Basics of the Game
For those not familiar with the game, Mafia Wars is a Myspace game, produced by Zynga, that has garnered massive popularity since its inception. In Mafia Wars, you are the leader of your family. You build up your family, equip them with attack and defense items as well as vehicles, and fight with other families in the game, building your character up as you go with stronger attack, defense, health, energy, and stamina.
A players level, attack, and defense stats determine if they win a given fight compared to their opponent. With each fight, your health is lowered, and if you run out of health, your character dies, which then requires a visit to the hospital or waiting for health to build up little by little. Each time a player instigates a fight, stamina is used. When stamina runs out, the player can no longer initiate a fight until either the next level is reached or the player waits long enough for more stamina to build up.
Energy is used for performing jobs. At present, there are five categories of jobs, ranging from Street Thug Jobs to Underboss Jobs. Higher level categories require more energy to perform, but yield more experience and money.
Recent Change Causes Massive Disappointment and Hostility
The hitlist has developed into an important part of the game. Players can add any other player to the hitlist, which typically results in the target being taken out. When a player is taken out from the hitlist, experience is lost, and the character is left weak. However, for stronger players, being on the hitlist offered an advantage. Until recently, fights won on the hitlist resulted in experience being gained. Therefore, even though you took damage while being on the hitlist and stood the possibility of dying, you still could at least advance in experience. However, Zynga has now changed the system in such a way that players no longer gain experience from fights won through the hitlist.
This widely unpopular change has resulted in several things:
- Players are added to the hitlist and constantly attacked with no benefit whatsoever. If the player is strong, hitlist placement could be maintained for days, with constant attacks, requiring continual attention and limiting what else can be done in the game.
- Many players enjoy fighting from the hitlist. It does not possess some of the inconveniences that the fight section does, and makes for a fun way to build your character. However, since this change, the hitlist is quite bare since no one wants to be on the hitlist or added to the hitlist in retaliation.
- It takes much longer for a character to advance to the next level. Previously, if your character was almost to the next level, but you were out of stamina and energy, you could count of being on the hit list to help get you to the next level. Since this change, massive time is required to advance to the next level, which is very discouraging to many players.
In fact, since many players have invested considerable money into the game to build their character via Godfather Points, the level of action from players ranges from petitions and names being gathered for those who support changing the hitlist experience gathering back all the way to individuals considering a class action suit against Zynga, since the game is no longer what they invested money into. Needless to say, the majority of players, especially those that play the game the most, are not happy with this change, and in fact, a large number of players have even abandoned the game due to this change.
Whether or not Zynga takes action to reverse the charge could well determine if the game remains popular at all, and the future of the game itself.
Update
Zynga responded to the dissatisfaction of players by changing the hitlist back to generating experience. However, they also introduced several new limitations and restrictions both to the hitlist and other aspects of the game. In the meantime, we have done an extensive evaluation of the new Bulletproof MySpace game and the Mafia MoFo game, and feel that they are superior games to Mafia Wars, even before the hitlist change. We highly recommend that you check them out!
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December 5th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Make it so you get experience from the hitlist! I refuse to play until this has been changed, as do the others in my Mafia. (151).
December 5th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Makes you wonder where the money has gone since I, like many others, have purchased God Father Points… This is a major let down for all of us players!
December 5th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Perhaps, in order to curb the perceived “cheating” to “level up,” Zynga — while IT SHOULD RE-INSTATE THE XPs IN THE HITLIST ATTACK WINS — should disable the “add to hitlist” bar when a player attempts to put one of their Mafia Wars “family members” on the hitlist in the hopes of the targeted player gaining wins and experience points (”XPs”) . Taking out the XPs in hitlist wins isn’t fair, since a player STILL loses 6 XPs when they are snuffed in a hitlist death. Wasn’t it bad enough that some people actually sunk money into this game to gain Godfather points, and now Zynga turns around and changes a crucial strategy used by the multitude of players to “level up”?! BRING BACK THE XPs IN THE HITLIST!
December 5th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Zynga has made a very big mistake. They have, in essence, ruined their most popular game. As soon as the issue of not getting xp points for being on the hitlist surfaced, the hitlist on my server was only 8 people long. Other servers have even fewer. It has stayed that way since, normally it was around 50 to 70 people long. I hope that Zynga is happy with their loss because I’m sure that the revenue they had coming in from people paying for God Father points has plummeted and they will probably face law suits over what people have payed for. If you want to do things to fix the game, make it so you actually do some testing to ensure people can not find glitches to take advantage of to use for an unfair advantage in the game. Spend more time working on how the game functions instead of making it look pretty. In my opinion Zynga has made their biggest mistake with this game….I thought that allowing people to buy Godfather points was bad, but this is by far the biggest mistake of all.
December 6th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
The problem is that the exp losses for being killed is only 6 points, if they had made the loss of exp point proportionate to the player’s level, I don’t think think the hitlist will be used as a shortcut to leveling up. Let’s face it, the hitlist was never intended as a shortcut, but no matter how you cut it, the higher level mafia family will continue to get stronger at the expense of the weaker families.
December 6th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Zynga has made a very big mistake. BRING BACK THE XPs IN THE HITLIST!
December 7th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Built my character to survive the Hitlist Rules (loaded health and defense). Had I known of these changes, I would have built a stronger “attack” character. Additionally, I now need to remove my “Top Mafia” because I don’t want them to heal me. If I get wacked, I want to stay dead until I’m online again.
December 7th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
The website address for the class action effort is http://www.mafiawarsclassaction.com. Please sign up today if you have been taken advantage of in any way by Zynga, SuperRewards, or SRpoints. The more people that sign up, the more of a footing we will have to fight the unjustice done to all players who have invested their time and money into this game only to be swindled in the end.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Zynga really jumped the gun on this. Disabling experience gain on wins from the hitlist should have been a last resort, rather than the first step.
If they want to change the hitlist to be just for money, that’s one thing. It will be much less popular since only new players generally need money, but it’s a better solution than it being completely one-sided like it is now. That is, it’s not fair for the offensive to get experience on wins while the defensive gets nothing for wins. Basically, it amounts to someone putting another player on the hitlist, and the player just loosing more and more health, with no benefit, even when winning.
It’s not perfect, but at least a better solution would have been to make it where a player cannot put another member of his/her family on the hitlist. At least that would lessen the issue a lot, and is a much better first step. If not that, something else, but try other things before heading to the worst possible case.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Those who are forwarding the class action suit, get over it. All you are doing is making the blood sucking, ambulance chasing lawyers rich, and you only get whatever scraps are left. If you had signed up for services with Zynga’s affiliates to get godfather points, and they have not delivered what has been promised, then you have a case. Otherwise, you have no case just because you are pissed off that you can no longer live off the hitlist.
It’s funny that I do not hear people pissing and moaning when the past glitches worked in your favor, such as being able to obtain the bonus weapon before reaching level 99 or making huge amount of money for your top mafia by hitting the mini bosses.
No one is forcing anyone to purchase godfather points and those who did it, you have paid for an advantage over those who did not choose to with upgraded skill points, limited edition weapons, etc. Like I said, if Zynga did not delivered the favor points for buying the points directly, you may have a case.
December 7th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
I am suspicious that this important change was made to provoke a strong response, as a marketing ploy, to gain even more attention and popularity. I can remember when Coke took their original formula off the market and then reintroduced it, soon after, as “classic”, with the same melodrama. I think not feeding into the anger, until the smoke clears, and keeping a clear perspective, is the best course. Although, Zynga, did make this sudden change, without notice, they also indicated, very cryptically, it would roll out subsequent updates to compensate for this.
The other unfortunate issue involves reward points, that have not been awarded via offers or cash investment, and can no longer be earned, or were ever available to be purchased with Zynga dollars.
If you are serious about getting Zynga’s attention, we have the power to boycott all of its games and its marketing affiliates, in concert, until the players demands are met. This means we all have to stick together and not play Zynga games, so that their traffic and marketing affiliates feel the loss of potential revenue. Zynga will come around, because the game is about revenue and business, not fun or player satisfaction. The outcome depends on your behavior.
Enough said.
December 8th, 2008 at 3:55 am
Mafiawars used to be my favorite game, but the recent changes have destroyed its popularity. I hope it comes back to the previous mode.
December 9th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
I agree with James. If they changed the game so that family members couldn’t put you on the hitlist, that would be a better solution. I don’t even “ride the hit list”, but I enjoy attacking people on it for the fun of adding to my “hit list kills” status. I purchased some DVDs, and never received my points, but I’m not even concerned about that. I’m just upset with the game. I signed up for the Mobsters app and the Mafia Wars app at the same time. I only played Mobsters because Mafia Wars, at that time, took forever for anything to load, and it just didn’t seem to be as much fun. I came back and tried it a month ago and they had improved the game and unlike Mobsters, the hit list was always full. I also liked the fact that you could get A LOT of money to purchase property…so I have stopped playing Mobsters and began playing Mafia Wars. NOW, the main reason I play Mafia Wars, the full hit list, is screwed up. I think I’m going to stop playing this too. God, what am I gonna do now???? I’ll have to go back to real life….lol. Later all, and Happy Huntin’!!!!
December 17th, 2008 at 2:51 am
Guys, the hitlist must be a place where no one wants to be…is that so difficult to understand? If a strong player goes to the hitlist, another stronger player will take him out, or any other weaker player, but sacrificing his own health. Don’t understand why the hitlist should be a positive thing for people in it…that makes no sense. If some cheaters and lame [elite] players took advantage of the buggy old hitlist, and now they are not doing it anymore…well done Zynga. Zynga added the energy paks to advance in levels quickly, so please stop moaning about the hitlist feature. It makes much more sense now than before.
December 17th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Zynga causes extreme frustration for all games. Most energy packs don’t work, and why should we promote businesses by playing games on Myspace? Anything used for the games should be bought by money made from the game!
December 21st, 2008 at 8:08 pm
It has gone down BIG time on Facebook, wiped out 1000s of players, and they’re all getting annoyed with them too…
December 31st, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Zanga sucks big time. They killed their own baby, enough said.
January 8th, 2009 at 8:00 am