The Official Mafia Wars Blog made the best post ever today titled Our Biggest Question & Answer Session Ever!. Someone put a lot of time linking all the issues to Get Satisfaction so players can provide additional feedback. The issues listed are the ones we have been working on in the Player Advisory Committee. Many hours have been spent by many players to come up with items that best represent the needs of the community as a whole. Please read the post carefully and contribute your input. Recently there have been players who claim to be on the Player Advisory Committee who are not. They are using their claims for unscrupulous reasons. To see the PAC members, go here and most of us are listed. Some chose not to be for privacy issues. If someone is claiming to be on the PAC and offering you something because of their "connection", they aren't worried about privacy. If they aren't on this list, it's all a con. Don't fall for it. I can attest for certain that nobody on the PAC gets any type of advantage in the game.
The Mafia Wars Team takes player comments very seriously and looks for every opportunity to improve the game. As we make positive changes, we understand that there will always be areas upon which we can still improve, and we want to hear from you, the player community, to better understand what you think is most important.
To that end, we recently asked the Mafia Wars PAC (Player Advisory Committee) to compile a list of issues currently frustrating our player community. Below, we provide a status update on each of those and links to where you can go to continue the conversation with us regarding each individual issue.
PAC’s List of Player Complaints
1. Popups during fighting (except for ice/kill popups) are making me miss out on icing other players! Grrrr!
Fighting is important and people do not want it to be interrupted. We have removed unnecessary pop-ups so that you can kill and ice uninterrupted. There may be a rare instance when a pop-up occurs, but for the most part this should be greatly improved.
2. There are too many events, especially spammy gifting events. The pace is exhausting and all that gifting is obnoxious!
Since receiving this feedback, we are now, more than ever, building events around activities that you already enjoy doing: fighting, doing jobs, robbing, etc. There will always be some element of asking for and sending gifts, but we are moving away from the random requesting of gifts that do not contribute to game play. Our goal is to create events that enhance the gaming experience and we are always open to suggestions and ideas.
3. It’s not cool that the fight page sometimes jumps to the fight or rivals list and back again when I am fighting, which often causes me to miss out on icing other players.
This has been fixed with the release of the new fighting system. We are very excited about the new Mafia Wars fighting experience, but it still has a few bugs that we must fix before we can extend it to everyone. We are working to get it out to every player as soon as possible.
4. It is annoying to have to click 3 times to send a gift back to a member of my mafia. Can’t you make sending take only a single click?
We completely agree that 3 clicks is too many, but the current platform makes this a technical problem that is not easy to fix. We have begun to work on a solution, but it will be a while before it can be implemented. Improving this flow is a high priority and we want to release very soon. We look forward to being able to announce it once it is ready.
5. There are too many Send/Accept Gifts popups!
Gifting is an important part of Mafia Wars. We are working to improve not only the functionality of the system, but also the quality of the gifts. We welcome all suggestions and feedback.
6. I don’t see many players on my fight list or they are all dead/iced. What gives? Also, sometimes a player shows up as active on my fight list, but no "Attack Again" button appears after the first time I attack them. What’s going on here?
These issues are mentioned each time we ask for player feedback. We understand how frustrating it can be when you want to fight and there is no one to attack. We are constantly making changes to increase the number of live players of an appropriate skill level that appear in your fight list, but the number will always vary, especially during times of high fighting activity.
7. When fighting a boss, my health sometimes decreases because I’m also being attacked by other players. Please make it so that other players can’t attack me while I’m fighting a boss, as it can prevent me from being able to ice the boss.
There are some challenges with this, but we are open to suggestions. The solution we’re currently considering is to essentially give you boss-fight specific health. You would enter into a boss fight with a full bar of health and be able to fight the boss knowing that only they can reduce it. To reflect the fact that fighting someone in real life would leave you vulnerable to attack by others, you would still be able to be attacked by other players, but any hits you receive outside of the boss fight will only be reflected in your regular health. Because you can still be attacked and even iced while in a boss fight, you’ll still want to give some attention to building good attack and defense stats. This stat balancing is an important part of Mafia Wars.
8. Why can’t I save my boosts for when I really want to use them?
The new fighting system introduced the ability to enable & disable the use of boosts in each fight. While this does not let you pick and choose specifically which boosts you use and when, we did want to get the basic functionality out, and we will be making improvements in the future.
9. It takes way too many clicks to navigate over to the Chop Shop & Weapons Depot items I want to build!
This is one of the many items already on our To Do list. It will take quite a bit of development time, though, so we plan to include changes like this in a bigger project in which we reexamine chop shops, weapons depots, and all other properties as a whole. Currently, we do not have this scheduled for the near future, but as one of a number of property changes coming later.
10. The red "War Declared" flag doesn’t always show up. Can Mafia Wars notify me in any other way when war is declared against me?
Notifications are tricky… how would you like to be notified?
11. Whenever I level up, my energy, health, & stamina points refill, which is cool, but I lose any points I had remaining, which is not cool. My existing points should just be carried over and added!
This is related to the strategy aspect we consider integral to Mafia Wars. The effective use of one’s energy and stamina proves how cunning a mobster they are. While it can be frustrating to watch the unused points go to waste, the choice to sacrifice those points is still up to you. You can wait it out to maximize the benefit of the points you have, or use a pack to speed up the leveling up process. Each time you make that decision is another important step in your quest to becoming the baddest mobster you can be.
12. I wish there were more customer support agents with whom I can chat live, as they always end up being the most helpful.
We are always making improvements within our customer support department, but live chat is not always available and not available to everyone. Mafia Wars on Get Satisfaction is also a great way to get answers to common questions and player-wide issues.
13. I’m sick of the gifting page popping up whenever I enter the game. I know how to gift and if I have gifts waiting for me. I don’t need this annoying reminder!
How would you prefer to be notified that you have received gifts?
14. Some Mafia Wars events require that I add hundreds of friends so quickly that I risk getting pinked/banned by Facebook! This is ridiculous!
We removed the biggest issues with this and have been working with Facebook to improve player communications with each other. To our knowledge, this is becoming less and less of an issue.
15. Is it a bug that, unlike with energy, I can't get up to 125% stamina, which causes me to miss out on stamina points received via boosts in mystery bags and from stamina-producing Brazil properties?
We’ve been looking into this issue and have discovered challenges to implementing this within our code that will require more development resources than we can currently devote to the issue. It is definitely on our radar, but we do not yet know when a solution will become available.
16. It’s not fair that I miss out on leveling bonuses if I level up while I’m attacking someone!
We understand that this can be annoying when you are trying to get your next ice or kill, and we don’t want you to miss out on your bonus. What do you think would be the best way to receive leveling bonuses?
Got more suggestions?
We want to hear your feedback! Please share what you think via the Mafia Wars GetSatisfaction page. And, if someone has already raised your question or issue, please be sure to comment or "Me Too" the topic so that it raises to the top as a hot issue that deserves our attention. Thanks for helping us to craft a better Mafia Wars!
| 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. |
Bring back the mini energy packs, Not sure about others, but by the time I empty my stamina and energy, I am always about 3k short from leveling up, it's such a waste of energy /stamina/top ups ... et all when 2 jobs in brazil would lvl me up, and then short again, not sure any strategy thinking would allow me to be better at this
ReplyDeleteYou built your character wrong. There are plenty of this you could do or have done to get you to level up.
ReplyDeleteIf you play these new 8 hour timers tight, a level 1000 player can level up 5 to 6 times a day. Any more than that would just be ridiculous.
ReplyDelete