicking the Collect All button in Union Hall.

You can also ask for and send "Super Shipments" from the Union Hall. When you Ask for all parts and people click your post, it says you will receive "up to one for each of the construction properties you can own (the Chop Shop, Weapons Depot, Armory, & Private Zoo in NYC, the Black Market in Brazil, and the Port in Italy)".

Zynga has another survey for you, this one about the Union Hall. You can go HERE to take the survey.

Personally, I think it was stupid to put out the survey when many of us don't even have the damn feature yet. If Zynga's usual style holds true, we're pretty much screwed until they get around to finishing the rollout next week. We play the game over the weekend, but Zynga doesn't bother to accommodate that. 

WTF: robbing property difficulty

I'm fairly certain this has been happening, and that I've heard people saying this before, and my friend David R. mentioned it again this morning in one of our groups.

This was David's screen shot. He noticed a difference with at least three properties when he shot this.

I decided to do a little robbing to check it out for myself with a Rob Squad (I do farrr more fighting than robbing). Here is my after shot; compare it to the Before shot at the top of this post, and you'll see that the medium property that I have circled is the ONLY property whose difficulty level didn't change.

Is this a graphical issue, or is the property difficulty actually changing on us? 

Big Heist event FAQ

The FAQ is up for this Big Heist robbing event with yet more new boosts. You can check it out here, but most of it's just filler.

Q: Is there a limit of how many Rob Squads I can get?
A: Yes. There is a maximum daily limit of 50 Rob Squads that you can collect. OF that total you can collect a maximum of 2 from free gifts and a maximum of 5 free Rob Squads from clicking on your friends’ feeds each day.

Of note was this item. So I guess I was wrong earlier when I assumed that we could have 50 at one time. Nuh-uh, it's only 50 a DAY. That increases the suckage factor of this event significantly, imho.

But what's this about getting TWO from free gifts? That must be a typo, because I know I've collected more than 2 from free gifts already since this event started a little while ago. And if we can only get 5 a day from feeds and "2" from free gifts, how the heck are we supposed to get the rest of the 50 every day?

Looks like this will be around for about a week, give or take. No timers, this time. Zynga surprises me, they love their timers on everything!

more on The Big Heist

Here's more info on The Big Heist that I've found since my initial post about it.As stated in another update by the Mafia Wars blog, you can store up to 50 Rob Squads to run your Big Heist during this week-long event. I assume that means at any given time you can have 50 Rob Squads.

That's not too shabby, I guess, since you can send them as free gifts and receive them as gifts. We'll see.
I really don't have time to mess with robbing right now. I'm getting kind of pissed off at all the stuff we're supposed to be staying on top of in the game right all at once.

The Big Heist robbing event

I just started noticing these littering my news feed, and then saw a post on the fan page by one of our admins. Time to investigate!

I clicked on one and collected a "Rob Squad".

And there's now a big banner on the Mafia Wars home page about The Big Heist. "Max out robbing for 2x Rewards".

You can also ask for Rob Squads from your friends. 

On the robbing page I now see a Rob All button, and it says 88 stamina in parenthesis. That would be the total stamina cost to rob the entire board.

 I got this for a few seconds *g*

But then I saw the results screen with all properties robbed. Very nice! It's much easier to rob all properties with a single click, rather than clicking on each property individually.

Another Mistyfied admin noticed the additional bonus from using the Rob All button.

 The next big question would be, how many times a day can we collect these Rob Squads and use the Rob All feature? We know Zynga loves their irritatingly-low limits, and they do not disappoint in this case either. I got the message that I can only collect 5 Rob Squads 'from feeds' per day. That was only the second post I clicked on, but I did ask for Rob Squads via a feed post a few minutes ago, so you can only get a total of 5, at least from feeds, either your own or clicking on someone else's post. That sucks.

Lastly for now, I noticed the robbing screen has gotten some minor graphical changes. The Refresh button got a facelift, and so did the burners. It rather irritates me when Zynga wastes time (and I assume employee resources and therefore funding money) on updating stupid sh*t like this when there are so many other things in the game that the PLAYERS think Zynga should be focusing on instead.