Still no Union Hall, still no Power Packs

You know what really pisses me off? The fact that Zynga can be bothered with all these new crap events and features, but they CAN'T be bothered to finish the damn roll outs they started weeks ago!

I STILL do not have Union Hall. How long has that been out? THAT CAME OUT TWO WEEKS AGO. Zynga cannot keep sitting there lying to my face about ensuring stability. The fact is, they can't be bothered to finish the job. They don't give a crap about a level playing field.

And Power Packs? I've been asking to have this restored to my account, but all I've been told is that they understand my frustration. BULL SHIT.

Finish the freaking job, Zynga!

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. 

Family Chat rollout & notifications

Nice! I see the Family Chat help notifications are working this morning! Last night, Family Chat 2.0 started a limited release, slow roll-out, all the usual non-answer terms they use to avoid actually telling you when you'll get the feature. We saw a lot of good updates, but the help notifications mentioned in the official blog post were missing, at least as of when I went to bed last night.

The Family Chat option was previously limited to a small group of families for beta testing, but I assume that more families will now be seeing the chat feature based on the official blog announcement and customer support FAQ on the topic.

Families: updated clan leader sign-up form

There were over 200 entries from clan and family leaders submitted for Phase 2 of the Families rollouts. It may take awhile to get everyone added, and obviously there will be delays as new issues and bugs are found and addressed.

The form to sign up for Phase 2 has already been turned in and is now closed, so rollouts will likely begin soon. If you are the Godfather/Godmother/leader of your group and you still want to be included so that you can claim your Family tag, please use THIS form to submit your information. We haven't been told how further rollouts will be handled yet.

Be aware that there will be a cost of RPs in order to first establish the Family tag. When you get the Families tab in your game, you will have the option to create your Family, and it's at that point that you would pay the RPs.

Group leaders are obviously not required to participate or sign up or use the feature at all. Participation is voluntary and there are still bugs and issues that are being ironed out. This is very beta at this point.

One reason that Zynga is reaching out to group leaders first is to reduce the occurrence of "tag stealing".

Familes: more on slow rollout, Family requests, and Family titles/positions

I've been looking at the new Families tab a bit more today.  Remember that this is a very limited roll-out right now. It was first released to a few players very late last night, including some members of PAC and a handful of clan/family heads/leaders. Today, Zynga is still working to get all of that group up and running, and understandably there have been some early issues that have held things up some. Known heads of families will likely be added first as the feature continues to roll out, to reduce any risk of "tag stealing".

This morning I found I had some requests waiting for me in my ZMC from my friends and admins to join my "clan". The term "Family" applies better to us, I think :)

 

I noticed here that the Family requests show the same as a Brazil crew request in your ZMC. I don't think I've seen any in my Facebook requests, so these requests may be just through the game. At any rate, make sure you pay attention to what you're clicking on.

There are three titles so far: Godfather/Godmother, Underboss, and Soldier. Only one person can be the Godmother or Godfather currently. It's been pointed out that many families have co-founders, or even a council of group leaders, so I hope to see Family positions be made more flexible in the near future. Underboss would be your group officers. If you try to promote someone to the position of Godfather and you already have that position, the game will advise you that doing so will cause you to step down and promote the selected Family member in your place.

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!

players speak out about latest slow rollout

Over the weekend, a lot of players became increasingly upset that they were not given the Put 'Em On Ice ice mastery event. When it finally hit our games yesterday, we found that we were not even being given the same amount of time as the players who received it first. Getting shafted due to Zynga's irresponsibility and negligence in its handling of "slow rollouts" isn't fun, and this latest occurrence has a lot of players speaking out about it.

Player Dviz Nana posted a red alert on the Mafia Wars Getsatisfaction page, and it's drawn a lot of "likes", "me toos", and comments. "I am owed 4 more days to complete it in the same amount of time. I don't like being blatantly lied to and feel cheated & robbed by ZYNGA," she writes. "I want the 4 days and don't know why I can't have them. Is [it]something that is beyond the Zynga developers capabilities to do?"   

That's a very good question, I think. Zynga knew going into this event that 1000 ices would be difficult for many players, yet irresponsibly left the job undone before clocking out Friday without updating the event timer.

I suspect we will see Zynga extend this event. From my perspective though, the issue is not just if Zynga is going to 'fix' the event timer for players who were shorted, the issue is also that their idea of slow rollouts continues to negatively affect its players. And we're losing patience with it.

To add your voice to the subject, go here, "like" it, click "me too", and add a comment of your own:  http://getsatisfaction.com/zynga/topics/unfairness_of_slow_roll_out_of_mw_icing_event

Icing event still on ice...

I don't mind saying this. I am pissed off as HELL that I still do not have the icing event. This is not a damn slow rollout. This is, Zynga let everyone go for the weekend before some a$shole didn't finish the job, leaving thousands of us hanging. I'm sick and  tired of the same canned response. This isn't a "slow rollout to ensure stability". Zynga's friggin' asleep at the wheel and I'm not the only player building up a lot of steam about this.

Zynga, get your act together on this "slow rollout" crap.

http://forums.zynga.com/showthread.php?t=1031148

http://forums.zynga.com/showthread.php?t=1033275