the Big Heist banner is back

 

The Big Heist banner has been gone from my Mafia Wars home page for a few days now, but this morning I couldn't help but notice that it was back in its old spot. What's up with that?

I went and checked the FAQ about the Big Heist, and it hasn't been updated, so I'm not sure why this banner was put back in the game.

Zynga has seemed rather disorganized and lackadaisical recently, and the information flow sure hasn't been there. They haven't even bothered with updating or making new FAQs about features in the game. It seems that when Nate is away, Zynga just doesn't give a crap.

Zynga survey on the Big Heist

Zynga has really been loving their surveys lately, haven't they? I don't mind though, as long as they're actually reading our feedback. Zynga has a few more surveys for us, this one about the Big Heist.

Identical to the other recent surveys, they just want to know if you saw the feature in the game and your level of agreement or disagreement with some basic statements.

At the end, you'll have a chance to enter any additional feedback you have. I told them they should remove the limit of 50 boosts a day. It's annoying to have to deal with yet another boost anyway, I believe the players just asked for a Rob All button, did we not? How did that get warped into an event with boosts to collect? Oh yeah....Zynga's "business plan".

Go HERE to take the survey about the Big Heist.

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!

EVENT FATIGUE

Do I even need to say anything about this picture? Of course I do! :D

As a person who used to love completing every challenge the game threw at me, times like these are frustrating. How many times do we have to bang our heads against this wall? This is WAY TOO MUCH going on the game right now!

Back in March and April of this year, event fatigue was a huge issue. Lately, I've been seeing it come up more and more often. Back then, Zynga seemed to gradually slow up on the events, and in early May, we actually saw a break in events, but it didn't last long, and there hasn't been a break since. That was almost three months ago :-/

And Zynga is showing no signs of slowing down. In fact, they seem to be piling on the events more and more. And LOOK at the events going on right now. There is NO way to complete all of them. You've got the Ice Season, which requires you to focus on using stamina fighting. I'm not done yet, and I wanted the stupid badge. Brazil Ruby Level Loot was a complete joke for me. I STILL have only 1 item. I only have Recife at ruby mastery, so even if I tried, I could only get in one or two jobs before I ran out of energy for the entire level. There's the ever-present mission event, which I now habitually ignore. Out of nowhere today we have the robbing thing, which I can't do because I need my stamina to finish the Ice Season, and the Italy mastery thing. On top of all that, rumors of Bangkok closing, which remain unconfirmed so we don't know if we need to work on it now or not. 

This is insane

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 - Robber Interuptus

When you finish a robbing session with the new Rob Squad toy there are a couple of simple things to keep in mind if you want to use the Spockholm bookmarklet Robber:

Refresh the Board First

If you do not refresh the board after using a Rob Squad the Robber bookmarklet will stall... no error... no freeze... just no activity.

Refreshing Screen Finish

If you stop using Robber do not refresh the screen you may apply a Rob Squad to a partial page:

While the top line LOOKS like it has not been robbed... notice the refresh value is 0... these properties were robbed with the bookmarklet... I did not get a pop up to see what the bonus Xp was, but I was able to confirm that I got 2 Diamondbacks thanks to Inventory History.

How are you enjoying the new toys?

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.