As always seems to happen with these major events, confusion, panic and excitement are the order of the day, until we step back and take a breath, and take a long, hard look, at the basic math involved. What I am always going for, is what I call, “Return On Tapping” or ROT. This is the best method to use, which requires the least amount of effort, to maximize the return for your time. It is my credo for a happy life.
In short…you want to do what earns you the most, by doing the least. And it seems in every update these days, there are some patterns that emerge that make “getting everything” far EAsier!
Let’s take a look at what we are trying to accomplish, and what method provides the best ROT.
As with most of the updates, there are three basic levels of earning/prize gathering that we need to work on.
As you will see…the “Magic 4 Hour Cycle” comes into play over and over again…so get used to living your life if four hour chunks…with your phone timer (or kitchen timer) going off every 4 hours for the next few weeks.
The first, is actually the EAsiest…but seems the most difficult. The Prize Track earns most of it’s “currency” (French Pins) by clearing tourists, and tapping pins in your neighbor’s towns. There are also some rewarded in chunks for daily prizes, and bonuses, but the basics are the basics, and the best way to earn them is by clearing your tourists.
HOWEVER…there is a reason that the Magic 4-hour cycle is “magic.”
Once you clear all of your tourists, they will repopulate at a rate of 1 every three minutes, or 20 per hour. 20 times 4 is 80…and if you clear them every 4 hours, along with the task to send Springfielders on trips, you will actually not have to worry about chasing down the tourists in your town. THAT is Maximizing your ROT. You will max out at 80 either way…as the “reserve” only allows for this max.
Every four hours, your airport will look like this. Tapping all of the icons will produce your rewards, and clear all of the tourists in your town, and your reserve. BOOM! Maxed out.
Each tourist that you tap in your town earns you 4 Pins and 2 Sky Credits. So…if you are clearing 80 every 4 hours (set your timers!!!), you will earn 320 pins…times at least 4-5 cycles per day (I clear at 6a, 10a, 2p, 6p and 10p) that is either 1280/1600 pins per day. So…you’re already almost halfway there to the required 3365 per day, to reach the “got everything” on the prize track.
When tapping the the Pin Shields in your Neighbor’s towns, you can collect 5 pins for 90 actions (3 per 30 neighbors).
That is an additional 450 pins. And you will also get game cash at the same time. I have also found donuts …rare…but it happens.
Add to this, rewards that happen in the daily challenges (today, I collected 1025 for completing the daily challenge), and you are well on your way to your goal.
Collecting Pins for Sending Characters on Flights
In addition…(and THERE IS A LOT OF CONFUSION ON THIS ONE…)you can/will collect pins from ALL of the characters that you send on flights. There is a trick to maximizing them…and it requires some patience and game management.
You can only use three tickets at a time…even if you have far more players eligible to fly the friendly skies. Each of these tasks has a “riddle” associated, so begin by tapping the character with the correct answer…but then keep tapping available characters until you max out…but then WATCH THE TIMER IN THE TOP RIGHT, and it will generate another plane ticket every two 20 minutes. (They changed this to fix the multi-flyer bug).
Use this to expand your “flyers”…If have 3, 4,5, or even 6 characters available…USE THEM ALL. Each one will bring in another 34 pins every 4 hours. That’s an additional 150-170 pins every 4 hours…times 4-5 cycles…up to 850 EXTRA Pins plus the 170 from the one “solving the riddle.” More than 1000 pins per day!
BONUS ROT…
I have experienced, (and it has been reported) that ADDITIONAL flyers can crop up every 2 hours during this cycle. There is no reason to wait out the 4 hours…SEND THEM ALL on fights by waiting out the timer…for new tickets. Every 34 pins helps…right? And yes…these flyers can be regular or Premium Characters…and I HAVE seen a preponderance of Premium Flyers. (Our bonus for buying Premium Characters?)
Each Cycle will help in completing your THREE ADVENTURE TASKS each day to earn even MORE Pins.
SKY CREDITS for Reward Center Earning
This really isn’t any different than previous events, in that you have loads of options as to earning prizes and leveling up. The sky credits are earned by tapping tourists (2 per, or 160 every 4 hours) and tapping the Pin Shields (or pins if you want to be specific) that show up when a neighbor taps a pin/shield in your town. This is where BEING A GOOD NEIGHBOR pays off. You only get one Sky Credit per pin, but a neighbor can tap three pins a day in your town…and if you have 50-100 GOOD NEIGHBORS…you could earn an additional 150 Sky Credits.
These will also show up in tasks, rewards etc. The thing to remember is that you can level up (which opens a larger variety of prizes), by purchasing items, or by simply using your stash of Sky Credits to do so (or a combination of each). There is no perfect ROT plan for these, as you are only going to earn what you are going to earn. But, you can either get a bunch of little stuff…or save them for bigger items…or just keep leveling up. There is no real advantage to any plan.
IN SUMMATION…
The Key Is to CHILLAX…and log in to clear your tourists, send flyers flying, and clear your Neighbor pins at least every 4 hours (more frequently if you want to check for Bonus Flyers). We are used to this by now...no doubt about it.
So…in basic math terms- you can/should earn at least 1600 pins per day in straight pin collection from your town. Another 450 pins from tapping pins in your neighbor’s towns…and at LEAST 1,000 pins from sending your characters on flights. That leaves just a little over 350 pins per day to earn through tasks, rewards, and challenges and Adventure Task bonuses. EAsy? Not so much. But, everyone can handle 3 minutes of tapping every 4 hours…with 15 minutes to clear your neighbors. Right?
OK. So,it will be a bit grindy. What’s new? The First Act always feels grindy.
How are you doing? What tricks, tactics are you using? Share with the community…we love to know what you think.
NOTE— THIS FROM A READER (Thanks IA!)… THIS SEEMS TO WORK– So Try it until they fix it!!
I finally worked it out!, and looking at some most recent posts there doesn’t seem to be anyone else with this info,
So you can send tons and tons of ppl to the airport!
All you have to do is send all but one of the characters from the list, then send that one on a normal job instead.
Airport will allow another 5 characters to go, repeat over and over 😀
Still have to wait for tickets though so to send everyone will take a long time.
UPDATE— this method is working for me! Try it…use it til they fix it!
Try it and report back, Addicts! Use it while you can…sounds like it is a short-term deal.
UPDATED- I was right…they corrected this bug on 02-02 (bastids!) so now you have to wait 20 minute for each ticket to generate…Making it VERY cumbersome to keep multiple layers of fliers in the air (but it can still be done).
BTW it looks like they just nerfed the airport job trick… my tickets counter has just jumped to 15 minutes! It looks like it still gives extra jobs when you store a character (or send them on a task) but it will be A LOT slower than before.
Just FYI, EA has now upped the two-minute wait for tickets to closer to twenty (probably to ameliorate the effects of this glitch).
Also, I believe the hard cap on characters (65 or so) is actually a hard cap on locations– everyone travels to a different city 🙂
Tickets are now generating at much longer intervals for me – 20 minutes on the last one. I have about 40 characters taking flights right now.
Sadly, the time required to earn one plane ticket has increased from 2 to 20 minutes in my game. 🙁
Great spot by op, I’m nearly at the 3rd prize already. My timer is now 20 minutes for a new plane ticket though not 2, anyone else had their ticket timer increase? Ah well, I can actually get some work done now…..maybe.
I guess they fixed the glitch already. I wanted to try it, but my tickets need about 18 minutes to fill up again! This makes it impossible to use the trick 🙁 It’s also not good, because now it’s even hard to send the normal 5 characters, because you need to wait like half an hour! Who’s got the time??? Don’t they know that we all have a life and this is just a game??? Very frustrating….
Looks like 65 was a cap for simultaneous characters. I tried to start a second round but now it’s 20 minutes to get one ticket
Ticket time is slowly dropping again. It’s back to 7 minutes now that planes are returning.
has any one had this issue? after I sent my 49th character on a flight, the refresh time for my tickets went up to 20 minutes.
Is the number of characters that can be sent to the airport capped at 65? That’s where it stopped working for me. Or has it just been fixed? Or does the glitch have a glitch…?
Could be the cap. Not every character has airport jobs…
My ticket timer just changed to 16+ minutes! 😡 Has anyone else’s? I was in the middle of sending lots of SF’ers on international flights.
What a clever strategy! Thanks a lot!
Basically, for those of you who are still confused, I have tried to describe what I am doing by using Poland as an example:
When you see the clue for the required destination (e.g. “Travel to the poles from eastern europe) it is in your interest to do the OPPOSITE by sending your characters to all destinations except the required task. So in this case, avoid any city in Poland.
The remaining character (who is going to poland) should be sent to a NORMAL task or you can store them in your inventory. Thereafter, you will see 5 new tasks for the airport.
You will need to wait 2 mins for each plane ticket. It caps at 3 but you can continue to earn tickets if you use the strategy above.
Hope this helps. 🙂
Thanks guys. The airport flights were frustrating me. My a town only let me send 3 ppl on flights! My b town let me send dozens and dozens, I had no idea what the hell I did. Lol … now I know
Sorry, but this is incorrect – there’s no need to avoid the “correct” answer. I think there was misinformation in another post that picking the right destination stopped you from sending people to the other locations, but after two cycles of sending the 65 max including choosing the correct job first, I can confirm it doesn’t matter.
The key is to do all but one available flight, then send the fifth character (whoever it is) to a regular job. This will repopulate five new flights and you can repeat the cycle.
The key thing is to NOT fill all the airport tasks, I suspect that is why some people are only able to send one character because most of their collection is already on a regular job. When I start the cycle of sending characters, I’ve always got everyone free and I always get offered five jobs at a time.
Hope that helps to clarify!
I initally tried it exactly the way you just described but it didn’t work for me.
It still works if you send yje correct one first and leave one at the end to sent out on tasks to pop up 5 more, however the timer increases, dependong on the number of characters you have sent it will vary, with 10 I think it increases to 6-7mins, passing 20 it’s around 12mins, passing 30 is like 16min and so on, mine is on 20min now
So I am confuse …if I have 3 tickets available. I should fight 2 and the 3rd send it for a job. Which job can it be or can it be a 60 minutes job?
Anything. The shorter the better.
Little off topic question here but somehow I unlocked Football Nelson in my B game and I’m not sure how I did it. No option to purchase it in my A game.
Any help would be appreciated thanks.
He is a premium skin. I am guessing you lost donuts from your B town
This post has been so helpful!! I was only sending one person at the airport for the lost luggage task because I thought there was a limited amount of tickets available and I didn’t want to waste them. Didn’t see you got a new one every 2 minutes. Doh!! Now I’m happily taking advantage of the glitch and trying to send as many characters as possible to make up for being behind on the calendar.
Happy to help…and the glitch will “catch you up” quickly.
d’oh, I cant store Princess Penelope (guess I can put her on a one hour task) What other characters can’t be stored?
You have to store the Krustyland castle, I think
LOOPYW- You can store Princess Penelope but you have to be in Krustyland to do it. She csme with the Wheel (24hr turnaround) so if you store that it will free her up in KL. You just have to get the shuttle bus back or ask Krusty for a lift☺️……💜X
Thanks all for the help. I was worried I was having hoarding issues.
Go to Krustyland and you can store her there with the building she came with. 😊
you don’t need to store the characters, send them on short tasks, if possible leave at the end anyone from original Simpson family (H,B,M,L,M) as the last traveler since those have really short tasks and can be used further if you don’t have that much characters available.
I am not seeing neighboreeno numbers. (all my neighbors’ French pins say 0 ). On a related note, is there a leaderboard for this event?
I still don’t fully understand the airport trick.
You send everyone available at the airport to their task, all BUT ONE. The last one you send on any other character task he or she has – look for him in the townhall (i take a 60mins task or shorter). Then magic happens and the airport will give you a new list of characters that can be used to get pins. Repeat from the beginning (it will take time until you have enough flight tickets to send the next four on a plane and to sent the 5th on any other job he has.
tl;dr: You have 5 character jobs available at airport. Send the 5th on any other task he has AFTER you have send the previous four on a plane trip. After you have send the 5th on a plane, repeat again from the airport.
Plane tickets renew every 2mins.
It is necessary to mention that ones you screwed up (for example you send someone on another task although two characters could have been sent to an airport task it will not work anymore. Then you’ll need to wait until the character that has van Houtens riddle task done until you can try again.
Thank you. The one missing piece was to always send 4 and the 5th one on a task, and then repeat those steps again and again!!
The key is to distinguish between FLIGHTS and TICKETS.
In order to send a character you must have both available. Let’s say that you now have the 5 flights available and 5x characters assigned. Use up 3x tickets, and flights A/B/C have taken off. Now you have 2x available flights and assigned characters.
Take the character assigned to flight D (or E) and send it on any task you want.
The airport does a RESET, and selects 5x more random characters. Now you have flight F/G/H/I/J available. Wait until the tickets regenerate and then send more characters on flights.
Once again, take a character assigned to flight I/J and send it to some random task. Airport resets again.
Does anyone think the free land tokens will remain after the event? Or should we use all of them up before the end?
I did the airport trick over and over. It seems to max out at 65 slots at the airport.
That would be correct.
My time to get a ticket started going up, first 6 min, then like 10…now it’s 20min to generate a new ticket. Is this right? Does it increase the more people you have at airport or… have they caught the glitch?
Regarding the trick to send more characters on flight, this is something you SHOULDN’T do: do not clear a character already on a flight. You lose the job and the event currency you would have won. This is probably obvious for most but thought I should put it out there.
Ok, so about the trick of additional characters sent on flights… DO NOT store current characters fliying on the airport, if you think (like I did) that by storing one it will unblock additional spots to send more Flyers… wrong!!! this will only cause to loose the pins you were going to get once the 4 hrs passed and you won’t be able to send anyone else to cover that spot, I just tried a minute ago, that spot dissapears; seems that you need to leave the character spot free when the list reloads every 4 hrs. Just an FYI to avoid doing this and losing pins.
I sent all but one character on a flight, I sent the 5th one on a job, and all that happened was that the airport replaced them with a different character. I didn’t have the option to send 65 other characters on a flight. What am I missing?
Did you have all of your characters free?
Try it again next cycle.
I had the majority of 200 plus characters free. I will try again, my 4 hours are up right now….
I have done two complete cycles of 65 so far…working like a glitchful-charm!
@Patric: After sending around the 20th character the counter increases tu 20min for each new flying pass, so you can send 3 in 1 hour but each with a difference of 20 min.
Even the ones needed for monorail tasks?
Keep them all free to be safe. It really depends on how many characters you have. I have been able to do the airport glitch, while finishing monorail.
It seems to come in waves. I sent 4 on a task, 1 on a job and 5 more popped up. I came bacl 10 minutes later and 5 more characters popped up.
I can only send 3 people at a time to the airport. What am I doing wrong?
The list will vary with each clue. But try the method listed on the very bottom of this post…
Huh. I could have sworn you didn’t really approve of using “glitches” to get ahead (aka cheat) in the game… 😉
Characters on jobs can’t fly. Clear all your jobs before starting a round of flights, or just don’t send characters on jobs.
Yh the glitch is working for me too. Also do we know when the 24hr period starts to do the 3 daily flight tasks? Or does it just start from when you do the first one? Thanks in advance
I believe it’s an 0800 GMT reset time each day.
Are you sure? It seemed like, for me, the 24-hour clock started when I did my first one, like with the neighbour-visiting clock.
ADAM- I saw your comment on my other post☺️. Whenever you can visit is cool by me. I’m just happy you haven’t absnfoned the game. I still love visiting your SF and I’ve gotten used to the new design. Look out for the graffiti☺️……💜X
So if you work 9 hour shifts like I do, you can’t get everything this event?
It’s like this for every event. Every event for the last few years has had this 4hr cycle of tapping. It’s not impossible, but it is difficult if you only log in once or twice a day.
I do recommend (especially with your schedule) doing the method listed at the bottom of this post, while it works.
Out of 2 lost luggages iv got 2 curved airport tracks, rail yard all over but with a limited time event where you cant get all that you need?!
I had a character left out, sent gramps on a 10min task…but wasn’t allowed any new characters to send. Is the glitch fixed?
Ok, tried this again and my original mistake…I’d sent everyone in Norbert’s list, and then stored grandp…brought him out of “cryogenic freezing” and tried tasking him. Doesn’t work that way.
Two questions: 1. Once you’ve sent a bunch of extras to the airport, do you have to wait for ALL flyers to finish in order to get credit for the entire group? I THINK once you’ve clicked on the actual people needed for the task…all others are wiped out? 2. Is this a PERMANENT CHANGE to the list…meaning does it stay extended forever, or do you have to leave off the last person every time to extend who gets to go?
Nope, they can be staggered. You just need the one for the clue to finish to get credit for Norbert’s task. And I think it’s a bug, so use it while you can.
Okie dokie. Thanks.
I wish they made a far bigger idea out of doing the 3 for their clue FIRST than was made in game…or did I miss something?
Anyone else only able to send one character (For me its Frink) to the airport? I see all this talk of sending multiple characters but I don’t have that option. Am I doing something wrong?
As annoying as it is, try uninstalling and reinstalling TSTO. Let me know if that works…
I’m having the EXACT same issue, only Frink is showing up as able to fly out of 65+ characters. I’ve un/reinstalled a few times but it didn’t fix the issue. I submitted a ticket to support and probably will never hear back from them…
I’m guessing Super Bowl is on its way as a robot mascot and a ton of football stuff just arrived.
Umm so I just got the FOX football robot mascot an de the field but whatever his name is went missing?!! How do I contact EA?
https://help.ea.com/en/contact-us/new/?product=the-simpsons-tapped-out
Really wish you hadn’t shown me that.
I need to get some rest 🙂
It’s been fixed… 🙁
No, ignore that! It still works! :))
Nope, still works.