Notification Changes 7/5

This morning on the Official Mafia Wars Blog, Notification Changes were announced.

Notifications are to be simplified, now one notification regardless of type of attack (regular or power attack) and batched power attacks will be reported as a single attack.

Faster, Stronger, Better (fighting) 5/8

The Official Mafia Wars Blog has new information on fighting that you might find helpful, or at least, informative. Zynga states clearly in their post that power attacks are being counted the same as regular attacks and that they are working to fix this "ASAP"... we'll see.

I guess we'll see how well the 'fix' fixes the issues we've been having. 

More on recent fighting issues on  Brutus' Yo Zynga, fix the fighting, capish?  Monday post about fighting 

Fighting Performance: batch power attack

Zynga has announced another update to fighting, and will soon be introducing batched power attacks. Instead of processing our power attacks and displaying those results attack-by-attack, this will process larger batches of clicks at one time. It will look like you're doing a huge amount of damage to your opponent, but that will actually be an aggregate number of the damage from several of your power attacks.

This should reduce instances of locking-up during fights, or getting that annoying "irregular behavior" message when you're only fast-clicking the power attack button.

Sounds good to me.

Fight Screen Gets Revamped

We all know that Zynga loves changing things and they're at it again. The fight screen has been updated so the ice window stays parked on the opponents side of the screen rather than flashing a BIG pop-up box.

When you ice an opponent, this is what you'll see:

At first I thought, "thanks a lot Zynga, now I can't post ices." And you gotta admit we're used to them breaking things.

But I was wrong, this time it works. To post your ices, just click on share boost.

That will yield the ice pop up post we're used to seeing. And lame as it may be, they've tried to add a little flare with the message "you've iced your foe, now go brag about it"

Another change to the fight screen is also along the same line, is the Your Ice was Stolen screen. That too is parked on your opponent's side of the screen and the Attack button for getting your revenge is just as easily accessible.

Give us your feedback on what you think about this new change. IMO, I might be liking it.

I'll give it some time to sink in and we'll see.

Additional fight module rollouts announced

According to this update on the Mafia Wars blog, more of you should actually be seeing the fighting update pretty soon. The date on the update was yesterday though, and I know a lot of people who actually had the feature pulled from their game. Hmm...

It reads,

6/20/2011 5:30PM PDT UPDATE: After extensive testing, we're ready to release the new Fighting experience to 90% of you! Any minute now you should see just how cool icing can be. Thank you for your patience and feedback! The remaining 10% should expect to receive it once we confirm that the system remains stable with the majority of players using it.

What's going on in your game? Do you have the fighting update? Or if you had it and lost it last night, have you gotten it back? 

fight system rollbacks?

A LOT of people are saying that they've been rolled back into the old fight system. A moderator's post in the forum seems to indicate that it's a mistake, and that those players will be restored. I'm guessing that's what he means anyway. I still have the updated fighting system and I would be hella mad if they pulled it.

more fighting updates

The Mafia Wars blog has posted this update:

As was posted last Friday, we've been implementing updates to improve the performance of the new Mafia Wars fighting experience. We are excited to announce that we are continuing to tweak the system based on your valuable feedback! Today's update allows players to choose whether to display the fighting module in-line with the fight list, or floating over the fight list (as before). We look forward to making the new fighting experience available to more players as we continue to improve its stability. Thank you for your patience and feedback!

 The option will be added at the lower right of your fight results screen, as you can see the "float" option in the graphic above. I'll have to play around with this option to see what I think about it.

Something else that I just noticed is we can now ask for boosts when we run out.

That prompted me to post this to the news feed.

Clicking on that post will send one and collect one for yourself.

Of course there's a limit involved, and once it is reached, this is the message that will be shown to anyone else who clicks on the post.

I got up to 12 boosts that way. Yeah I know the screen shot shows 13, but I accepted one manually and was too lazy to take another screen shot :0) I'm not sure if 12 is actually the limit though, that seems like an odd number, but that's what I got.

what to do until Brawler is updated

A lot of us who have been rolled into the new fighting system are beginning to have Brawler withdrawals. At least, I know I am!

There are some other things that you can spend your stamina on in the meantime. The job Eliminate A Hill Supplier in District 6 of Vegas gives an XP ratio of over 2.25.

Robbing is another way to burn through stamina fairly quickly, and there are several robbing achievements in the game. 

In fact, that's probably what I should be working on... :-/ 

Spockholm has a very nice spocklet for robbing, too, Robber BG v1.03 beta.

Meanwhile, I do see signs of life in Brawler, and Arun has said that he is looking at what needs to be changed in Brawler to work with the new fight system.

 

I noticed that Brawler was spending stamina and I was gaining XP, but I wouldn't recommend using it to spend stamina until Arun has announced a fix. 

You can check the Mafia Task Force forum for any new updates.

 There's also the UnlockedMW toolbar, whose built-in stamina helper was already updated for the fight changes a couple of days ago. When enabled, it can help by completing attacks that you initiate. You can read my post about it here.

Fighting 2.0: Icing Just Got COOLER!

At the very beginning of this third edition of Mafia Wars Live, Nate and Month announced that yes indeed the "Fighting Changes Coming Soon" are coming tonight! (well, starting tonight. As stated during the broadcast, the rollout will take about a week). Read on for a preview of some of the new imagery and features.

MAFIA WARS FIGHTING V2

New Loot? I wonder if this means a new FHEL class. Stolen Ices? Tell me more. I'm not real excited about "bigger boosts", but everything else sounds cool so far. The look of Fighting in Mafia Wars has gotten an overhaul, and we should be able to see our progress when directly attacking an opponent. It's supposed to make it easier to find new opponents without a lot of scrolling up or down, too.

This is a big change right here, although we did see a precursor to its coming last week. I'm curious to see how this will be received by the community-at-large and what if anything this means as far as privacy of individual skill point levels. Some people are sensitive about that.



There's going to be two new boosts that we can send, such as the shot of absinthe. The boosts will be for attack or defense, and will work as a percentage of our overall attack and defense skills. Additionally, and much more importantly, we'll be able to turn boosts on and off during fights. I guess someone at Zynga is up-to-date on classy alcohol. Absinthe only just became legal here in the USA a few years ago.

One of the new features that I'm particularly looking forward to has to do with stolen ices. It's a lot of work sometimes getting the ice on someone, especially if they have a lot of health! It's even more annoying when you're attacking and attacking someone, and then see that someone else iced the person that you were attacking. Now you'll be able to take it up with the ice thieves! That's one way to get your ice back!

Kill will now equal 2 ices, something that was previously hinted during the Put Em On Ice event.

Mafia Wars Live TODAY

There may be an additional reason to tune in to Mafia Wars Live, scheduled for 3:30 Pacific time in a little under 3 hours from now. I heard there might be discussion regarding the fighting changes that Zynga has heavily hinted at a few times over the past few weeks.

Nate and Cole will be telling us about new features "coming soon" - as per the Mafia Wars blog.

If you want the guys to answer a question that you have, go to this forum thread to post it, and then tune in right here today at 3:30PM Pacific time. I'll see you there!

Fighting Updates Coming Soon...?

There have been many hints about the upcoming fighting updates.

With Put Em On Ice about to end, and another Mafia Wars Live session coming up this Wednesday, I have to wonder if we might not be seeing those updates pretty soon now.

When the Put Em On Ice event started to hit our games back on May 19th, there was a blurb on the home page module that said "Fighting Updates Coming Soon!"

Currently, it only says "Through this Monday only, send and receive attack and defense boosts". There's now less than 24 hours on Put Em On Ice, although there remains the question of whether this event is going to get extended or not.

In a forum thread started by Mult McMult, there was lots of speculation about what the fighting changes may be. Could it be new fight loot? Another player suggested that Zynga will be changing the look of the fight list. Other ideas included a change to how ices and kills are counted, the return of critical hits, and fighting collections.

In a recent post regarding how ices and kills were being counted for the Put Em On Ice event, we saw a blatant hint from forum Super Moderator Cerulean Master. He said, Kills are counting as an Ice, but it is set to count as two. . . .. <---- Hint to the future?  

Based on CM's not-so-subtle hint, I think we can probably expect to see Kills counting as Ices :)

On May 20th, Le Trainspotter noticed a Health Left percentage showing on his fight results screen. Other players were noticing this too. It seemed to be a limited beta feature that was being tested, and it's not too far of a stretch to assume this may also be part of the upcoming fighting updates.

It's all speculation at this point, of course. Hopefully we'll be seeing the updates soon...I can't wait!