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Zynga to Sue Creators of Mafia Wars Autoplayer:

And it looks like Mafia Wars Autoplayer is backing down, even though it’s highly unlikely (in my unqualified opinion) that Zynga could win the case. I can’t blame the MWAP developers though; it’s just not worth the lawyer fees to save a free program.

As a society, business is becoing more and more service oriented, and while I enjoy Zynga games, they have a terrible reputation in the customer service department. What if the money and time Zynga has spent filing a case against Mafia Wars Autoplayer was instead spent on customer service reps? I’m sure Mafia Wars would be a better place. Not only that, I bet Zynga would see an increase in their bottom line (and ardent fans) by pursuing this option rather than bolstering their legal staff.

Look, I don’t endorse botting, but I also live in the real world. I’d rather have a fully-functioning, well-supported game and just accept the fact that sometimes people will cheat and bot. The real kicker with this whole situation is that I’m sure some coding geek(s) will pick up the torch sooner or later; it’s only a matter of time before another auto-bot script comes out. Millions of people play Mafia Wars, and over a half a million of those at some point had downloaded Mafia Wars Autoplayer off of userscripts.org, so there is clearly a demand for it.

Even in an imaginary world where Zynga manages to suppress all resistance in the United States, a botting program will just be outsourced. Some enterprising programmer in a developing country will make a fully-functioning autoplayer and sell it for 5$ a download and will make a pretty penny.

It sounds ridiculous, but we’ve seen it happen with anything people want online that is suddenly made illegal, whether it is virtual currency or online gambling.

Now tell me, am I lyin’?

I should preface this by saying that I love Mafia Wars. I’ve logged in to play at least 5 days a week for the past 8 months. There have been a lot of good changes to Mafia Wars this year, and it’s nice to see the development team taking game issues more seriously and being more responsive with changes, especially in the past month. I hope that continues in 2010. With that said, many long-time Mafia Wars players (myself included) are not happy with the way the player vs. player aspect has headed.

The genre of an MMORPG (as Mafia Wars is – even if it is text-based) is the classic act of pushing a rock up a hill over and over again. The game starts, the player push the rock up the hill (the player levels up, completes jobs, collects items), and then the developers roll it back down the hill again (new expansion – level up more, complete more jobs, collect more items). The problem with Mafia Wars is that right now once you get the rock to the top of the hill, you can’t enjoy the view! There’s no point in collecting loot if you can’t use it.

The fact is that the player vs player dynamic in Mafia Wars is sorely lacking. I know there is fighting and the “Declare War” feature. Each of these features is completely inconsequential; there is little gained from winning a fight or war  and even a smaller penalty for losing. With the release of Moscow and the removal robbing (fortunately it was announced a few days ago that that robbing will be back), the only thing to do in game is complete content, and as a result, energy has become the only important stat.

Energy Accounts

As it stands right now, there is no real disadvantage to creating an account with most of (if not all) stat points allocated to energy. Trying to change game mechanics  (like lowering XP payout for Moscow jobs) negatively effects all players and even pushes people towards energy accounts.

The only reason that energy accounts even exist is because there is no other way to meaningfully progress in game other than to spend energy. If players could progress at a reasonable rate and enjoy all types of game content by doing so, balanced (stat wise) accounts rather than energy accounts would be the norm among daily players.

Means of Progression

In a role-playing game, game-play revolves around progression (making your character better).  In Mafia Wars, progression means that your character is able to do jobs more frequently, can fight better, or is able to collect more money (or loot).

Progression is the one of the primary things that keeps players coming back to the game day after day. Progression gives players a sense of accomplishment. Accomplishment gives people a sense of worth in a crowded world, and this keeps players coming back day after day.

Types of Progression

There are five primary means of progression in Mafia Wars: leveling up, collecting loot, completing content, buying property, and achieving achievements.

Let’s take a look a bit closer at each means of progression:

Leveling Up: Gain experience points to level up to receive extra 5 stat points.

Methods for collecting experience points: doing jobs (costs energy), fighting (costs stamina, uses attack, defense, and health), helping out friends on jobs (socially powered), getting helped on jobs (social/energy).

By default, energy is the primary means of leveling up since it is the only stat point required for doing jobs, while fighting makes use of 4 stats (stamina, health, attack, and defense).

Fighting is not a viable way to earn experience points (at least in its current implementation). A level 500 character needs somewhere around 6,000 experience points to level up. Each fight victory averages to 2.3-2.4 experience points. It would take 2500+ fights to level up, and leveling up this way would take hours. Alternatively, you can spend 3,000 energy in 5 minutes by doing the same job over and over.

The real kicker is though that you get the same amount of experience points for fighting, no matter what the level or power of the opponent – so even energy based accounts can get plenty of experience points for fighting weak or low level opponents.

As a result, this makes energy more valuable than any other stat for leveling up.

Collecting Loot: Collect loot to improve your character’s strength in fights.

This is most easily done by spending energy. Random loot drops from fighting are just that: random. If you only need Zoloto Sports Cars, fighting is of little to no use.

To further tip the scales in the favor of energy, collection loot items are a solid source of stat points and the vast majority of collections are earned by spending energy.

Buying Property: Buy property to improve income and vie for achievements.

Fighting (and the old version of robbing) is not a viable way to accrue property at the moment. Money received from fighting and robbing is too low to be of any use. Jobs (which cost energy) pay out much, much higher, making spending energy the method of choice for procuring property.

With that said, property (and rackets to an extent) are still a bit pointless (more on that later).

Completing Content: Complete jobs to get extra stat points and job mastery items.

Not much to say here – players spend energy to complete jobs.

Achievements: Complete various tasks in game to earn extra skill points.

Out of the 52 achievements in game,  11 are fighting related, while the rest are socially or energy related.

Every means of progression in Mafia Wars is dominated by spending energy, and that’s unfortunate for many players like myself who got hooked based off of the combination of content (jobs) and robbing. Robbing was very exciting for the low level player – it was very exciting, it was a reason to continue leveling up and collecting items, it was an end to a means.

Improving Fighting

As is well known among avid players, the novelty of winning a fight wears off after a time due to the lack of associated progression. Now, if I did not provide any alternative ideas, I would just be a critic and not contributing to the community at all. With that said, here is what I would like to see happen over the next year in Mafia Wars.

Scaling Fighting

Fighting needs to scale in some fashion. As a player gets to higher and higher levels and finishes more content, jobs start paying out more experience points and drop better loot. Fighting on the other hand, stays the same.

One change could be simply scaling with level. Only getting 3 experience points for a fight to a level 500+ player is not even worth the time it takes to click, unless the guy just hitlisted one of your Mafia buddies.

I propose a new formula which 1) would improve the amount of experience points rewarded for fighting and 2) would encourage players to fight players their level range.

For example:

- A level 10 player fighting another level 10 player should receive 1-5 experience points for winning.

- A level 500 player fighting another level 500 player should receive between 10-30 experience points for the victory.

- A level 500 player versus a level 10 player should only receive 2 xp per win.

- A level 500 player versus level 1000 should also receive 2 xp per win.

Note: The reason I suggest not getting bonus points for fighting significantly higher level players is because that would encourage players to create high-level energy accounts with 0 mafia members and fight then attack these accounts repeatedly. If the formula for calculating experience gain required comparable levels, this would create a lot more work for scheming players.

Now, one issue with giving more experience points for fighting is people could create “stamina accounts” much like they create energy accounts now. To nip this in the bud, stamina cost could scale based on the amount of points already in stamina versus the current player level. This way, players who already have huge stamina pools would not get a huge advantage while players with low stamina pools would not suffer – stamina levels would ultimately stabilize at a set point per level.

For example: If a level 100 player had 100 stamina, it would cost him 3 or 4 stat points for his next point of stamina. If a level 100 player had 200 stamina, it would cost him 10 stat points for his next point of stamina. If a level 100 player had 10 stamina, it would cost him 2 stat points for his next point of stamina.

If a player already had a large stamina pool based on level under this system, he would not be inclined to spend stamina until he reached a higher level. If a player had a low stamina pool, he would be able to get stamina at the normal rate. This would be the fairest system possible in my opinion.

Property, Robbing, Cash, Loot and Achievements

Recently, Mafia Wars announced that robbing will be added back into the game in the new year and that will be a “new and improved” format. What I would like to robbing be developed into is an actual ends to a mean for the “grind” (leveling up, collecting loot, and just all around improving character fighting ability). I want robbing to bring back the giddiness that low level players felt the first time they robbed another player. In other words, robbing (or another player vs. player system) should be meaningful for the player.

I think that a great way to increase progression via fighting could be done through property. Another related question: Why does property (and rackets to an extent) have to be so worthless?

Right now, property and rackets produce cash (or boosts). The problem with this is that cash and boosts have no real value since there is nothing to spend the cash on and fighting is not a significant part of game play so there is little incentive to use them.

Why not make properties actually useful? What if instead produced experience points over time? Or loot over time? People would all of a sudden become very interested in these properties. Consequently, they could be robbed for either experience points or loot items.

For example, a new property type could be a “car factory” which could produce 1 Zoloto Sports Car every 6 hours. It could also be robbed for a Zoloto Sports Car. Alternatively, a certain property could produce 10 experience points per hour and be robbed for 20 experience points.

There would have to be limitations on this model such as limit robbing each property type one time every 24 hours per opponent (i.e. you would not be able to rob the same factory over and over again for sports cars) as this would discourage multiple accounts and just overall abuse of the system. Of course, there would have to be limits to these amount of these special properties that players could buy (such as a limit of 5 sports car factories).

An alternative would be to create many new tiers of property in New York (or even add them in new cities) that would just involve the production of large amounts of currency. Buying new tiers of property would generate enough money to buy even higher tiered property types. The point of collecting all of this money would be to achieve a monetary achievement (like “That starts with a ‘T’”) and then attaching a significant reward for to this achievement.

For example, if you could buy a sports stadium (fictional new property) for $1 billion a piece, and if these stadiums paid themselves back within a few weeks, players would shortly reach $1 trillion. Then you could buy entire cities for $1 trillion, which also would pay themselves back within a few weeks. Players would then shortly reach the $999 trillion (“What’s after Trillion?”) achievement. For reaching this milestone, players could be awarded an actual mastery item that improves fighting capacity or ability  (like faster stamina regen or using 50 more mafia members in fights).

On the way to this achievement, players would be robbing these new properties back and forth along the way; there would be a huge upswing in fighting-related activity.

Awarding fighting-related items for fighting would ensure that players who prefer to do jobs rather than fight would not miss out on any must-have items, and it would give players who do enjoy fighting something to do!

Final Words

While I have been pleased by recent developer action over this past month, I really hope the developers consider making fighting a viable form of progression over the next development year. I think that this could be implemented in a fashion that would tackle a variety of game issues without making significant changes to game mechanics, creating major development costs, or negatively affecting current players.

I also think that changes along these lines would inspire many players to open up their wallets and spend some money on +stat points, top limited edition loot pieces, and stamina refills.

Feel free to discuss or contribute your own ideas – I will be checking back regularly to contribute to the discussion. If you agree, pass this post around. With enough momentum, some good things just might happen!

Comment!