No Chrime Like The Present

Share:

Our Christmas Trees have finally arrived.  Sorry for the late post but I've been traveling today and visiting family.  Log into your Mafia Wars account and get all the No Crime Like The Present Gifting Event.  I guess 'Tis The Season For Stealing was just a teaser to get us excited and keep the event mysterious.  Get to your tree and track your progress from the home page current events module.

'Tis The Season For Stealing is a multi-faceted "Holiday Extravaganza". The 3 main components of this event until New Year's Day are Gifting, Robbing and Spamming.

Gifting

You get your very own Christmas Tree that you have to "decorate" in order to upgrade it.  Your Christmas Tree has 5 Levels and need Candy Canes, Ornaments and Tree Lights.  These items are contained in
Send and Request them through the Free Gift page.

Holiday Sacks are described as Mystery Rewards but it's really no mystery. They will contain one of the 7 gifting items offered in this event.  I showed you what those were yesterday because they were "accidentally" dropping from fights and some jobs.

For the record, players who received these items yesterday had them taken away.  I had over 200 of each and today they were all gone.  So basically all the accounts that dropped these items were screwed out of the loot they should have gotten while fighting and doing some jobs.

Back to the "Sacks".  We see a new way to ask for gifts.  Instead of making a blanket post to all of your mafia, you can no target individuals to ask them for gifts.  It will count as one of your Facebook requests for the day.  It won't count for your mafia member when they send it to you because it's done through the Zynga Message Center.

Robbing

The robbing component of this event is pretty simple.  Use the robbing board to steal one of the items above from someones Christmas Tree.  This is an easy way to get enough of the items you need to upgrade your tree.  Here are the results from a 2,990 stamina run.

You have to use the robbing board as the Christmas Tree will not show up when you go to a players properties to rob.  You will usually see one tree per board regardless of what destination you are robbing from.

If your tree is fully upgraded, you won't get anymore of the upgrade items and the drop rate on the gifts is not good.  Here I used 3,035 stamina and only got 2 presents.  The Lump of Coal drops like crazy!  I'm not sure if that serves any purpose but to annoy us.

Once you get enough items to upgrade your tree to Level 5, just focus on getting 45 presents as the upgrade items are now useless.  You can't even send your extras to your mafia as gifts.  Here is a chart from the Mafia Wars Wiki Christmas 2010 Page that lets you know exactly how many of each item you will need to get to upgrade your tree to Level 5.

And here is what my tree looked like at each level.

Spamming

The spamming component works just like previous spamming events, Don's Diner and the Governor's Run.  Simply ask you mafia members to gift you with protection.  When you click on "Post" and request will automatically be posted on your mafia members wall.

When the player you sent the request to clicks on "Protect em", you will be given the protection that will prevent someone from stealing from your tree. You can only hold 6 of these at a time.

When you help your mafia by giving them protection, you will get one of the 7 items as a reward.  Most the time you get the "You are to late to help protect so and so" because the 6 slots are already full.

You can create a link and post it whenever you run out of protection.  Just find one of your posts, right click to copy the link location, make a tinyurl, and post it to your wall and anybody who clicks on it will help you out.

The goal is to have 45 presents by New Year's Day.  This shouldn't be hard to do if you make sure to keep up with your gift protection so the gifts you have don't get stolen.  You can keep track of how many gifts you get and their status on the mini News Feed located right in the module.

We have 9 more days so I'm not worried about not having 45 gifts.  I would recommend to save a few just in case you get robbed the day before.  Zynga wants to make sure that we log in on Christmas so they are offering a free Christmas Tree upgrade and a loot item called the North Pole if we play Mafia Wars instead of spend time with our families.

Here are the reward items you will get for each present that you open on Jan 1st.

If you succeed in opening 45 gifts, you will get the grand prize item called Auld Lang Syne.

Just like the decorations, the loot items that our presents will turn into are accidentally dropping for some lucky players.  One of my mafia members has gotten hundreds of them while doing a job for a Mission.  Instead of Wooden Crates, all of the New Year's Day "Presents" were dropping like flies.  He prefers to remain anonymous but reported his stats at the time to me as 137,905 [+1851] / 133,630 [+1500]. Early on he made a screen shot.  Check out the number of items he has of these great loot items.  I wish I could be so lucky.

Here is a Repeat Job run performed by Leesa Feudora.  That's a lot of them and check out the drop rate.  Don't be too jealous because Zynga took them back.  So sorry Leesa.

Article written by Jennifer Patterson, Creator of the MW Loot Lady Blog, The Mafia Wars Loot Lady Facebook Fan Page and Co-Host of The Informant Podcast. All material is protected by copyright law