Answers By Nate

Share:

Blue Eyed Nate took some time to answer some questions in this forum thread. It's a lot to read but there is some interesting information.

#1       Today, 12:32 AM

Blue Eyed Nate  Community Manager   Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: Zynga Posts: 148

Nate's Answers to your 3 questions. Ok. Actually these answers come from several of our team members, so I can't take the credit... The Mighty One asked: 1. When will unreleased items located in the Inventory be released to the public? Please let us know which items you are talking about (start a new thread) and we will find great uses for them to be released in game ! 2. Can we have a dedicated set of loot for robbing? It would be just one more loot set that we would need to update, and we are already behind on some. though robbing and fighting now share loot. this may be added eventually, but there are currently no plans for it. 3. Will there ever be another loot design contest? YES! Please stay tuned as we will be hosting some great contests over the next 3 months! Filipole asked: 1. When will there be a Stamina Pack? We are working on finding the right place for it, and we have to make sure it works properly. so not anytime too soon, but it is on the way. 2. When will there be an update to the Golden Treasure Chests? This is a system we would like to remove from the game. We would rather have new items going elsewhere in the game, where people are actively participating. 3. Why can’t you disclose the fighting formula? We need to keep you on your toes. There are a few formulas that we keep secret, to keep a bit of mystery in the game. If we released them all, the mystery would be lost. Hbillings asked: 1. Which group of players is The Raven boss fight intended for? Players who are able to master the week long bosses and still have ammo left over. We tune the bosses under the assumption that players will start with 0 consumables. some players were able to stockpile some ammo after beating the bosses, so the raven is a way to let them use up the rest of their ammo. TonydaNose asked: 1. Why can’t we have more granular control over in game popups? We’d love to give you full control of your game play experience, but we have pretty limited resources for doing so. While implementing granular control over every aspect of the game seems like it would be the most common sense thing to do, the truth is that we don’t know how many players would really make use of such fine-grained control and if that’s enough to merit spending developer time on it. There are also some situations in which there are currently some pop-ups that certain players find excessive, where we actually have plans to add relevant information for as yet undeveloped features. So we don’t want to let you disable these just yet, until you know for sure what they’re going to contain. 2. Why has Icing become such a large focus for the developers? We asked players what their favorite parts of fighting were. there were a lot of “Icing” answers, so we went to work highlighting this part of the game. The Icing events, new fight results, and some other features are the results 3. Why are graphics so emphasized in the game design since they make it difficult for laptop users or for quick use? Much of our design focus lately has been on trying to update and improve the UI to make existing game mechanics more clear. As an example, icing in fights has always existed in the game, but a vast majority of players were completely unaware of it and found fighting to be meaningless, since they could not perceive what the goal was. By adding a visible health bar, players became aware that their attacks were actually having an effect. The vast majority of these graphical improvements do not have a serious impact on performance. Contrary to popular belief, the new fight UI is not Flash-based (and very few items in the game remaining are) and should be easily run by any relatively modern web browser. GT1 asked: 1. Is the new fight page going to be pulled? Nope! The Tyromatic asked: 1. How were the members of the PAC chosen? There was an open submission period in January and people we welcomed to submit. We had about 200 entries of which we chose 35. 2. Why does Zynga feel the need to make things “random”? Some amount of randomness keeps a game from being too predictable. we don’t have too much randomness though. if there is a specific feature that feels too random to you, tell us a bit more about it and we would be glad to discuss it. Hamhead asked: 1. Why does Zynga release so many events back-to-back? Big features like new cities take a long time to develop, and people can take anywhere between a day and a year playing through all that content. the events are stuff for people to do between our big content releases. we don’t really expect everyone to complete every event. but we do need to keep the game fresh and fun for as many players as we can, and this means creating events. 2. Why are there only a handful of developers for this game? Zynga is a pretty large company with many games on many platforms. Zynga is constantly hiring quality developers for it’s many game teams. Mafia Wars is just one of those teams, but we make due with what we have. 3. Why can’t the Shark Tank start at level 1000? We have tried to change the shark tank level several times, with no success, there weren’t enough players on fight lists, rivals lists were breaking, bad stuff. we are still working on a means to deal with the strength disparity in the shark tank. hopefully we can get a fix out soon that keeps everyone happy. Youlostthegame asked: 1. Why are glitches the help people fixed instantly while glitches that hinder performance are never fixed/fixed in days to months? Glitches never help anybody, they can sometimes be exploited to allow players to gain an unfair advantage, and those we do try to fix as soon as possible. and those fixes are generally easy to make, replace a 10 with a 9 in the code, and it’s done. performance issues require lots more work, additional servers, complete overhauls of the codebase, etc. we want to fix these issues, but they are no small task. they take time to fix, if they can be fixed at all. 2. Why are the fighting and jobbing drop rates constantly decreased? They aren’t. in fact, robbing drop rates increased with the loot improvements 3. Why are there so many events and features that require spam? Mafia Wars is a social game where you strength is measured by stats and also the activity of your Mafia network. “spam” events are our way of rewarding players who have active powerful mafias that are willing to work together to achieve a goal. __________________

Thanks to TOKO for the link.

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