Info : For New Players

**************** General ****************

Notice the notification system (click on the dots, scroll down and confirm the changes) - use it so that you get notified when your selected activities are available to do.

(I think notifications are being worked on, as some of them are giving notice waaaay in advance of when they can be done. So find a notifier with the same time repeat interval that IS working and use that one for the one that isn't working - for example, I use the photo parlour reminder for missions)

Among other things, the very top line of the screen has the current Mara-time , and also has Players Online that you will need to use to do profile visiting in certain events.

Every hour on the hour, the site background changes from day to night, or the reverse. MP Bank and Knutt Knight quest are only open in Mara-daytime, Troll quest is only open in Mara-nighttime.

The background also changes with the different weathers and the seasons. Seasons are purely decorative - but different weathers have an impact on gameplay. In special weathers (like rain or tornado), some shops may close, some may have 2-for-1 specials, and there may be other changes too. Just scroll down a bit, there's another blog containing excerpts from the News that describes the changes for each weather. (If you get a message saying your wig has blown off, you don't need to buy a new one, just reload your selfie.)

About the Jelly Castle and Waffle Wobble forum threads - "There is no rule about tagging other players. If players want to know when it's jelly hour they can add this topic to their favourites and get an alert each time there is a post" .. so you might want to do that.

About Greedy Fairy : The header says she rewards whoever has most of an item in their gallery (it does not specify how many). But a staff member told me you must have at least 100 of the item to win. There used to be no requirement, I saw someone win with 2 ancient newspapers once.

Item Retirement

Every so often, items get retired from the main shops. This includes shops that require other forms of currency other than MP, such as BP, RP and OP. Every so often, check out the Retirement Planning "shop" in Puchalla Village. If something is going to be retired soon, grab a few of them. After an item is retired, the price will usually skyrocket in price.

Shop Restocking Times

The main shops restock every 5 minutes. If you get there right when a shop restocks, you have a better chance of getting a high rarity item.
The times : http://www.maraforce.com/guiderestock.php

Clubs

Join one. There are no disadvantages.

It's a friendly atmosphere with a chat - and most have events/contests occasionally. You can display chat either statically (click on the messages logo at the top of the club page) or self-refreshing (via maratalk, I think). If you don't want to talk, you don't have to.

And clubs offer swaps - crystals, diamonds, photos and plates. There is a stockpile of those items in the swap area, so you can swap what you have too many of, for something you need.

Larger clubs probably have more in their swap storage, smaller ones are more intimate and may have special focuses like roleplaying or a particular type of music or ...

Maraforce

https://www.maraforce.com/guidemissions.php
http://www.maraforce.com/goalsultimate.php
http://www.maraforce.com/goalscity.php

Maraforce has all kinds of info, microwave recipes, avatar lists, etc.


**************** Making MP ***************

1. Free Games

Play all the free games you can, easy to get startup MP

Games to play every day
- fairy flight, monty, quack mafia - give out stats and other prizes. Decide what reward you want, then get that score.
- pumpkin patch, at least until you've beaten the last level. Don't use the pumpkin rewards yet, wait until you find out what pumpkins you won't be able to get otherwise.
- pearl hurl, for both the level rewards and the score rewards
- jigsaw puzzle, hard mode

Read the descriptions of all the games - many give you a chance at a bigger reward, like AU or retired items

Most of the pay to play games are good for beginners too, maybe skip dukka dash for a while ... and dark fairy for a bigger while LOL

Definitely buy magazines and newspapers whenever you can. Buying older missing mags/papers gets expensive.


2. Quests

In doing quests, it is much cheaper to have stuff in your attic than to buy from user shops. When you are first starting out, you basically cannot afford to buy items from user shops. You want to buy items from the main shops and stock up your attic. Stick to doing quests that don't require you to have lots of everything in your attic, do those that only ask for items from one or two main shops.

Most quests require you to have lots of kinds of items, but a few do not, start with one of these. Get at least 30 of each item from the pertinent main shop(s) then you'll come out ahead on that quest. If an expensive item is asked for, let the quest time out. (And yes, there is a fairy that rewards you for total number of quests done.)

- Queen Bee - asks for flowers, perfume, ice cream, sugar cubes. I still skip the sugar cube ones sometimes and do other stuff. Sometimes gives very nice MP rewards, also gives nice wardrobe items (use the first one in your wardrobe, sell the others you get). Even now, if I'm out of MP and don't want to take any out of the bank, I do Queen Bee quests. I always keep a nice supply of flowers, perfume and ice cream ^_^

Edit: Queen Bee has been changed, and now asks for a much greater variety of items. If you're just starting, do garage or battle quests, try queen bee later.

- Garage - asks only for car parts, no special items given out tho

- Aquarium - After you've done worm digging enough to get a nice supply of worms, do this one. It gives out a scholarship every time you feed a fish. You will need these later on, but for now, sell them.

- Talon / Knutt Knight / Sumo Sally - No items needed, you get BP from all three, plus MP, feathers and plushies from Talon, and Diamonds from KK/SS. Many shops require BP - Newspapers, Magazines, Rapunzel's Tower, Glasses, Mummy Dolls, Potato Chips and Health Tonics.

Btw, KK is only open in Mara-daytime (every other hour), like the MP bank. (And Troll is only open in Mara-nioghttime)

Candy Tree isn't too bad, it only asks for items from two shops - Chocolate and Candy. But definitely build up a good supply of each in your attic first.

Long term money - Retired items
Go to Puchalla Village, then to Retirement Planning. You will see a list of items that will be retired from the main shops in the next few months. If you can manage to snag a few, they will be worth a lot later on.


3. MP and Items from Fairy Rewards

Many fairies that reward you for progress.

If you look at the bottom of many pages, one of the icons is for Rewards. Click it, there are many screens that have this link. If you click on one of the fairy names on that page, you can see what rewards are given out for what amount of progress.

Some rewards are specific for each pet, like Obese Fairy gives out rewards for how much gourmet food a pet has eaten. For these rewards, every pet has it's own progress level, and any stats given as rewards only apply to that pet.

Others are not pet-specific - they don't really apply to a particular pet, and any stat rewards apply to all your pets. Examples of these are rewards for your wardrobe, and your photo, plate, plushie and stamp collections ... and the total number of battles won by all pets combined. (No one in their right mind trains multiple battle pets, but someone might change which pet is their battle pet)

Start with wardrobe and gourmet food. Most people pick one pet to be their "everything pet", that one pet being the main pet for all pet-specific rewards. Since all fairy rewards include battle atats, that pet gets stronger faster, as opposed to one getting stats from gourmet foods, another getting stats from books etc.

Alternatively, some people have different pets collect different pet-specific rewards, to keep the lending fees lower for the pets. But eventually, the lending fees for all your pets are gong to be high and most people won't pay high fees.

Btw, gourmet food is defined as anything edible that has a rarity of 10 or higher. All worms, health tonics and pancakes are gourmet food. If you click on Check Price under an item (anywhere), the rarity is shown in the upper left, such as R14 means rarity 14. Many plants are gourmet foods, too. To tell if an item is edible, click in it, then click on Use Item. It won't use the item when you click there unless you confirm, so it's an easy way to tell what an item is for. I still have to do it on some items, to see what they are used for.

Gourmet foods are a nice money maker. - both to sell in your shop, and to get the obese fairy rewards

Wardrobe - get one of everything you can. Clothes, makeup, wigs, tattoos, Queen Bee items, guess the flag prize shirts, contact lenses, and some game rewards. And holograms/scenery/clothing/wigs from events. You can also get items from Trades and the AU shop but they aren't cheap.


4. Your User Shop

Keep it stocked, with anything. Once an item is in your shop, do a Check Price on it and price your item the same, or one MP less. Put a couple of the same items in. If it doesn't sell after a day, reprice it - again, one MP less than what Check Price shows.

There are always many people selling the same item and trying to be lowest price on the market. It doesn't matter. People are doing quests and need the items, and many people are told to get the same item at the same time. Some will get it from the main shop, then some will get it from shops priced a bit lower than yours, and then they will get yours.

Don't feel bad about selling items at 8-50k. Once you start making serious MP, that's still pretty cheap. It's how the system was designed, to allow us to earn MP.

Huge price cuts will just mean you will make less MP. It will not have a long-term effect on market prices. And those people buying from you will likely put it in their shops at a higher price. Most players will keep their prices where they were, knowing that the prices will return to normal in 1-7 days. Just price your items 1 MP less ^_^


5. Olympics

This isn't exactly making MP, but you can win OP (Olympic Points) from it. At first you won't win often, but do it anyways, there's no cost to doing it. The OP can be spent in the Olympics Shop, but stockpile them for a while. If something gets retired from this shop, the items will still be on the market but the price will skyrocket. If you have a nice amount of OP saved up, you may be able to buy the item that's retiring directly from the OP Shop.


********* Photos and Plates *********

This isn't something you need to do immediately, but be aware of it. If your pet changes due to operations portal or whirlpool, take at least one photo for your collection, maybe a few more to trade later. Same thing for minipets that change in Fasoro Falls (Ferris Wheel, Resort) for plates.

-- What photos and plates get you
Marada progress goal 61 requires 1000 plates in collection
Marada progress goal 73 requires 1500 photos in collection
Puchalla goal 49 requires 3000 photos in collection
But marada goal 75 does not require puchalla goal 49
Penitentiary reward is an Arinya (mission asks that specific photos be in collection)
Jester reward is a missing gourmet food (mission asks that specific plates be in collection)

-- Again, being in a club and using the photo/plate swap feature will help you grow your collection faster.

-- The Missing Photo and Missing Plate GiftBoxes are a great help. If you have one, you can go to trades, search for photos, then click on check price, on each photo you see. If you have the photo, you'll see a checkmark, if you don't, offer a photo they need that's about the same value.


*************** Giftboxes ************

Most are nice, get some. If you can't spend real money, you can buy AU from other players, current rate is about 2mil MP per AU. I would start with
- Shop Autopricer
- Pet Stats (to choose what pet gets game stat rewards)
- Doubles - crystals, diamonds, worms, university
- Attic - lets you sort your attic items (category, not location) by various criteria, mainly you can sort you photos/plates by price, so you can find one to offer in a trade
- Secondary - Clothing Rack (lots of quests ask for this stuff), Jelly Castle, Multiple Pet Olympics (if you have a bunch of pets)

Use your judgement - playing Swindler twice as often is nowhere near as beneficial as getting 2 worms from Worm Digging.


************** Battling ***************

***** Equipment

You need 2 matching weapons. Harvest Scythe is good but since it's retired, the price is now about 22k. If you can get them, do so.

If not, go for Chocolate Daggers. They are not retired, and their price varies.

You also need 2 matching healing items. Go for Staff of the Yuletide, in the weapons shop.

Armors are not needed, that part of battling is not working (I think)

They need to be equipped to your pet (your main pet!). Just click on the item in your inventory, and do Use Item. To remove them (like if you get better ones), you need to go to your pet's profile, click on weapons (in the circle) then click on the item you want to remove.

***** Healing with magic

edit : some healing items are currently broken, heal 0)

When healing during a battle, you can use both healing items and magic in the same turn. Eventually you will want to build up magic stats by doing Computer Repair Quests. The max amount of magic you can use is 5 times your pet's level.

But you won't want to use magic for a while. When you use 2 identical healing items and no magic, your total healing is THREE times the healing of one healing item. It's like having 3 healing items equipped.
If you use magic, your total heal is the sum of the healing of your TWO healing items (no bonus) plus the magic.

***** Opponents

You need some battle cards (opponents) to fight. These are cards for beginners, get them all and Use Item them to put them in your deck. There are 2 battle fairies, one rewards you for how many cards you have in your deck, the other rewards you for the number of battles you have fought.

Wild Minipets might be a little tough for beginners, See
https://sites.google.com/site/marabattleguide/wildminipets
This is a very useful site. Oops, sadly it is no longer usable.

--- Trading Cards shop
- Appy
- Gouda
- Housse
- Linuw
- Lunar
- Moola
- Pepperoni
- Pleon
- Pop
- Qikre
- Rubhd
- Snap
- Spex
- Tuin
- Uayl
- Zeew

--- Shop Search, fairly cheap
- Excavator
- Halloween Snowman
- Halloween Alien
- Mara

--- Should I fight this opponent?

If you lose, you will have no HP left and will have to heal at the Bubble Pin in Jenoa, or buy the Battle Giftbox that autoheals your pet after every battle. Don't count on being able to use the Bubble Pit a lot. After some random number of heals (can be one!) she will say she's too tired, come back tomorrow (after midnight Mara Time).

So if you're unsure, check the opponent out here, and see how much damage it does.
https://sites.google.com/site/marabattleguide/tradingcards/alphabetical .. Oops, sadly it is no longer usable


***** Battling

Go the battle screen and pick your opponent, and start battle.

The green circle around you and opponent is HP. You can click on the pictures of you and opponent to see current values.

If you don't have the Battle giftbox, and your pet's HP is low, heal firat
Click Heal
Select your two healing items, then heal.
You can heal more than once in a row if you like

Click Attack
Select Normal Attack and your two weapons, than attack

You may have to alternate between attacking and healing for some opponents.

* NOTE *
........ Even though your selected weapon and wand choices
........ are saved from one battle to the next, sometimes when
........ Ian does updates, those settings get undone. Always
........ look to see that you have attack on Normal and that
........ your weaps/wands are selected.


***** Training

Gym is for battling-type stats
Elite Gym stats are only for Olympics
Olympics use both gym and elite gym stats

Once you have a well-stocked attic, do Haunted House quests to get crystals, and train at gym.



Ciao and have a good time playing, if you think something needs added here, MT me or post here

Suggestions Etc.

Suggestions Etc.

Not turning these in, there's too much broken now for these to be addressed

Please note : I care about this game. If I didn't, I wouldn't have taken the time to write this. There are many that say nothing, and just leave.

To be fair, I don't know how Ian does it. I don't think I could stay inspired about working on the same code for as many years. He truly needs some help. Still, for the game to survive, problems have to be addressed.

Please allow us to turn off that pulsating mission-fail reminder. I dislike it when I see it when I'm in the process of getting the items the mission has asked for. I hate it when I've decided to fail a mission because it asked for an exorbitantly priced item on a very low mission level and it goes on pulsating for an hour or two. It will not succeed in getting me to buy the item, and I won't stand for seeing it. I either put a piece of opaque tape on my computer screen to cover it up, or go play a different game for a while. Let us disable it. Please.

In fact, get rid of ALL pulsating reminders, they are annoying, like a constant drumbeat you can't get rid of. Kids may think they're cool, but the adults are the ones spending. Or not.


Gender equality

"Blushing bride" and "maiden" are concepts from a time when women and men were held to different standards. Why are there no "blushing groom" items? What is the term for a male maiden?


Broken stuff

Spooks Busters no longer drops poisons.

Decapitation Fairy, after you reach the level where you're supposed to get a costume instead, does not decapitate your pet, nor do you get a costume.

Health balls (the old crystal balls) heal zero in battle

Slingshot Snookle does not work for all. Don't tell me to use Chrome, I don't like it. I use Firefox. It also doesn't work on my phone (which DOES use Chrome). If it doesn't work for all the main browsers, the game should be yanked until it's fixed, and the items removed as requirements for anything. I do not like being asked for quest items that are impossible for me to get.

Many reminders come up when they shouldn't, hours before the activity is actually available. Others work fine. Mission ones are always hours early (useless). FIXED

Many games do not work well on mobile because the pan and zoom is disabled (even in non-mobile mode), which makes it impossible to make precise actions. Try Pumpkin Patch. If I disable mobile mode on my phone, there should be no forced formatting, which would make it easier to play some games.

It is irksome having my doll disappear when I try on items, or when I finalize a lush fountain color change. This gets fixed and rebroken periodically, not a biggie, just have to equip spare earrings and after char is made, delete them one at a time until character reappears.

The probabilities for many random events got messed up when crystal balls were added. I have a separate blog with some probability computations. When people can't advance in regional goals because the probabilities got broken, people find other things to focus on, and dismiss the goals.

No progress goals after 75.

Nothing new. Weather changes were new and interesting, and were stopped for some reason.

This is a great game, but it seems like it's self-destructing.

Text Readability

Did you ever try to turn in a term paper written with yellow ink on white paper? Why not? It is unreadable and unprofessional

While playing Venomous Victory, when Serpent gets an extra roll, the text notifying you of this is OUTLINED to be more readable. If this can be done in a minigame, it can be done for the yellow text.

Namechanging / Picturechanging

(1) player's spreadsheets
Stop changing names of items. It does not make the game more fun to play on a base of shifting sand. We have spreadsheets that use these names. We have those spreadsheets because the GBs don't do all we need. No matter what is offered by GBs, people will always want to do more, because no two people think the same way. We may have the GB and still want more info.

The name changing is basically crapping all over the playerbase, with no gain. There are no name conversions posted in a special forum place, so it destroys our databases.

It is a compliment to a game when players care enough to make spreadsheets. But ... there was a guy here that played and chatted - spent lots of real money, and got up to maybe marada level 55 in about a year and a half. He made more spreadsheets about Mara stuff than I ever would - and after the name changes, he quit.

I can look up an item in Runescape's wiki and be presented with a chart showing the price of the item over time, since it was first created. The name (and usually the picture) has never been changed. I can drop out of playing for years, return, and feel like I never left, except for new stuff added.

I felt I'd been scammed when I saw a new book in the book shop, bought it, then pricechecked it and found I already had 47 of them.

(2) familiarity
Maybe we LIKED the old pictures, they are a part of our history. New is not always better, no one is modernizing the Mona Lisa.

I'm mostly referring to item pics, but it applies to other pics also. The new tombola pictures look like cheap random pics bought on the internet with a Marapets pet plopped on it - the old pics had Mara flavor. The Baspinar one shows a woodcutter's cabin, not a castle!

Light-Up Ushunda, Water table, Paffuto Skateboard, Apple Computer etc. - such magnificent, creative, unique items !!! All scrapped for a bunch of lookalikes.

(3) players returning after a long absence
When I returned to Mara after a 9 year absence, the first place I went to was the toy shop. It had always been my favorite shop, with all its unique items. I was surprised to see furniture in there, but other than that, I was happy to see all the old familiar items. There were a lot of new places and shops, but the old shops were still there, a comfort to me. Now the Toy shop has (to me) been destroyed, along with Armour (all those cute amulets !!) and Weapons, and it seems Books is next. There was nothing wrong with species weapons, and armor is useless anyways, so why the changes?

If I were returning today rather than when I did, I'd probably not stick around.

And why is this being done when there's so much broken stuff, anyways ?????


What photo giftbox doesn't do, why I keep my own list

I have the photo GB, and it's awesome. But it doesn't do everything, so I maintain my own list.

--- When Whirlpool changes my pet, I'd like to be able to click on something to tell me if I need this photo

--- I'd like to be able to click on players' pets in their profiles to see whether or not I need those photos. Particularly nice when they've offered a photo I already have, on a trade of mine.

What GF giftbox doesn't do, why I keep my own list

GB will not show me a concise table of info at a glance, which is what I want.

I have a spreadsheet with one line for each GF my main GF pet has eaten, and on that line are flags indicating which other pets have eaten that food. It's nice for getting the other pets' collections up. I don't want to feed my tertiary GF pets an item before the secondaries have had it.

(same for learnies)

Wardrobe : Makeup

The way makeup colors are shown sucks. In the new packaging, the true colors are not shown - you can't see what the color is. And when you look at contact lenses, all you see is a field of blue lens cases. The old packaging showed the colors better, and just showing a color swatch (no packaging at all) would be best. Often I just use Lush Fountain because I can see the colors there. At least, please use the old style of makeups inside wardrobe.

Wardrobe : The popup -assertive female please

This is supposed to be a website where all gender preferences are equal !! But those characters ..... it's a throwback to June Cleaver days.

The male looks assertive - eyes wide open, confident mouth, uplifted chin - ready to go out and do big things in the world. Good !!

But the female looks demure and submissive - half-closed eyes, hair draped over the forehead - not really capable of going out and doing big things.

C'mon, she need to look more professional. Please give her some guts - don't be portraying females as inferior.


Wardrobe : The popup - function

This has become important because so many of us will never be able to max our wardrobes. Thus, I pick and choose. I want to try stuff on, that's what missing wardrobe GB is for. If something costs megamillions in trades, and I can't see it on my doll, I don't buy it.

1. No need to see male and female chars side by side, just split the reset doll button into 2 buttons - reset doll (return to default doll without changing gender) and change gender (without changing clothes).

2. It was hard enough to see stuff on the doll in wardrobe, the popup is even smaller. It would be nice to have an option to pick a display magnification for the doll shown in wardrobe. Seeing makeup is hard. Maybe even a zoom-in-on-face feature.

3. The female char's wig is so long it obscures some items.

4. The background is white. I can't see several white or yellow items at all (e.g., energy element, stardust), so phooey on them.

5.When items were displayed on the wardrobe doll, we could look at the URL to see what color would change in Lush Fountain. I may or may not want something, depending what color in the item will be changeable.

6. Using the popup requires an extra action or 2 every time, and that gets old, especially since the only gain is seeing both M and F, which could be better accomplished with the switch.

Personal Preferences

We all have them. It would be nice to have more things customizable in settings.

- Enable / disable rotating pictures in menus

I once coded a rotating picture display, please kill me. They used to be a thing. At least the one I made rotated very slowly. I detest them now, give me static pictures please.

The trend in pictures now is to show one picture full size and below that, show icons of all available pictures - whichever icon is clicked on becomes the one displayed at full size. You can see these in any online store.

- Enable / disable black info 'eyelids' in menus

These are creepy, they literally make my skin crawl. Either offer the option to disable them, or make them only show on mouseover of an 'I' in a circle (which is industry standard) or both.

The rotating pictures and the info eyelids are why I have bookmarked nearly everything in Mara that is within menus. Haven't bookmarked the temples and pyramids yet (other than Wonky), so I never do them. Oh well.

- Enable / disable showing the rotating tombolas.

I have a lot running on my computer, and the tombola sometimes halts everything for a few seconds. I disabled animated gifs and that didn't work. A static picture of a tombola would be great.

- Enable / disable mission reminders

If a mission asks for something that costs over 500k on level 1-3, I will not do it, nor waste a magic carpet on it. I will just wait it out. I do not need a pulsating reminder in the corner warning me that I'm going to fail in xx minutes.

I want the option to not see them - I can disable temples, but not missions. There are players that enjoy themselves here, but don't do missions. Why irritate them with mission reminders?

Also, the mission reminders always come up at least 3 hours before I can do the mission. They are useless. I use the photo parlour reminder to let me know it's time to do a mission. Seems this has been fixed

All Reminders

I sometimes want to see what's available of the reminders I have set, and click maybe 50 times on the inventory icon to see what reminders will show up.

Please make it so that clicking a little dot somewhere will list all reminders in a big column - then you can click somewhere to make the list vanish.

End-of-Game Animation

Consider having an animation analogous to the tumbleweed but for winning, maybe a dancing minipet does somersaults across the screen. I sometimes play Window's Spider Solitaire just to be able to get to the fireworks screen