May 30, 2010

Rate Mafia Wars

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The Official Mafia Wars Fan Page has asked their fans to rate the game.  To do so go to the fan page or click HERE.







The ratings page is full of 5 stars praising Zynga for such a great game.  I had to try and get my point across to as many players as possible in hopes they start giving the game 1 star and force Zynga to correct the many problems.  Here is my 1 star rating and my 2 cents.  I hope someone from Zynga reads it.  To potentially have your voice heard, complete your own rating now.
" Rating: 1 star-I'm addicted to this game and had a very good strategy in place. Recently things have been changing too quickly for me to keep up with them. This has caused me a great deal of stress. Zynga changes, adds, and deletes, features without notice and constantly finds ways to encourage me to buy reward points. I know reward points exist and how to buy them. I don't need to be reminded through excessive game pop ups. I also don't like the fact that I have to worry about losing progress in my game and inventory items because of glitches. The risk of losing access to my account due to a Facebook hacker or an unexplained suspension by Zynga also makes me want to play a different more clearly defined game. I love and miss the way Mafia Wars used to be.

Property Buliding Glitch

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 UPDATE:  The glitch is fixed.  Nemesis is working on getting it back to the way it was before.  The script can still be used to upgrade properties without all the clicking.  The only catch is now you have to have the money to do so.  If you ran the script without realizing this and all of your money is gone don't worry.  As you collect on your investments, you will eventually get it back.  If Zynga screens accounts and takes away property upgrades than you will be out of luck and Zynga will be flooded with support tickets from those who did not use the script and want their money back.  This script is still useful and works to upgrade all your properties.  I'll give the instructions to people who want to upgrade all their properties to level 100 and earn the Real Estate Tycoon Achievement Badge.

The Property Unlock Tool by Arch-Angel Nemesis is now available.  Hurry up and upgrade your properties for free.  Zynga has been known to take back anything gained from a glitch in their system so it is possible they could reset any work that you have done, once they find out about this and fix the glitch.  This script works great and now I understand it well enough to write about it.  I will make changes and updates to this article as I learn more.  This program will upgrade your properties for FREE.  All you need is enough money to make the required purchases but the money will not be subtracted from your account.  It will work on all of the cities so use it first to upgrade your Bangkok properties if you don't have them fully upgraded.  The main thing to remember is you need to have the money it would cost to upgrade the property in your bank.  You will not spend it but the program will not work if the money is not there.  Baht is not easy to come by so I recommend you sell off some inventory or Faction Store items to have the required amount of Baht.  All the properties in Bangkok will only upgrade to level 30.  Almost all of the properties in NY have no limit to the amount of times they can be upgraded.  This is a great chance for us to upgrade enough times so that eventually we can get the impossible money achievement badges.To use this program, just follow the simple steps below.
1. Go to the Arch-Angel Nemisis Mafia Wars Tools Website 
2. Click, drop, and drag the Property Unlock Live Bookmarklet to your bookmark tool bar.















3.  Go to your Mafia Wars game and click on Property Unlock once to unframe, go to your Property page of choice and click on Property Unlock to activate the program.  Click on ScrollMW to get your scroll bars back an fill in the information.  This is what your page will look like from NY.













And from BK













I ran this program for a few minutes and here are my results:





In just a few minutes of running this program The Arch Angel saved me $148,599,000,000!!!!  I'm very happy because I was one of the many people who missed the robbing glitch (by 15 min!!!) and felt I was never going to get the money achievement badges.  Now thanks to The Arch-Angel, I have a chance.  This will stop working if Zynga fixes the glitch so please don't write about it on the Official Zynga Forum.  The TopMafia.Info Forum has a discussion thread on this.  Go there or the The Arch-Angel Nemesis Fan Page to discuss this great tool and any problems you encounter using it.



May 29, 2010

Bangkok Unlocked: Triad or Yakuza? BOTH!!!

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The Arch-Angel Nemesis has done it again!  His new tool Bangkok Unlock (Live) was just released and it is a brilliant piece of work.  Yakuza or Triad?  This seems like a simple enough decision but the pros and cons of each make it difficult to choose.  Choosing one over the other will lock you out of a Triad or Yakuza loot dropping job.  Who knew The Forest Scorpion would become so popular?  If you have stayed awake at night contemplating this decision and lived with regret because you made the wrong choice, this is the tool for you.  No more feeling like a loser when you see your news feeds and learn that everybody else picked Yakuza and you chose Triad.  No more worrying about how you will come up with enough energy or stamina to gain Faction points with Yakuza or Triad.  With Bangkok Unlock sitting in your bookmark toolbar it no longer matters which side you choose!!!.  Bangkok Unlock (live) will do the following things for you:

1.  Allow you to perform jobs in Bangkok which you locked.
2.  Allow you to gain +3 faction standing points with Triad or Yakuza by doing the satellite phone job of your choice.
3.  Perform all of the loot dropping jobs for less energy*
*If you have a level mastery of 4 on all your job tiers in Bangkok, this feature will not work for you.

To start using this tool today, follow the steps below:
1.  Go to the The Arch-Angel Nemesis Website
2.  Right click on the box containing the words Bangkok Unlock (live) and don't release, while maintaining your hold on the right click button, move your mouse up to the bookmark tool bar (this is known as dragging), release your hold in the bookmark location of your choice (this is known as dropping).  The bookmark will now stay in whatever location you dropped it in.
3.  Click, drag and drop on the ScrollMW bookmark if you haven't done so already (not required for  Bangkok Unlock to work but you will need the scroll bars if you want to move around in the game).



















4.  Go to your Mafia Wars game, travel to BK, and go to Jobs. Click once on Bangkok Unlock (now located in your tool bar) to take the game out of frame. If your screen starts to shrink or do weird things, read my article titled Screen Shrinkage & Missing Scroll Bars to learn how to stop this).  Click Bangkok Unlock a second time to activate the program. Since unframing will cause your scroll bars to disappear.  Click once on ScrollMW to get them back.  Your screen will now look like this:










5.  Click on the item you want to make and the job will appear below the program regardless of which Faction you chose.  In order for this program to work, you need to have Episode 6, Chapter 3 unlocked for all items except for the satellite phone.  The satellite phone requirement is to have Episode 3, Chapter 2  unlocked.  Also ensure that you have purchased all the inventory items for the job corresponding to the item you choose to make. 

In addition to using Bangkok Unlock (Live) to farm loot on jobs which are locked, you can also use it to gain faction points for Yakuza or Triad.  Click on the satellite phone job for the Faction you wish to gain standing points with.  Every time you do this, you will gain 3 faction points and a Satellite Phone.

You can also use this tool to save energy.  Go to any job tier in which you only have a mastery level of 1 (1 star) and click on any of the items in this program.  The job will now cost you the same amount of energy as if you were doing it in the first level.  Example:  Your Episode 7 job tier is at level 1 (only 1 star is present) and your Episode 3 job tier is at level 4(all 4 stars are present).  Normally it would cost 77 energy points to do this job.  If you go to Episode 7, load Bangkok Unlock, and choose the satellite phone job of your choice, the job will only cost you 35 energy  points.  With the script, the game thinks you are at a level 1 mastery and will only require the energy cost for level 1 instead of level 4 for any job you chose.  If you are past level one on all job tiers than it will cost more for level two, even more for level 3 and even out at level 4.  Special Thanks goes to Karen La Strange for explaining this to me.

If you have a big energy account and don't want to manually click every time you do the job, you can run The Spockholm RepeatJob Beta Bookmarklet at the same time as Bangkok Unlock (Live). This is another excellent tool available on The Spockholm Mafia Tools Website.  Follow the bookmark installation steps above but go to the Spockholm Beta Test Bookmarklets Page and click, drag and drop the RepeatJob Beta Bookmark.


















From your unframed Mafia Wars job page already loaded with Bangkok Unlock (Live), click on one of the items to get the job on the screen and then click on RepeatJob Beta once to activate and your screen will contain both bookmarklet programs.  You can now let it run, minimize the window, open a new one and go about your business.  When you run out of energy, you will have the loot items you never thought you could make.
I have level 4 mastery on this job tier and chose Yakuza.  It cost 35 energy points (I had a boost which subtracted 18 energy points).  With out this script, I can not do this job and it would cost 77 energy points.
















Because this program is live, you won't need to delete and re-add it whenever there is an update.  I don't recommend farming a large quantity of Forest Scorpions until the new Animal Feature is released.  We don't know if the animals dropping in the game will become giftable.  To learn more about Bangkok Unlock (live) or ask The Arch-Angel Nemesis questions about his tool, click HERE to go to his fan page. 












May 28, 2010

Holiday Sale Strategy

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Many times I've seen the advice that the best thing to spend your reward points on is skill points.  I never understood this because 4 skill points cost 14 reward points and energy refills cost 10 reward points allowing me to  level and getting 5 skill points.  Once I stopped putting my skill points into energy and my level got higher in level, it was taking 2 energy refills to level up.  This is about the point that I started analyzing the factors of making my character stronger.  I realized that the most important factor in this is how many skill points were added to my attack and defense.  This is all proportional to your level and explains why a level 200 can take me down on occasion.  I may be higher in level and have more skill points in my attack or defense but he can beat me because his ratio of level to skill points is higher (math people, please contact me or comment if my explanation is not accurate or you can add to more info to this). The combat equation is too complicated for me to even begin to write about it here.  It did write an article on The Mafia Wars Wiki site called The Combat Formula and added it to this blog.  I now use all my reward points to buy skill points and wait for them to go on sale so it cost 12 instead of 14 reward points.  I have been saving my reward points to finish the new episodes in Bangkok but decided that I wasn't going to worry about finishing these episodes as I'm getting very frustrated with all the game changes.  I'm so lost as to what my goals in the game should be.  This Memorial Day Sale has something good to offer so I decided to use my points for this sale.  Here is what I did.  If you are new to the game, it's never a good idea to use your reward points to buy any special loot items.  To make a difference in your combat score (see my article titled Combat Calculator) you would need 500 of any item (assuming you have 500 in your mafia).  It's always better to use them to build your character.  The Memorial Day Sale has given me an opportunity to use the reward points that I have been hording.  For the sake of research only, I did have to purchase a few.  Since I have a paypal account the points were on sale because of a promotion.  Now I see that many things in the market place are on sale including skill points.  I also saw that if I buy ten items from the Market Place, I will get a good loot item. 














So I purchased 10 sets of skill points (for research purposes only).  This cost 130 reward points.  In addition to the 40 skill points I received, I also got some cool things along the way.  Skill points will go on sale for 11 reward points at various time this week-end.  I'm going to be busy and wanted to get this information out so I didn't wait a sale.  If you know you will be playing a lot, wait for the sale and it will cost 110 reward points instead of 130.














I got this when I used my key.  Not so impressive.

















After my 5th round of skill points, I got this item.  I like the stats of this.















On my tenth round of skill points, I get this item.  It wasn't the items I was going for but the two I got were a nice addition to my 40 skill points.  It was reported by The Mafia Wars Maniac that you can do this many times and get the tank each time.  I'm happy to just have one tank.

Adding Family Members

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Because of the requirement to add new Mafia members for the London Challenge Mission many players are looking for people to add.  If you were like me, when you first started playing, you went to all the random "add me" groups to build your Mafia Wars family.  Once I knew what I was doing, I realized that a large percentage of my family didn't even play Mafia Wars.  How could this be???  My theory is that many of the profiles I added were spammers posing as Mafia Wars players.  They also go to the "add me" sites.  Now you are sending friend requests to them and they don't even have to do any work!!!!  Some Add Me sites screen the people they are asking you to add.  Just make sure you check the site out before you start adding and posting.  The Mystyfied Mafia Wars & Pimping Site has a good reputation and you will find many quality players there.  They weed out the bad seeds for you.  Another good way to add the smartest and most active Mafia Wars players to your family is to go to your favorite fan pages and add the people who are commenting on the wall posts.  If you go to the Facebook Fan Page section of this blog you will find many great fan pages to choose from.  Click on one of the links, read the posts, and send friend requests to the people who have added comments to the most recent posts.  Do NOT make a comment saying "Add Me".  This is considered spam by many and you may find yourself getting attacked both verbally and within the game.  It takes a little more time to do it this way but it will pay off.  Your news feeds will contain a lot more valuable information and your mafia will have many more strong players.
While I'm on the subject of spammers, many players get invitations to groups promising free reward points, weapons, skill points, etc.  These are also set up by spammers.  They ask you to invite all of your friends and if you do they will reward you for it.  Don't fall for this trap.
Here is a parody on this created by Chango Fumando.  You can read more about this group by clicking HERE.  I got a laugh out of it and hope you do too.  I wish I had read this when I was new to the game and didn't know any better.  While researching this group, I discovered a cool website called MWUnleashed, Home of ZCFU!.  The forums and blogs are a smarter version of the Zynga Forums as many of their members were/are active on the Official Zynga Forum boards.

May 27, 2010

Memorial Day Weekend Sale

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 Read this following article Memorial Day Mastery Item by The Mafia Wars Maniac to see how you can get these items.

From The Official Mafia Wars Fan Page











From The Clearing House Fan Page.
I didn't get this offer when I went into my game.  Maybe I'll see it next time but I'm not going to buy reward points until the game becomes stable and fun again.  There is so much to keep track of and too many changes.  I'm waiting for the problems to be fixed and the new features be implemented.

Challenge Mission: London

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Screen Shots of what of in game messages dealing with this Challenge are appearing now.  I put the My Crew message first because it is something different than what we saw in Paris.  Chapter 1 unlocks in about 22 hours from now. Start collecting your passports.
"Each chapter you will unlock two additional slots for your London Crew.  Any new person joining your mafia will also be added to your crew (up to 7 total slots).  You will be given a one-time bonus of British Passports for each crew member that joins and unlocked slot"
The London Mafia War Wiki Page  explains this in more detail.















 






































Theses are the 3 Mastery Items we will get for completing each chapter.
Chapter 1: 







 Chapter 2:








Chapter 3:


Updates: New Wiki Page

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Mafia Wars Wiki added another useful feature to their site called Updates.  Every time there is a game update, it will be added to the list.  This will be no easy task as Zynga has gone crazy with new features, additions and changes.  This will sure make my job a lot easier.  Thanks Mafia Wars Wiki.  To check out the Updates feature click HERE
I recommend that you bookmark this page and check it everyday before you start to play.  To create a bookmark, go to the Mafia War Wiki Update Page and click the little star in your browser bar once to bookmark the URL and twice to change the name (optional) and assign a location.  Here you can see I named my bookmark Wiki Updates and moved it to my toolbar bookmarks.

The Best Robbing Assessment Ever!!!!

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While visiting the Mafia Task Force Website, I found this great assessment of the newest robbing feature.  Click HERE to read it. (graphic image by Mafia Task Force)

This one has more game strategy advice than the Robbing Wiki Page. Visit The Mafia Task Force Website and Forum and The Mafia Task Force Fan Page to learn all kinds of things about Mafia Wars.  You can even have your questions answered in the Live Chat Room.  They were very friendly and answered my question right away.  I asked if the assessment would be updated to reflect the recent unfavorable changes in the robbing experience payouts and was told that it will once it's determined if these changes are permanent.  Lets all keep our fingers crossed that these they are the result of a glitch and not an intentional move by Zynga.  To learn more about these changes, see my post titled Robbing ChangesThe TopMafia.Info Forum has a great discussion thread on the recent changes and they made this easy to understand chart.












May 26, 2010

Joyka Does Mafia Wars Math For You

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I'd like to thank Joyka for helping me understand this program and for reviewing and editing this post.
Joyka is a great script writer who wrote the popular bookmarklet program called ExpEnergy2.0.  This program calculates all the ratios you need to determine which jobs to do for the highest energy or monetary payouts.  It is especially useful when you are close to leveling up or need to figure out the best strategy to avoid wasting energy.  A ratio is simply the number you get when you divide one thing by another.  Divide the amount of experience you get by the amount of energy you use and that is the exp/energy ratio.  The higher it is, the quicker you will level up.  Before I found this great tool, I had my calculator near by and it was a pain to constantly calculate everything.  To install this tool, go to Joyka BookMarkelts Page and drag ExpEnergy2.0 to your preferred bookmarklet storing area.

Now go to your Mafia Wars game and click on ExpEnergy2.0 once and click OK to take your game out of frame.  Click a second time to activate the program.  Once you do this, every job will now include ratio statistics for Exp/Energy and Money/Energy units. Jobs with best exp/energy ratio are highlighted in blue and jobs with best money ratio are highlighted in green. If best exp/energy and money ratios belongs to the same job, this job highlighted in red. 
The numbers you see here are telling me what ratio I should look for to get to the next level.  Obviously there are no jobs with a 7.1 Exp/Energy ratio but if I were closer to leveling these numbers would help me decide how to best utilize my remaining energy.  When I go to my jobs this is what they now look like.
Now you see the exp/energy ratio for the job Undermine Nongchai's Support is 1.708 and the B$/energy ratio is B$55 per energy unit.  It's also highlighted so I know this is the best job for me to do in this job tier.
If you click on the word "options" in the upper left hand corner, you will get the following screen and can change the settings.
Money Ratio:  Choose what type of money ratios you want to see.  You can pick between money/experience, money/energy, or no money ratio.
Highlighting:  Choose what you want highlighted.  You can pick best energy, best money, both or none.
Bribes:  Decide if you want the bribes in Cuba to be factored into the ratio.
Update every:  Decide when you want the program to update your statistics.
Read In:  Decide if you want the program to tell you how long it will be until you have enough energy to do the job you want.  I like this feature because it eliminates the need for me to keep going into my game to see if I have enough energy.
Boosts:  Use to incorporate your boosts into the ratios.  There is a drop bar and you pick the boost you want it to use.
AutoUpdate:  You can turn off auto updating for jobs and see the normal MW page and if you need stats you click Update button 
Style:  Classic or Energy
Don't forget to save your choices.  If you find your options of choice are not appearing, most likely you forgot to click save.  Go back, redo, and save!!!!
Yonks of TopMafia.Info explains how to use this program in more detail to include useful game strategies in his video.  Click HERE to watch this now.  If you need more instructions on using bookmarklet programs in general, see my blog posts titled Bookmarlets and Screen Shrinkage.

The Mafia Wars Wiki Bookmarklet Page discusses the controversy over bookmarklet use and Zynga TOS violations.  Joykas script is not performing any automated actions or manipulating the game in any way.  It simply provides you with the statistical information for each job.  If you are against using scripts in Mafia Wars you should feel safe using this one.  Other than taking your game out of frame, there are no other TOS violations associated with this script. 


Crates

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If you're into crates than you will be happy there is a new one called the Arctic Crate.  Visit the Arctic Crate Wiki Page to learn about the items you can obtain by purchasing these crates from the Marketplace.  I use my reward points to buy skill points and energy refills.  When I first started playing Mafia Wars in September of 2009, I purchased some godfather points and used them to buy crates.  I didn't know any better but was lucky and received a rare item in the first crate I bought.  When I later got obsessed with Achievement Badges, I was upset to see that I didn't have The Treasure Hunter Badge.  I started a support ticket with Zynga and in November they gave me the Achievement Badge.



 

Free Reward Points

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This was brought to my attention by The Daily Players Website.  Click HERE to receive 1-5 free Reward Points.  I tried it and it works.  I only got 1.  Hope you are luckier than me.

Swiss Banker

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Join the Pay Pal Fan Page by clicking the like button. And then click the play for free button and you will be awarded a Swiss Banker which will show up in your Armour Inventory list.  The stats are pretty good as well (27/54).  It only works once per account.











If you don't want to join the fan page, click the following link to get the item.  For now this is working.  http://apps.facebook.com/inthemafia/index.php?next_params=YTozOntpOjA7czo1OiJpbmRleCI7aToxO3M6MTE6IlBheVBhbE9mZmVyIjtpOjI7czoxMDg6IiZzZW5ka2V5PTY5MDcxNDk3YWVmMWQ4YjQ1OTA2YT...YxN2Y0N2MxYjc0JCRjY0YoTlVUVSoqbEVRX1hVeVZHKCx0OGdqV3pSZ0ooU1N4aDJWNigqNWpxTTVrSmVLLSwmcGF5cGFscHJvbW89MSI...7fQ%3D%3D