Property Confusion Causes Problems For Zynga

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To clear things up, the Official Mafia Wars Blog made a post about Family Properties and how they work. This came a little too late and doesn't really address the main areas of confusion. Fortunately, members of the community have already figured it out. I've been trying to get another post out which outlines the upgrade process and points out the information obtained from the back code of the game (stay tuned).

When the Family Property first came out, we started testing it out and discussing it in the Spockholm chat room. The first thing Martin said was this was going to make the Assassin-a-Nator equipment scores go all over the place. It did exactly that and players who don't understand how the Family Property works want to know why they are losing equipment points. Customer Support must have been bombarded with inquiries from these players because Zynga made a follow up post addressing the problem (1). Most players probably don't notice the fluctuation in their equipment score. The ones who do are most likely using scripts. In the example below, Timothy asked us on the Mafia Wars Loot Lady Fan Page why he lost 81 equipment attack points. The Assassin-a-Nator log read as (+-81).

All players in families started out with a +1,000 attack equipment score bonus. This number is not static and decreases/increases based on the health level of your property. The bonus changes as players heal the property and as other families attack it. When the Assassin-a-Nator is running, it catches any change made to your equipment score. The Family Property is no exception. When my family upgraded to Level 3, I was able to capture the bonus awarded on my Assassin-a-Nator.

For every level you make, you get an additional +1,000 points to your score. This number decreases when you are attacked. Once the Artillery Station is fully upgraded, the maximum bonus will be +10,000 to your attack equipment score. Since we are at Level 3, our maximum bonus is 3,000. We lost some health when our family was robbed so the bonus at the time of the image below was +2,653. If we added enough Artillery Shells to reach 100% health, the bonus would go back up to 3,000.

Another cause for decreased attack or defense equipment scores is due to adding loot items that are active in your inventory to your Artillery Station. The golden rule to follow is once you add an item, you can't get it back. Because of the confusion, many players added items that were contributing to their equipment scores and lost points because of it. Zynga really messed things up for themselves when they listed items so the best ones were shown first. Players that weren't sure what they were doing ended up removing top loot items from their inventory resulting in a decreased equipment score.

The in game instructions are confusing because they state that higher defense items grant higher health. The feature utilizes combined scores so you have to factor in the attack stats as well. This thing is a big mess and it takes some time to get it just right. If you add an item and it's the only item of that category, you get a bonus which is contributed to the defense score (health) of your families property. I used the Spockholm Analyzer to find out what my best combined scoring equipment that I was no longer using in my inventory and added the top items that I had more than one of to my property.

Top 5 Non-Active Combined Items 

Ideally the 5 items you add to your inventory will each be from a unique category (weapons, armor, vehicle, animal and henchmen) and they will not be items that were active in your inventory. Once added to the property, they are considered consumed. If you change them, they are lost forever. In the example below, my item contribution to the family property health is +926. Because all items were from different categories, I got a bonus of +100. This bonus should not be confused with the attack score bonus. It only applies to the health of the family property. The higher the property health, the harder it is for other families to successfully attack it.

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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