How does the paying option work in Candy Crush iOS

I wrote a whole guide you can check out, but I'll summarize here:

• As others have mentioned, comboing your special candy can be quite powerful. Each combination of two special candies, when matched, will produce a devastating effect on the board as a whole. This is somewhat situational, though, since you're not always going to have the luxury of having a bunch of special candy that is easy to combo together. However, getting your 4's, 5's, and 6's matched together is almost always a priority, since they create effects that can hit a wide swath of the board.
• Work from the bottom up. The bottom candies tend to get stuck there and stay there, and more often than not you need fresh candy down there with lots of matches in order to clear the board. Additionally, moving candies at the bottom tends to create "free" matches at the top that boost your score and keep the candies moving.
• The hint system is terrible, so avoid following its instructions. It will often tell you to match 3 and break up a match of 4/5.
• You can repeatedly enter and exit levels to re-roll the starting candies. (At least on the Android version, this does not cost you a life, unless you make a move first or the level has a timer) This is especially important where you need to clear the bottom quickly - you can reroll until you've got a 5 match or a couple of 4's, or even several 3's along the bottom.

That said, the game is very random. The whole point appears to be to make the game just hard enough that you get near the end but frequently fail. The way the company makes money is when you lose and either buy new lives or attract new players who will hopefully spend money. Therefore, they've got a vested interest in putting you in unwinnable (but not discouragingly so) situations.

I've rolled several of the levels 20-30 times in service of finding easier starting positions, and I can assure you that the starting candies are quite random. The objectives tend to be in the same positions, or at least have a fixed spawning pattern in the case of "ingredient" levels, however.

If you ask your Facebook friends, they'll be prompted to play the game. If they refuse or have blocked the app, you won't get the ticket. If they play, (I believe) they can give you one ticket towards each ticket checkpoint without any impact to their game.

In addition to spamming your friends and spending real money, you can also earn free tickets by replaying levels from the previous set in so-called "Mystery Quests".

Update December 2014: You must be completely offline (ie, no 3G/4G/WiFi) in order to see Mystery Quests, now that King has added the "Kingdoms" feature to Candy Crush Saga. It is no longer enough to log out of Facebook!

After passing a quest, you must wait 24 hours before you can try the next. I've heard multiple people mention that you can skip the wait by modifying your device's clock. There's a particularly complete description of how to do this in a comment here.

Once you've cleared the three bonus levels, you'll be allowed to continue.