Released This Week
The Mafia Wars "Sweetest Halloween Treat" Contest
Win an in-game item of your choice!*
New Mission Event: Money On The Water
Show the City of Traverse's owner you mean business to earn the River Otter (159/90).
Zombie Apocalypse Fight Event
Fend off Zombies as a Survivor or try to turn Survivors into more of your kind as a Zombie. Braaaaiins never tasted this good! Chicago Districts 4-6
Become a legend 3 more times in 3 new Prohibition-era Chicago districts! Deals Of The Dead
Reward Points are on sale today (10/28), and exclusive Halloween items can be found in our Marketplace sale (10/28-11/1)!
This Week's Major Bug Fixes
We jumped on a bunch of Zombie Apocalypse Fight bugs that revealed themselves as you played the brains outta the new event. We also addressed an issue with some property feeds posting as expired. If you are experiencing feed issues of any kind, please let us know via the Bugs & Support forum, where you can get the latest updates on known issues, fixed bugs, & solutions in development.
Coming Next Week*
*As far as currently scheduled, but things can change. Secret District: City Of Traverse Family Boss Fight #4
We’re live at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto for the company’s games announcement. While we aren’t quite sure what the company will be announcing today, it sounds as though the company will be announcing something about more distribution/communication channels for games. We’ll be posting updates live. So stay tuned.
[4:56 PM PST] – Someone is expected to begin in the next 5 minutes or so. We’ll post and update once they get started.
[4:58 PM PST] – You can catch the livestream below. We’ll be following up with key highlights.
[5:06] – Julia Lam of Facebook prepares for the announcement. Dan Rose of Facebook is introducing Mark Zuckerberg. Jared Moregenstern will also be making some statements.
[5:07] – Mark Zuckerberg is speaking as says that almost 300 million people come to the site every day. (I’m paraphrasing this talk). He says that it’s pretty interesting because hundreds of people love games on Facebook, while simultaneously hundreds of millions don’t like games. They’ve been working to figure out how to “thread the needle” properly.
5:10] – Mark is discussing the site integrity team which is focused on making sure that content displays properly. Right now over the past few months, the teams has been focused primarily on friend requests. Friend spam over the past month have gone down 40 percent. Mark has also mentioned that games are the source of some of the most complaints on Facebook. They are among the top 5 things that people don’t want on the site for some people.
[5:14] – A lot of the solutions that we’ve come up are pretty simple. If someone is playing a game, and they like that game, don’t limit the amount of content that’s displayed from that game. If you don’t play the game, you probably don’t want as much content about that game. If you play a game every day we want to make sure there’s a stable link in the navigation.
[5:20] – Jared Morgenstern is talking about how much he enjoyed Nintendo Power and the listing for video game colleges. This is all most likely background for the announcements. More than 200 million people play games on Facebook each month.
[5:25] – Jared is discussing the development of a loft at the company for playing and developing games related things. So now that we have this loft, what are we going to be doing in that loft? So here are the changes:
The first is to fix navigation and make it more useful. There will now be a relevance algorithm to determine what applications will be displayed in the left side. There will always be a set of “core services” on top and then below the content will constantly be changing.
The second is a “stronger re-engagement channel”. We’re going to use this through our own products. This is blue bubbles on the right hand side. Essentially redesigned counters.
The third thing is to “simplify and strengthen behaviors”. As such we are going to modify all these requests and notifications so that they all take place from the left-hand navigation. We will also add the ability to retract requests in order to protect developers from having a poor request allocation.
The fourth category has to do with “understanding our shared audience”. We should let users know that when they are publishing stories they aren’t spamming all their friends. The friends that the stories will only be visible to friends using the application. However we don’t want to kill discovery. As such, we’ll let you know which of your friends are adding games.
Finally, we’ll be making viral loops more frictionless.
Jared said they will also be introducing a new set of gaming APIs. Dan has come on stage to discuss some of these changes and the rationale behind them. Jared is now fielding a question which is about the stream stories. He is confirming that users who don’t currently use game will not receive stream stories.
“Requests and discover stories are the only new user discovery channels.” Developers don’t seem happy about this. Mark Zuckerberg took note of this and has now taken the mic to explain that they are now setting a base to move forward from. He wants to emphasize that over the long term “we may add more features so people can broadcast stories broadly”.
Dan Rose is also emphasizing how important discovery stories will be. One of the audience members is asking for more clarification about these “discovery stories”. Jared has fielded the question and says that “this will be evolving”. The first story will be based on a user installing an application and using it to a level that “we believe merits displaying that story”. Overall we’re looking to balance it out so that the newsffed is relevant.
An audience member just asked for clarification about the strategy behind free credits. Dan is saying that the goal is to grow the percentage of people who play the games that spend money. One of the ways we are attempting at doing that is by giving people the opportunity to buy goods without spending money. “We’re now trying to gather the data” about how that’s performing. “We only gave these credits to people who never spent money before.”
One developer is saying that the cost of user acquisition has gone up significantly. How do you see credits being rolled out? Unfortunately “we can’t bring all the games on at once” and our goal is to get to a point where “all games” are accepting credits. Mark is discussing something about the increasing cost of user acquisition. “We are balancing two things” the cost of acquiring a user and the ease with which users can reengage with those games. “What we’re trying to do is make it so those people who play games have them as a greater part of the overall experience.”
I have just checked it that we have new features on the Collection & Vault page. All Collections are being sorted together and we have 3 options of Collection now :
Choose a city, Crew Collection and Special Collection!
Also the new Crew Collections and Vegas collections were released today!
You can see them on your Collection & Vault page and choose Vegas city
VEGAS COLLECTIONS
If you logon into your account you will notice a new message on your homepage.
When you click on the "Get to Work!" button you will be awarded your first item and you can ask your friends to help you find the others. If they find the item, you get one too.
For Crew Collection, you see by choosing the Crew Collections tab.
In order to get your Crew Collections items, you can not directly "Ask for help" from your mafia..
I found it took between 1 to 5 clicks. If you run out of energy, you will have 1 hour to finish the search.
Here you go, guys.. the Vault bonus item..
This is info about this new Crew Collection
Crew Collections
These are special types of collections that require your Mafia's help in order to finish. Mission specific items have a rare chance to drop on any job, while others will have to be found by your Mafia through job assistance. Here are some more things to know:
Asking for help - 1. You can only put out 1 request for 1 collection every 48 hours. 2. Up to 5 Mafia Members can help you on a single request only. 3. Once a Mafia member decides to help you, they must have the item drop from a random job. They only have limited time to do so.
Helping your Mafia - 1. You cannot help more than 1 friend at one time. 2. On successfully helping, both you and the friend get the item. 3. You can only help up to 5 friends in a 24 hour period.
Misc - 1. There is no re-vaulting of these collections. 2. You can ask for help once an item drops or straight from the collections page. 3. New crew collections will be added in the future.
Our top priority at Mafia Wars is to listen to our users. And what you have been telling us is to fix stuff that’s broken in the game. This week’s dedicated to improving the game.
Our team has fixed a whole lot of bugs over the past 2 days. Some of these issues include fixing cross-promotional items that players weren’t receiving, replacing wonky error messages and stopping players from awarding themselves extra skill points when they complete jobs.
More than 20 million users play Mafia Wars each month. Our goal is to provide a better user experience for all our users. That’s a big task, and that’s why our entire team is working together to make it happen. Like you, we want to spend less time staring at a blinking revolver and more time playing the game.
Our work is far from over. And we will continue to spend the rest of the week to fix issues and update you on our progress. It’s time for us to get back to work. In the meantime, go play Mafia Wars! We have just discussed about the Game News including the Release Notes.. and suddenly now we have it on our game..
Release Notes
Bug Fixes (7):
Fixed “Show Items” error display when robbing.
Fixed featured items display on the inventory page.
Fixed secret stash for jobs in Vegas.
Fixed erroneous “gift expired” messages when accepting from the Facebook requests page.
Fixed a bug that was blocking multiple purchases of job gate loot.
Fixed several display and text errors across the game.
Fixed an issue that was granting the incorrect item for completing the Frontierville cross promo.
New banner on my game tonight. "It's On In San Juan" and the "Fight Starts Thurs 9/2". No additional information is provided. Because of the mysteriousness and the phrase "Fight Starts", this reminds me of the "Feds Are Watching Banner" that we all got sick of looking at. It's probably a safe bet to assume that San Juan will be very similar to The Feds. Let hope all the bugs are gone and this one won't be pulled a few times.
In addition to Events, Zynga also loves to recycle graphics. If the guy on the banner looks familiar to you it's because he already has a home in the game. You can find him the first time you enter Cuba.
Would be more realistic if San Juan was in Cuba but it's the Capital City of Puerto Rico. Maybe the Cuban guy wants to start his life over in San Juan. I bet he wishes Zynga would just leave him alone!
