FAMILY BATTLES

Prove Your Family Is The Strongest In Family Battles!

They say ones reputation precedes them. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of mob families, so we created a Family Battle system to help you assert your family's power and prove its strength in the public arena. Bragging rights will be yours - if your family can earn them.

How To Start A Family Battle
Only family officers may instigate a Family Battle, they may elect to hold a 4 or 48 hour battle, and your family can only battle one family at a time. There are two ways to start a Family Battle:

1) Select a family to challenge from a list of recommended families on the "Battle" tab of your Family page:

2) If you already know exactly which family you'd like to challenge, you can do so via their family page.

A Family Battle only begins once an officer from the challenged family accepts the challenge. More precisely, a Family Battle begins 5 minutes after the challenge is accepted:

An officer can send as many challenges as they desire until one is accepted. Challenges are delivered via the ZMC, and your family officers will have to choose among the many challenges they are likely to receive. Upon accepting a Family Battle challenge, any other challenges in your family officers' ZMCs will disappear. Note that pending Family Battle challenges will disappear from ALL of your family officers' ZMCs, not just that of the officer who accepted the challenge. Once a Family Battle has begun, your family officers will be unable to send or receive additional Family Battle challenges until the current one is over, after which an officer of your family may accept another Family Battle challenge immediately.

How Will I Know If My Family's Entered Into Battle?
Your Family Progression icon will become outlined in red and a "Battle Active" flag will appear to let you know when an officer of your family has accepted a challenge from a rival family:

How Family Battles Work
The family that has the most points at the end of the timed Family Battle wins. You earn points for your family by icing and killing rival family members and by attacking your rival family's safehouse. When all family members are under 20 health, a safehouse will be vulnerable to attack. The longer a safehouse gets attacked, the more points the attacking team earns, so you want to defend your safehouse at all costs.

Lead Into Gold

Objectives

• 0/4 ACTIVATE 4 CREW MEMBERS IN BRAZIL.
  Appoint members of your Mafia to keep everything in line while you're gone.

• 0/8 ACQUIRE 8 ARMORS.

For your first objective, it means exactly what it says. Go to Brazil and activate 4 crew member positions.

If you need to get more crew members in order to complete this objective, DON'T click the Ask button. It seems the most obvious way to go about getting more crew, but that button only wants you to send Facebook requests to get crew members. You don't want to wait for people to answer those requests.

Click the button to the LEFT of the Ask button, and a drop-down menu will appear. Click the Recruit button there.

That'll generate a news feed post, and your online friends can click and immediately join your crew with much less waiting time on your part.

The second objective has some people confused, and understandably so. You're told you need to acquire 8 Armors, and when you click Go Now, it dumps you in the marketplace. Zynga just wants you to purchase armor items, but we're not going to do that.

• Go to Brazil.
• Click on your Inventory tab. 
• Click on City Story. 
• Click on Armor. 
• Buy ANY armor there, and it counts toward your objective.

 

Mafia Wars Lead Into Gold: Underbrush

Underbrush is mission number two in the latest mission event, Lead Into Gold.

Objectives

• 0/2 BUY 2 HORNY TOAD ATVS FROM YOUR BLACK MARKET.
  Buy some vehicles for the jungle trek.

• 0/40 FIGHT 40 OPPONENTS IN BRAZIL.

• 0/10 JOB: "MAKE A PATH TO THE TEMPLE"

About those Horny Toad ATVs. You don't need to have a fully upgraded Black Market in Brazil to obtain them -- but you do have to wait 23 hours between builds, unless you want to spend reward points.

Fighting 40 opponents in Brazil is easy and painless. Activate your Fighting crew members on your Brazil crew, and it costs you nothing but a few minutes spent on icing.

Attack any player in Brazil for this; doesn't matter if they're iced, doesn't matter if you've already attacked them. Multiple attacks count.

The last objective in this second Lead Into Gold mission is to do the job Make A Path To The Temple 10 times. Fast-clicking through these will only get you a discount, and not one you want, so if you're low on energy don't waste your strokes.

Chicago Sneak Peek #1All this corruption and jockeying for power sure makes a town a little rough ‘round the edges. Guess it’s true what they say; you can’t ever really go home again. But if you can’t beat’em, join ‘em.

Chicago Sneak Peek #2 Turning this dump into a class act will take work. And good hooch; the real McCoy. But paying for it is for saps. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Chicago Sneak Peek #3 

It’s amazing what power buys you in this city; all the dames, hooch and clams you could want. And respect. Cops are only too happy to look the other way, with all those greenbacks lining their pockets.


Soon my speakeasies were running at maximum capacity. We was runnin’ three trips a week to the border to pick up the booze. Sure I had to protect my investments, but life was good. Then the other families decided they wanted a taste of that good livin’...

Chicago Sneak Peek #4 

I guess I should’ve seen it coming, but doesn’t loyalty mean anything in this business?! Must be time to assert myself.

When I reached Pantucci’s office, he was with a dame – a real plump bird wearing too much makeup. He was wearing it now too. His wife wouldn’t be pleased. But then red isn’t really Guido’s color... (Guido ain’t lookin’ so good in red...)

New NYC Property: Sports Bar

New NYC Property: Sports Bar

There's a new New York City property in town, and you've got until 12:00 pm PDT on Thursday 9/15/2011 to upgrade it to its maximum potential through feeds/requests. Your Sports Bar will retain the level to which you are able to upgrade it by the time the countdown timer reaches 0:00:00.
The Sports Bar will allow you to craft some awesome sports-themed items, including ones with skill points when you've upgraded the property to higher levels.
We will be releasing a new limited-time-to-upgrade NYC propertiy each week for the next few weeks, so stay tuned and get your Mafia to help by sending you upgrade parts!

READ ALL ABOUT IT!

THE BOSS FIGHT NERF as it is being called was implemented because Families figured out the strategy of beating it very fast and were basically farming the high end loot items throwing the balance of the game off as some players were getting too strong compared to others. Zynga states a timer was supposed to be put in but wasn’t so now they added one to make things fairer but they also made it so if you want to beat the boss and get the loot you can pay 25 RP to bypass the timer so basically you will have to pay for the loot now if you are farming.  From what I hear there will NOT be a rollback or adjustment because of this as it was Zynga’s stupidity not the players fault.

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POWER PACKS: Power Packs are a big issue in the game and with the players right now.  Some players have them, some don’t, some had them and had them taken away and others just flat out never had them. This has turned into a FAILED Experiment for Zynga. The Power Packs were fine and a stable feature in the game and all they had to do was finish up the full roll out to the other 50% of the players or other 500,000 LOL, and everyone was happy with them.

If  Zynga did do the full roll out as they were 125% every 8 hours and then changed it to 100% the players would of been fine after bitching a bit but the way they EXPERIMENTED on the players just pissed everyone off. Well now we hear they will be rolling them out again to everyone but now they will be 50% Power Packs every 8 hours. So I guess this was their solution so they didn’t lose too much money, well something is better than nothing. NOW GET THEM OUT TO THE PLAYERS ALREADY !!! 

We will also be having a New Mission & Secret District next week right after Cuba closes again. The Mission will be called Lead Into Gold & the Secret District will be called El Darado. As you can see they are both themed with GOLD. From the looks of this it should be another high energy Brazil event. Hopefully it will at least have loot that is worthwhile.

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MAFIA WARS LIVE: Next week we should also have some new fight stuff but details were kept sketchy But the guys on the Mafia Wars Live recorded edition. They tried to do a show Live but had audio issues again and had to record it.

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NEW PROPERTIES: They will also be adding a new build-able property to New York called Hawkeye Sports Bar later today. This property you will have one week to upgrade it as high as you can you can and the rewards will be a craft-able loot item that will offer rewards based on how far you upgrade it and it one of the rewards will be SKILL POINTS. So basically you will have to spam your friends for the needed parts and this will be a weekly thing as they will have a new one each week for now. The items for the first property don't look that great for the higher level players but we will see what skills they provide to see if it worth it to spam our friends. But there will be a problem and that brings me to our next thing up.

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FACEBOOK has eliminated the Unlimited Gifting we have all grown to love. So now we are limited to sending out 26 gifts a day from the game AGAIN. THIS IS NOT A ZYNGA ISSUE IT IS FACEBOOK BEING ANTI SOCIAL AGAIN !!!  So I hate to say it but you may have to use the bookmarklet's to get your gifts needed for the new properties coming out and the Family Progression goals you need to hit which brings me to our final thing.

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SPOCKHOLM: Now According to the Mafia Wars Loot Lady the Team Spockholm will finally be coming out with their own version of a toolbar. Their toolbar is almost ready for release and will incorporate most of their popular bookmarklet's in one nice and neat location.

It will not unframe your game it will just be added right on the screen with the game with a drop down with the bookmarklet's like gift-a-nator, switch, get-a-nator & much more in it.

Graphics Courtesy of the MW Loot Lady

 

Spockholm Link-o-Database

Spockholm once again developed something new. We call it the "Link-o-Database", and it is basically an addition to the Link-a-Nator and the Free-Gift-Get-a-Nator.


The original way of sharing your gift links was posting them to your wall. The script to create and post those links is called the Link-a-Nator, or LAN.

Later we came up with the idea of a Spocklet that collects all those links posted to your friends walls and displays them in a easy way. This is called the Free-Gift-Get-A-Nator, or GAN.
In the latest version it even sorts your links by category and lets you click them or copy to the Bagman Mugger.

Meanwhile Facebook-API changed a few times and is still changing for some accounts, making it really hard to find enough gift links. We've already added (with help of our fan Bill Liebler) an option to scan the feed, but this is painfully slow and never gives you a lot of links.

We've always dreamed of having our own database of links, where you just go in and get links that you want, fast and instantly, without bothering Zynga or Facebook. The problem here was to get only the links of your mafia members, which is not a simple problem.


Now Zynga came with their (or Chester's) Family Module.  With the Family Progression, the need for gifts became bigger, since you can easily fulfill your daily helper task with opening 100 gifts.

So we from Team Spockholm sat down and designed and created a Family Gift Database (Martin called it Link-o-Database).


How does it work?
The concept is simple. Every Family Member contributes their links, and every user can then retrieve their Families links.

We designed this to be as easy as possible. It was integrated into Link-a-Nator and Get-a-Nator and you just need one extra click each to use the Link-o-Database.


When running the updated Link-a-Nator, you will notice the following new options:

Clicking the "Publish to family link-o-database"-button will publish your links to the database. One click, no further work for you. If you want to even save that click, check the "Send to database automatically after creation."-Option and your links will always be updated to the database.

Now that you have created your links, you may want to retrieve your family member's links and click them. Run the updated Free Gift Get-a-Nator and select the option "Link-o-database" from the select field. Click "Scan" and you will see the links in an instant!

To ensure you are really uploading your links for your family, we've added a leech-check. You have to have at least 10 links uploaded in the last 48 hours, or you are not eligable to retrieve your familiy's link. Of course you should post your links daily to help your family the most!


For the Beta-Test-Phase, we have decided to roll this feature out (yes, sorry for using Zynga-methods) to only 1/10th of the familys. If you family-id ends with a "7", then you may use it. We're doing this so we can monitor the server-load and will then include more families every day. So try again every day and enjoy the benefits of this new service!


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Article written by Eike, part of Team Spockholm and co-writer to the MW Loot Lady Blog

All material is protected by copyright law

Here is the Official Word From The Mafia Wars Blog about the return to Cuba

Temporary Visa: Return To Cuba!

With the Neo-Imperium distracted by their criminal activities in other parts of the world, your chance has come to sneak back into Cuba. Your job progress will start for where you left off, but you’ll find a new tier of job mastery and powerful new loot. Be sure to hurry though, the Neo-Imperium won’t be fooled for long. Grab what you can while you can, because this temporary visa won’t last forever.
Cuba Event Developer Explanation:
Due to player request, we will be re-opening Cuba temporarily for 2 weeks. Many players are disappointed that they no longer have access to Cuba job progress and properties, so we wanted to attempt a temporary re-opening through a limited time event to see how players enjoy it.  
During this time users will have access to Cuba with new added loot drops. Their job progress will be the same as when they left it. Additionally, for those players who already finished Cuba, we are releasing a Ruby tier of Job Mastery.  We are very aware of the dedication players have put into finishing Cuba, so we wanted to make sure everyone has something to tackle in the re-opening, along with high end loot drops and new mastery items for completing Ruby Tiers.
We would really like to hear your feedback on this event, the Cuba shutdown event, and future city releases and events. We strive to make sure the new city content we release is the best for our players that it can be!  Thanks everyone – and good luck dealing with the Neo-Imperium!