Choose The Daily Timer Please

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When the second round of the Family Progression feature rolled out, a weekly timer was given instead of a daily timer. This changes things and Zynga claims they are testing to see which one is better. Eventually all Families will have the same timer. We just don't know which one they will choose. I've had a chance to look over both timer systems and feel the weekly timer has more disadvantages to the players and to Zynga. Lets compare the individual and Family experience payouts for the two different timers. Individual experience is a percentage of your current level and will be different for players who aren't at the same level.

	Daily Timer	Weekly Timer
Bronze Family Exp	100	700
Silver Family Exp	200	1,400
Gold Family Exp	300	2,100
Combined Family Exp Per Category	600	4,200
Total Daily/Weekly Family Exp	2,400	16,800
Bronze Individual Exp	12.5% of Level	87.5% of Level
Silver Individual Exp	62.5% of Level	437.5% of Level
Gold Individual Exp	125% of Level	875% of Level
Total Individulal Exp Per Category	200% of Level	1,400% of Level
Total Daily/Weekly Individual Exp	800% of Level	5,600% of Level

Upon review you will notice that the payouts are much larger for players with the weekly timer. This might seem great on the surface but there are only 12 opportunities to collect bonuses per week. Daily players can collect bonuses 12 times a day for a total of 84 times a week. The advantage to the player is they have more control of when to use the bonuses and the advantage to Zynga is it keeps players more engaged. I know from experience that I'm the worst at crafting items and collecting gifts every day. The daily timer reminds me and gives me incentive to do these tasks. I would forget with the weekly timer. I've actually played Mafia Wars a lot more than I normally do because of the Family Progression feature. If it were a weekly thing, I would do it all in one sweep or put it off until it was too late. Another reason the weekly timer system is bad is because Families have the potential to lose all the experience they worked so hard to achieve. In the example below, my Family was at 100% for the ices, jobs and property categories. Any collections in these 3 categories were not applied to our total progress and were wasted experience. This doesn't hurt so much in the daily timer system. If the clock was running out for the weekly timer and you had no choice but to accept, a whole weeks worth of experience would be wasted. It's already going to take a long time to reach level 10 and this scenario will just add to the time.

The payout are also so large that there may be no good time to collect them. You will get so much experience that your energy and/or stamina will be wasted because you were pushed so far to the next level up. This is incentive not to collect the higher individual payout but not doing so will mean your Family doesn't progress. Here are the payouts for my energy account which is a level 11,891.

Upon level up, I needed 147,437 exp to get to the next level. I have plenty of energy to get there.

I collected my bonus and got 104,048 experience points.

Now I only need 43,389 exp points to level so much of my energy and stamina will be wasted. Experience will push over to the next level but there is no way to avoid wasting energy and stamina.

I really hope that players can see that the weekly timer is a disadvantage and will be vocal about letting Zynga know which one they would prefer. I started a thread on Get Satisfaction as a starting point. Please like it and add your comments. Now is the time to act before a decision is made. Feel free to present your feeling as to why you like the weekly timer better. Maybe I'm missing something. The only advantage I can see for the weekly timer is that there won't be a rush to complete all the tasks every day. Players who don't log on everyday might like that.

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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