Valentine's Day Event: Love Stinks

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The Valentine's Day Love is Hard To Find Combo Event is here and this thing is a real piece of work! Let me tell what's hard to find...Broken Hearts! The Customer Support and MW Blog posts make it seem like this will be a fun and easy event but it's all over the board and impossible to track.  I've used over 6,000 energy and stamina and haven't gotten near the limit of 10 Broken Hearts from jobs, fighting or robbing. They are dropping better from fighting but I can't really say how many I have for each task as there no in-game tracking for each category.  Enough with my rant, we did complain that we were sick of the Gifting Events so I guess we asked for it! Find this "combo" event on your Home Page.

There are so many ways you can get Broken Hearts, so lets break it down one by one. The first is from your Free Gift page.

Collect Broken Hearts from your Zynga Message Center or your Facebook request page.  The big problem I have is you aren't told how many more Broken Hearts you can accept for the day like you are with every other gift that has a limit.  Customer Support says that we can collect up to 20 of these a day but many players are told they reached their limits after 5 or so.

Once you reach your limit, Broken Hearts become Mystery Bags. Some players have stated that they didn't even get a Mystery Bag but all the ones I opened after the 20 were.

The next option to get Broken Hearts is to do jobs, fight and rob.  You can get up to 10 in each category everyday. It sounds easier than it is because the drop rates are just terrible. Whenever a Broken Heart drops, you get a pop-up.

 

If you are lucky you will get a Golden Heart and that's worth 5 Broken Hearts. You can only get one of these a day.

These pop-ups are annoying and unnecessary because in jobs and fighting you can already see that you got one.  The pop-up in robbing is the only way to know that a Broken Heart dropped so it's more useful.

Mike Nestor was in the midst of a crucial ice during a war and time is the most important factor.  Look what happened!  You can see behind the pop-up that the ice was within his reach.  No luck for Mike as he was dealing with his pop-up, somebody stole his ice. Not cool Zynga! I thought you all determined that pop-ups during fighting were bad news for the clans.

Here are images of Broken Hearts and Golden Hearts that drop while using Brawler. It's funny that even Brawler has to list these things several different ways because of the pop-up factor.

If you want to avoid the pop-ups, you can do jobs in Atlantic City as Broken Hearts are dropping there too.
Haider from the Mafia Wars Maniac Blog found one. I tried and didn't get any.
(image from the Mafia Wars Maniac Blog)

Now on to the Mini-Game.  This will also involve a pop-up that randomly appears while you are playing.  You get 4 windows and you need to choose one.

You will either get up to 5 Broken Hearts or a big "Sorry". If this is a fun game for you, you can play again buy using 1 Reward Point.

You can also find the elusive Golden Heart while playing the mini-game.

Some players get this for their mini-game and it doesn't even work!

The next way to obtain Broken Hearts is through the news feeds. According to Customer Support, you can get 5 per day by generating a post asking your mafia to send them to you and 10 a day by clicking on posts generated by your friends.

There is no limit on how many times you can make this post but you will only get 5 Broken Hearts a day total and you can't click on your own. When you send a Broken Heart, you also get one.

You can collect up to 10 a day from your friends news feeds. Only the first 5 people to click on a post will get one.  When you are successful, you will get the pop-up below and you can share with your mafia.

You will also see Golden Hearts in the news feeds but you won't get 5 Broken Hearts, only one.

If you don't want to deal with all the bugs and hassles, the last way you can obtain Broken Hearts is by using Reward Points. They will cost you 1 Reward Point each.  I would only do this if you are short one or two Broken Hearts on the last day of this event. Find the option to buy them on the Home Page (click the question mark) or the Marketplace.

If you want to buy them in bulk, you won't find them in the Limited Edition Loot section.  You have to go to Special Loot tab, click "View All" and scroll to the bottom.

As you start to accumulate Broken Hearts, the reward items will begin to appear when you click on the little yellow question mark or "See Rewards" from the Home Page module. This is the same page you can use to track how many Broken Hearts you have.

I used my energy account to demonstrate how this works but I recommend you save your Broken Hearts for the last 2 items as they have a better chance of counting as part of your equipment scores.  When you click "Redeem" nothing really happens. You get a flash message that says "Item Received!" and you need to check your inventory to make sure the item is there. I guess they didn't see the spamming opportunity here or they know that not many of us will be redeeming a bunch of prizes.

"Redeem" means what it says. You will lose the the number of Broken Hearts you turned in to get the loot item.  This is why you shouldn't waste them on the first two items (unless you are a collector).

Before Redemption 

After Redemption

Here are the four items you can get during this event and how many Broken Hearts they will cost.  It looks like they want you to be surprised and they don't show the items from the home page module until you collect a certain amount of Broken Hearts. If this is what they want then they shouldn't list them in our inventory!

The last two items are decent but OMG it's a lot of work. I'm not going to go out of my way to get these Broken Hearts and will be happy to get enough for one or two items in the next 10 days.

Love Stinks would have been a more appropriate name for this event because it really does! It's too complicated, it's not organized, the rewards aren't that great and so far it's full of bugs.

Thanks to Mike Nestor and Pistol Pete for helping with the screen shots and figuring this thing out!  Also thanks to everyone who sent me images of the Golden Hearts and Brawler runs via e-mail or posted them on Mafia Wars Loot Lady Fan Page.

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