I had a New Year's party so I set all my characters to end at midnight then when I got home I cycled Homer through his various tasks. He's now set to finish tonight at 1:30 a.m.

This morning I played for a minute or so then got kicked out. Must have been pretty bad since they posted about it on their Facebook page. I'm back in now, though.

If nothing is available, like not even the Simpson house, I'd guess that they haven't played in a while. If you're curious, your Origin friends screen will tell you when they last played.

Looking at that shows them both as being active in the last day and 1 of the 2 visited my Springfield today since my last post. The one town is basically a few buildings, the elf cannon and the elf door and not much else. It's like they removed everything so they can find the elves easier because it's all you see. I did see the Simpsons house there once but it's such a tricky town to search when no matter where you move it's mostly just white.

EDIT TO ADD: I just went back to one of the towns and was able to tap 1 thing(found the Simpson house). That's all there was so now I'm showing Daily Actions 2 for this person. Is it because they just don't have much available?

Also, is there some kind of fired elves cheat/glitch or is this person just lucky somehow? In my list one neighbor had their count jump by like 700 elves in under a day. The top 7 in my list were all hovering around 1200 and now while most of the 7 are no higher than 1320 this person is well above 2000.

He/she must just be tapping a lot. The Simpsons house regenerates so quickly you were able to slip in before he tapped it.

When it came up from the downtime today, for about a half hour shooting the canon wasn't getting rid of shots for me and it wasn't subtracting elves from me, no clue why. When I came back it had stopped doing that.

Can someone suggest what to spend my donuts on? I'm at 96 donuts at level 21, and I haven't bought anything with donuts yet.

edit: Make that 106, I didn't know about the Jebediah Springfield easter egg, sweet!

Any building with a character included. You probably don't have a lot of options with that amount though.

I declare this Winter event a success. It was pretty doable for almost everyone, not like previous events. Right now I'm two days ahead, like I was in the first part. And I'm playing 3-4 times a day. Sometimes just twice a day.

The sushi guy is only 100. I agree that there aren't a lot at that pricepoint.

What about just spending them on Homer Budda's? Should I just keep saving them?

Save them as you're not guaranteed to get anything good with the Homer Buddhas.

Also, I hate tapping these elves. It's by far one of the most tedious and annoying aspects of any event we've had, in my opinion.

What should I be saving for?

I agree that The Happy Sumo with Akira is a great buy at 100 donuts. His quest line is funny (especially if you have Kumiko, Comic Book Guy's wife) and he can make you free bonsai trees every 36 hours. Poor Akira has become my bonsai-making servant pretty much around the clock. This is the first and only donut purchase I ever made where, when it popped up in the update, I immediately said, "Yes!" and bought it without hesitation and I haven't been disappointed at all.

But, you don't have to take my word for it....

Yeah, very little good comes out of those Homer Buddhas. Once in a while, maybe.

The elves are annoying, but I still think the snakes were worse. At least we have the elf vacuum, and seeing their shadows on the snow sometimes helps.

Nice, I'll go for Akira then. Thanks for the suggestion!

I had an easy time with the bunny zapper but it takes several times for my phone screen to realize that, yeah, I've got my finger on it and I'd like to zap the elves now.

One of my friends removed almost everything from his town, the elves really show up good on a completely white background.

Yeah, I saw one of my neighbors did the same, removed almost all the buildings. And he has all the land.

I think I'm going to run out of elves! I had so, so many in the early tapping of the event but as I near the 13,800 bell mark, I'm finding I'm barely ahead of the number I can launch. My cache of captured Chris Kringle collaborators is cut to quite a, um, small number. 85 or so. So I'm launching more elves per launch (12/36) and am getting better at collecting elves until they're all gone, but at a certain point, I wonder if I'll end up shooting less than the maximum.

Not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or right?, but I always have more than 100 elves available. I'm at 12415, cannon level 11.


Also, I'm sure it's easy, how do you disable friends notifications? Like when they visit your Springfield. I have notifications disabled, so I don't receive notifications when a job is complete and those kind.

I hit that stage a few days ago, unfortunately. Upgraded cannon means I'm firing more elves more frequently, so other than early in the morning I'm often short of elves. I expect I'll get all the prizes, though, so I'm not too worried about it.

Not sure why you have a cache other than maybe you don't fire your cannon as frequently as you can?

As far as I know, notifications are either on or off, so if the game handles friend actions separately, I don't know if there's a way around that.

I've been playing regularly too, other than one day worked last week and I have a backlog of 190-220 elves.

I play daily and I hardly ever have elves to fire now. I only get to fire my cannon the 3 times in the morning when I first login. After that my cannon cools down but I usually only have 4-5 elves to fire after. It takes me forever to actually get to use the next 3 fires with my cannon because of that. Many of my shots only have 3-4 elves max.

Have you turned off notifications for Tapped Out in the OS settings?

Android: Settings/Apps/Tapped Out
iOS: Settings/Notifications/Tapped Out

I have a large backlog of elves, I check for them multiple times per day.

Goodness knows I don't want to be shooting blanks!

Thanks! Just did that.

Not a fan of Part 2 of the holiday event. I play regularly, as I have since launch, and am nowhere near the 22k bells required for the last two prizes. I just got Ralph around 14k. There is no way to get enough bells in time without donuts, and cogs to upgrade the cannon are even worse. Usually by now, I'm finished with events and have all the prizes. Seems they made it impossible on purpose this time. You should have gotten like 10 bells for every elf bottled or something.