ZMC Design Flaws: Please Increase The Limit

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Millions of free gifts and other requests are passed around between Mafia Wars players. In theory, all requests sent to you will end up in your Zynga Message Center (ZMC). The problem is only a fraction of these requests will ever be viewed and/or accepted. On November 10th, Zynga "enhanced" gifting, Facebook requests were made useless which in turn caused all gifting links to break (1).

Gift links were so popular that they were causing the url shortening services to hit quotas. Because of this and the fact that many phishing scams involve shortened links, Team Spockholm created their own url shorting service called spockon.me. Spockon.me went public in early April and Team Spockholm shared their metrics with me. Approximately 40 million links have been created in the past 8 months and an average of 200,000 links were created each day. These are only spockon.me links so and don't include the additional links created with other services such as tinyurl.com and bit.ly.com.

Returning gifts has never been easier and players seem to like the change. There is a major design flaw with the new gifting system which is the reason enhanced gifting is not fully embraced. The ZMC which is now the only source for gifts has a holding capacity of 100. This wouldn't be an issue if there was a queue or a way to get to old requests.

Facebook offered what players wanted. The limit of visible requests for an application is 200 (recently increased from 100). If you clear out the visible requests, older ones will appear. Requests never went into a black hole.

Unlike Facebook requests, ZMC requests get bumped into thin air. When a new request comes in, it bumps the last one out. This makes it impossible to save them. To demonstrate what happens, I sent myself a free gift from an alternate account.

I noted the time as soon as the request was sent.

I double checked to ensure that the gift arrived to my ZMC.  Here it is in position #1.

I periodically checked the ZMC and tracked my gift as it went down the list.

The gift eventually disappeared because it got bumped out of the ZMC. As to where it went, nobody knows.

I was surprised at how quickly this happened. I expected the process to take at least an hour or so. The request was bumped out of the ZMC in 24 minutes and 8 seconds.

The only way to prevent gifts from disappearing is to keep up with your ZMC. Not many players have the luxury of being able to check and accept requests every 15 minutes.  Even if they do, they are stopped dead in their tracks. You are only allowed to accept 200 free gifts in a 24 hour time frame. If I lost 100 gifts in 24 minutes, imagine how many get bumped during the time I have to wait to accept more.

To give one an idea of what this number could be, I checked my notifications for yesterday. I had a total of 1,430 requests. Only 200 of these were accepted and the rest have been pushed out of the ZMC.

We are encouraged by Zynga to grow our mafias. To achieve competitive equipment scores, 500 players are required to be in your mafia. In the past we have had events like Crack The Safe and were rewarded for recruiting new players. The feature My Recruits is still in our game but it's one that Zynga doesn't bother to update so there really isn't a reward. I could never get one of these items. The only 2 accounts that made it past level 1 were ones I created and forgot about.

A limit of 200 gifts a day is not a reasonable number because we are required to have 500 mafia members. I would like to help everybody by returning all my gifts but the game prevents me from doing so. If the gift limit stays at 200 then there should be 200 spots in the ZMC. The pace of gifts being sent, accepted and returned is too fast for the ZMC to accommodate. We also lost the ability to choose the gifts we needed.  Gifting scripts were a great work around for this but Zynga broke those. Players trying to upgrade their properties are going to find that the players who already have aren't going to accept their requests and the process will take much longer.

With the gifting system as it stands today, the only way to ensure you get the gifts you need are to send them to your mafia members and hope you get one in return. Many are resorting to mass blasting the gift they desire to all of their mafia in hopes they get enough sent back to meet their needs. This is counterproductive to the concept of gifting because players with small mafias who are counting on your help find their gifts aren't being  returned because they got lost in the shuffle.

There are a few types of requests that shouldn't be in the ZMC. Mission Crew requests are a problem because most of the ones you see are no longer needed. If a player sends you a Mission Crew request, it's not going to help them unless their Mission task is still active. If you send a Mission Crew request and they accept and thank you, you will get return requests from players that don't even have an active Mission. Fortunately you can tell the difference. If the request has a "Join Crew and Thank" button, this means the player needed you to join their Mission Crew when the request was sent.

If the button only says "Join Crew", these are thank you "gifts" from your original requests and should be ignored or they will count towards your limit.

The problem is there is no way to tell if players still need your help until after you accept the request. If a player still has an active Mission, it will say "You just joined your friend's Mission Crew!" and they get credit for the Mission task. If you have an active Mission, these requests will also count for yours. Unfortunately, they are hard to find because most players with active mafias complete these tasks quickly.

If the Mission Crew is filled up before you accept the request it will say "You just accepted: Mission Crew!". This means you didn't help your mafia member. To make it worse, accepting requests which are no longer needed count towards your free gift limit.

Mission Crew requests should behave in the same manner as Brazil and Chicago Crew requests. The fact that you can generate news feed requests also keeps them out of the ZMC for the most part.

These don't count against your free gift limit and if a players crew is full, you get a Mystery Bag.

There is also an issue with Battle requests. Due to request bumping, it's impossible to save these and accept them when your family is ready. Many of these requests are simply pushed out of the ZMC before anyone knows they are there. If Zynga insists on limiting the ZMC to 100, they need to figure out a better way so Battle requests don't get lost.

Mafia Invite requests shouldn't go to the ZMC either. Due to a bug, they don't even work most of the time (1). Because of the limited ZMC space, they often get pushed out before you see them.

Mafia Wars Invites work fine from the Recruit Page (when they make it there) so there is no need to have 2 separate systems.

Family Boss Fight notifications don't belong in the ZMC either. This is just a waste of a spot.

There is a main tab that is always visible no matter what page you are on letting you know if you have any Boss Fights.

To sum this all up, Zynga could make the gifting system better by increasing the ZMC Limit to something greater than 100, add a storage queue or some other way to save requests or they could allow us to convert existing gifts to the ones we need.

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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