A few days ago, Zynga removed some important items off of the Free Gift page. I told you how to generate your own links and I received quite a few e-mails with current gifting codes and scripts that will do the steps for you
(1).
Team Spockholm has since updated the Link-a-Nator and made a few changes.
The items with asterisks next to them are not on the Free Gift page and as written on the Link-a-Nator "are manually added and could stop working at any time". These items are in the red boxes and I highlighted the items on the Free Gift page in purple since Team Spockholm took all the other colors.
They weren't messing around with the phrase at any time because within hours of the update, Zynga changed the gift codes and most of these items produce Mystery Bags (or as Simy0 likes to call them, Misery Bags).
From this we can conclude that Zynga does not want us to have gifts that are not on the Free Gift page. It's been almost impossible to collect enough Italy property upgrade parts because of all the gifting events that have been going on over the past few months. According to the
Mafia Wars Wiki Italy Page, you need a total of 432 of each part to fully upgrade your Italy Village. That's 1,728 parts total!
(images from the Mafia Wars Wiki)
Now I'm sure all the Bossy Don's have had their Villages fully upgraded since day one, but what are the rest of us suppose to do to get these parts? One of my readers sent me a Customer Support transcript (sorry I can't find it) in which they were told this wasn't a big deal because they could get them from doing jobs and accepting Mystery Shipments. I thought it would be interesting to explore the various ways we can get Italy upgrade parts without using the free gift system and demonstrate how the current methods will make upgrading our properties before we die (or quit playing) a challenge.
Italy Jobs
All Italy property upgrade parts do drop when doing jobs in Italy. Unlike all the other property upgrade parts, they are specific to one destination and drop no where else. They also do NOT drop while fighting. You probably have figured out by now that the drop rates suck and this was something intentional as stated by Al Catraz on the Zynga Forum Boards.
I wanted to see if the drop rates increased since they took upgrade parts off the Free Gift page. The simple is answer is they still suck. Here is a 5,000 job run in Italy in which 685,000 energy was spent.
Now there are cheaper jobs and if I was on the bronze level, it would have taken less energy to do the same amount of jobs. Here is a smaller run on a different energy account with the same job but on the Bronze level. In this example, 26,108 energy was used and 16 upgrade parts dropped. These cost 1,631 energy each. Moral of the story is you will still have to spend a lot of energy but if you stayed on the Bronze level, it will be cheaper to get these parts. The drop rate is 3.7% and is the same as the Ruby level when you calculate per job instead of by the energy used.
I wanted to see how many parts I could get on my main account where I have a more reasonable amount of energy. I didn't follow my own advice and stay on the Bronze level so I found the job that would be the cheapest which was in Region 1. With my energy full, I did this job and got 7 upgrade parts. The drop rate was 3.5% and I spent about 462 energy per part. In conclusion, farming Italy upgrade parts from your main account is not going to get you fully upgraded very fast (unless you have a boat load of energy).
Mystery Shipments
Sending and accepting Mystery Shipments sounds like a reasonable solution until you realize that you can only accept 5 of them a day. You are not guaranteed to get Italy parts and usually you don't. I got lucky here but usually you get something from one of the other destinations or an item you can easily make while doing jobs.
Mike Nestor also took some screen shots of his Mystery Shipment items.
After you open up 5 of these, you get one of those Misery Bags! I can definitely say that Mystery Shipments are not going to help upgrade your Village very quickly.
Asking Your Mafia
Every 24 hours, you can spam the news feeds and ask you mafia members to send you on of the parts you need. The maximum number of parts you can get this way is 5. You also need to remember to do this once a day. I always forget because there are too many other things to remember,
The Daily Chance
The good news was that Zynga made an improvement on the rewards we get from the Daily Chance but the bad news as far as upgrading your Village is concerned is you won't get many Italy upgrade parts. The Daily Chance is only once a week and the other property upgrade parts are also rewarded.
If you're like me and haven't finished upgrading your Italy Village, all you can do now is hope that once all these silly event gifts are removed from the Free Gift page that Italy upgrade parts will be re-added. An even better idea would be for Zynga to finally make them giftable so we can trade with out mafia members. All the others property parts are so why not these?
Search for people with free gifts archives at their notes.
ReplyDeleteDon't know if it's a bug, but old links are being accepted. you can claim lots of gifts from the same person at the same time.
Some people started compiling links in gifts archives already, some dating october and early november!
It's important to start collecting from the oldest day possible.
I've been able to collect ALL the gifts listed on ALL posts (yup, more then one per date) easily reaching 250 limit in less then 30 minutes. In other hand, a friend of mine still has been dealing with one gift per post (even so, there are LOTS of posts).
Been doing that for three days now. That's how I fully upgraded my village this week. Today I'll take a break to have enough gift space for any Tree issues that may happen before the day ends, but tomorrow I'll start collecting parts for the Nightclub yet to be released!
Hope you read this comment, cause this info is really precious.
Thanks for your blog!
PS: if you don't have anyone compiling links in your mafia and have a lot of patience, you can manually go through your friends wall checking for links. Just go clicking 'Older Posts' til you find his/her first links, or the links you want, your choice... Once you find the oldest link you wanna grab, just go collecting them all up to the most recent post. It takes more time, but still very useful.
ReplyDeleteWhat I don't know is if the links are "re-claimable" after some days. With so many links, I didn't need to repeat any. Yet.
ripper makes a great point, and to add to what he said, the old links that still work are the ones created before december 23rd.
ReplyDelete- Ender Fedaykin
thank you all for the precious info :)
ReplyDeleteShhhh!!! I've been doing this since early November and have been trying very hard to keep what Ripper found out in very tight circles. I'm so afraid that Zynga finds out and close it up. :)
ReplyDeleteYou can use Mug-a-nator (FB App) to separate the items and then Bagman Mugger (Spockholm BM) to collect them.
PS: You can collect on links that are around 3-10 days old. Sometimes they don't work right away, but if you wait a few more day, they work fine.
ReplyDeleteI don't really consider Brazil parts giftable. I have a ton of Brazil parts and yes I can gift it, but only if I haven't already sent the person a gift and only 1 part a day. This doesn't help my friends. I want to be able to send many just as I'd like to send many of my extra Italy parts.
ReplyDelete