QCD with heavy dynamical quarks exhibits a first order thermal transition which is driven by the
spontaneous breaking of the global $\mathcal{Z}_3$ center symmetry. Decreasing the quark masses weakens
the transition until the corresponding latent heat vanishes at the critical mass. We explore the
heavy mass region with three flavors of staggered quarks and analyze the Polyakov loop and its
moments in a finite volume scaling study. We calculate the heavy critical mass in the three flavor
theory in the infinite volume limit for $N_t$=8.