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Facebook Mafiosi Go To the Mattresses vs. Zynga
sympleko writes "Zynga has the lion's share of traffic in Facebook applications, and Mafia Wars is one of their most popular social games. Collapsing under the weight of over 26 million users, Zynga has been scrambling to thwart hard-core gamers who reverse-engineer URLs or script the game to optimize their enjoyment. Many of the workarounds have annoyed users who were accustomed to various game features, and even worse, the hastily-deployed changes have resulted in many players losing access to the game, in-game prizes, or statistics. Fed up with a software company seemingly bent on discouraging people from enjoying their product, a number of tagged players have organized a boycott of all Zynga games. The first 24-hour boycott on Sunday 12/13 resulted in an 11% decline in Daily Active Users, and an emergency thread on Zynga's forums (from which most of the flames were deleted). The current boycott, extending Wednesday through Sunday is being supported by a 428K strong Facebook group. At issue is the social contract between software companies and their devoted user base, as well as the nefarious tactics Zynga has used to raise cash."
When you've got the CEO bragging about how sleazy they've been, I think that's enough to explain the boycotts.
Me? Never played any of them, don't plan to. Company's evil, and the wisest thing to do would be for everyone to stay away until they disintegrate.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
" Collapsing under the weight of over 26 million users, Zynga has been scrambling to thwart hard-core gamers who reverse-engineer URLs or script the game to optimize their enjoyment. Many of the workarounds have annoyed users who were accustomed to various game features, and even worse, the hastily-deployed changes have resulted in many players losing access to the game, in-game prizes, or statistics. Fed up with a software company seemingly bent on discouraging people from enjoying their product, a number of tagged players have organized a boycott of all Zynga games. "
I see. So basically "gamers" try to game the system for their benefit, then complain when said company is "bent on discouraging people from enjoying their product".
Make them an offer they can't refuse.
Did someone mistake Mafia Wars as something other than a business practice? They make money off of those who think it's worth spending money to have an imaginary gun better than the other free imaginary guns. The "hardcore gamers" run scripts, bots, and generally try to cheat the system at every turn while not spending any money.
If the anti-bot/script stuff bothers your enjoyment of a free online game, go find another?
What, people play games on Facebook?
I thought those were bots designed to annoy you with "gifts" and spam your friends' pages with garbage.
--
BMO
It's "going to the mat." As in the wrestling mat.
Not "going to the mattress" which is something I generally associate with getting screwed.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
No. Going to the matresses is an old mafia term when one Family would get into a fight with another family or was worried about the possibility of a fight. The term comes because when it occurred important people or people who they didn't want to get hurt would find an apartment far away and they'd rent it and sleep on matresses with not much other than their bodyguards. I don't know if this is actually a genuine term, but it is quite old. It is used in the original Godfather. So whether or not it is a real term, it makes sense given that we are talking about a Facebook game that revolves around a glorified fantasy version of the Mafia.
Business folk have been shooting around Pincus interviews for months now. "What is it that makes him so great?" "How can I invent a simple Facebook game and be rich?" "It's so easy, right?" etc.
It's bad enough that a trusted associate is trying to get me to drop everything and develop "apps," because everybody knows they're the next big thing.
But the fact is, Pincus and his people (with great encouragement from his mentor, who *only* cares about money) looked up every sleazy trick in the book and put them all out there. Now they get Sleazy results, and the media suddenly have occasion to finish up the Pincus Story by presenting a dark side. They'll be all over that.
I think your intepretation of the saying is wrong. Going to the mattress was slang for going to get the guns. People would keep their long guns under the mattress.
Never read "The Godfather," huh?
I can't stand needy people, and I can't stand needy programs that NEED to be on my wall and whore for attention.
The only "App" I still use on Facebook is the movie app, yeah, I right a few movie reviews, find out what the movies are about and rate them. I don't want addicting Mafia, Farm, Navel Gazing crap.
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A boycott can only be effective if the entity being boycotted has a real risk of losing customers. It would be much better if that 11% decline were permanent. What message are they really sending by returning to the game the following day?
...protests about Facebook on Facebook tend to work out very well. It's just like those "don't buy gas on day X" chain letters that get bounced around whenever gas prices take a hike upwards.
hookers and grits.
To make FB usable for its original purpose you have to block and hide metric f*cktonnes of spam from friends who wanted to find out what Harry Potter character they are or who think some picture of an egg (with free spam subscription!) is a nice gift to send a friend. Add to that the significant loss of privacy that comes with actually posting anything; I'd cancel my account right away if FB weren't the only way I can keep up with some of my friends and family.
Possibly, but a quick google search shows that most of the websites quoting the phrase in the Godfather have the full quote as "That Sonny's runnin' wild. He's thinkin'a going to the mattresses already. We gotta find a spot over on the West Side" which certainly sounds like it is talking about finding a hidden location.
I used to work for Mark Pincus at his "failed" social networking site, Tribe.net. It didn't fail, he ran it into the ground because it wasn't making the money he wanted - meaning it wasn't providing him with three mansions and two private aircraft the way Zynga has. It's kind of interesting though, Mark was starting Zynga exactly when Tribe.net users asked us to start a subscription program to raise money to buy needed hardware for the site. Surprise - we made $30,000 the first month, and any time I asked for money for new database servers or to pay contractors, they claimed there was no money. It's pretty obvious to me where the money went. This is NOTHING. This story has been picked up by large media and is only going to get bigger - I was interviewed last week by Details Magazine about what a scumbag Mark is. Sadly you can't read that until March - but that's justr a measure of how fucked this company is. Up until this scandal, they were claiming Zynga would IPO in a month or two. That talk has all vanished. THESE are the types of scumbags that need to be ridden out of Silicon Valley on a rail.
So would be this be the social contract where it is A-OK for power gamers to abuse and exploit the game because if they can do it they are supposed to be doing because otherwise they wouldn't be able to do it and then the game company gets to try to crack down on the power gamers which doesn't work except for pissing off the normal players, correct? And then the power gamers get all indignant when anyone tells them they shouldn't be doing something because it is the power gamer's responsibility to not be responsible for anything but doing what is most advantageous for them no matter the cost to everyone else?
I've seen this statement popping up a lot recently but this is exactly why we can't have nice things.
This is getting offtopic but if "Sonny" is "going to the mattresses" he could be getting his guns. So everybody not on his side should hide. You both are just looking at it from the opposite angles.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
http://www.appdata.com/
They over 232 million users over all their apps. a measly 500k will do nothing.
Not to mention thier most popular game farmwille has 73 million alone.
Yes they ahve made mistakes in mafia wars, causing probles, but know what. People were cheating like mad, scripting stuff, etc, that people would leave the game if they didnt try to fix it [they need to do a better job tho].
The problem at hand here is that zynga has created two games that encourage cheating.
MafiaWars is the worst because of the combat system. If you don't have at least 500 friends who play and are added to your "mafia" then you're shafted from the outset. This encourages the dangerous practice of adding people you don't know to your personal facebook account OR breaking facebook ToS by creating a second account for yourself.
Then you have the weight in the combat formula of the equipment being much higher than the weight of your stats. A person with lousy combat stats but maxed equipment will beat somebody with twice their stats but lousy equipment. They also have free trading of items between players with items that require (at my last calculation) over a year of play to be able to get the best equipment available.
To top things off their game isn't in flash or something that's not easily machine readable, their entire game is presented in an iframe, so it's relatively simple to create scripts that interact with the game directly using greasemonkey or bookmarklets with javascript. The best examples of these is the Mafia Wars AutoPlayer (http://www.mafiawarsplayer.org/) or Spockholm's bookmarklets (http://www.spockholm.com/mafia/bookmarklets.php)
Combine that with a game that's designed to appeal to highly competitive players and you have the perfect recipe for disaster for rampant cheating. Whether it's people who buy their combat items or people who run multiple accounts to "farm" items for their own use, it's all against the rules. The hilarity for me is watching zynga "combat" the cheaters and the bots when they could fix the game mechanics to make the cheating and bots unnecessary. Even if it was something as simple as offering the loot for sale in their ingame store, they would put the cheaters and under-the-table loot sellers out of business, and actually be honest about their microtransaction business model. People would complain that the richest player would be the one to win, but that's the way it is right now, so why not own up to it?
FarmVille is a different beast, in that they've got just about the worst leveling system I've seen in a game yet. A plant crop that grows in four hours will give you the same experience to grow, and more money per hour, than a crop that grows in 24 hours. That's just a broken game.
The clicks required for farmville are what is most astonishing. The average person will click 1200+ times per DAY playing that stupid game. The best thing they have to minimize that is the farm equipment, which naturally require gas to run that you have to buy, but even with that you're forced to click 300+ times in the best case scenario. I'm trying to make easy to use tools with autohotkey that I'm hosting on my site (http://www.kort-pleco.com/) but it's a challenge finding the time to do that. There's other people who sell full fledged farmville autoplayers, but the point is that it's still the game that is broken and should be changed to fix these problems.
A great example of a fun game that's NOT click intensive is happy aquarium by crowdstar or zynga's rollercoaster kingdom. They've both struck a great balance how much use you get per click, and I think it's a step in the right direction for facebook games in general.
Zynga is a game maker yes, but it doesn't mean that their popularity corresponds to the quality of their games. It just means they're able to out advertise everybody else using money they scammed from their players.
The people talking are Clemenza and one of the other Corleones. So they are on Sonny's side. In any event, there is agreement that the OP's remark is incorrect.
As long as it's not a game where you start with ten "energy", 100 "health", 3 "stamina" and your standard attack/defense setup then I don't care what they do.
Zynga making money because people are too stupid to not give their email addresses or cell phone numbers to companies that misuse them is a new form of evolution. The strong (i.e. those that don't fall for these scams) survive, the weak fail. Zynga doesn't give a rats ass about the boycotts because unless they actually stop spending money, having 11% less on their servers is doing them a favor.
.. since I don't spend a dime on Zynga products but use their service to play games, and they are not getting any ad revenue for it, then if I joined in the boycott it would have a POSITIVE impact on their system because it lets those that spend money use resources that I'm not tying up.
.. I can play for 10 minutes and walk away until my next round of crops come due. The entertainment in it for me was how to get the most out of the game for the least effort and NO money. I'm at level 33, have bypassed all my friends but one that started before me, and haven't spent one red cent.
.. then who gives a fuck why they get pissed off. If someone gets so wrapped up in a FREE game that they get upset when the engine goes down and they lose some crops, stop playing it and go spend money on a real video game that requires skill. Unless they are too inept to handle real video games. But then again, there is always solitaire or Plants Vs Zombies (I love PVZ).
In other words
No one makes anyone play Farmville. I do because it's entertaining to me
If people aren't smart enough to figure out how to enjoy something that is free without spending money on it
As to the whiners whining about 'social contracts' and 'being exploited', what a bunch of feel-good liberal BS. Do you make sure the person buying your used car buys it for a fair price, or do you get as much out of them as you can. And when you buy a used car, do you pay extra for it, or do you try to pay as little as possible. We ALL take advantage of other people, it's just a question of to what degree.
I was in a motorcycle crash several months ago. The person driving the car that hit me had the minimum coverage that Arizona state law requires. So MY insurance company had to pay for what hers couldn't. Anyone whining about this poor college student exploiting the system, or me being taken advantage of because I was smart enough to pay for a decent insurance policy??? But I'll bet if it was the other way around, there would be all kinds of law suits flying around.
So go ahead and whine about the mean old company taking advantage of the stupid people without doing anything illegal if it makes you feel good and all puffed up about how moral and upstanding you are. Just make sure the next time you sell your car, you take as little for it as possible so you aren't a hypocrite.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Wouldn't an appropriate response be to constantly play the games (maybe even to the DDoS level but that's not needed) so you load their servers but DO NOT pay them any money for their in game items, thus making it so their income gets cut down at the same time their servers get overloaded. You just increased their overhead and decreased their income.
Mario Puzo explained it along the lines of JoshuaZ in the book version of "The Godfather."
I don't know if this is actually a genuine term, but it is quite old. It is used in the original Godfather. So whether or not it is a real term, it makes sense given that we are talking about a Facebook game that revolves around a glorified fantasy version of the Mafia.
Seems like I've heard the phrase wrong all of my life, and some Googling seems to confirm what you are saying.
I bow to your superior knowledge.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If you count copying as innovation. Zyngas two most popular games (Mafia Wars and FarmVille) are both copies of other games (Mob Wars and Farm Town.)
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
As of the latest stunt, I've stopped playing MW. The problem for me, is that ... well, you have the CEO bragging about how nefarious they've been. That raised alarm bells. But ... mostly I just detest the quantity of noise they seem intent on generating. I mean, for a facebook integrated game, I know full well that most of my friends list already know I play mafia wars. They either already play themselves, or they don't give a toss about what the spam is. If they play themselves, then ... one notification a day is really all that's necessary. OK, maybe two. But ... certainly they don't need a 'feed' page filled with mafia wars spam.
And that's why I've stopped, removed the account, and blocked everything. Simply because I no longer believe that Zynga have any ethics to them whatsoever. 'Secret Stash' was the final straw - previous 'spams' have been 'giving free stuff' and as such optional. I did spam a couple a day, but no more. When they've changed a gameplay mechanic to stop working _unless_ you spam a friend, and they click on the link you send... too much.
But that was enough to make me realise that the game is actually not all that interesting anyway - it has very little depth, and is just about 'acquisition of more stuff'. And frankly, Progress Quest is better at it.
Doesn't matter if they are on his side or not, when the whacked out monkey starts slinging poo everywhere, it's best to take cover.
So a game called "Mafia wars", which is about mafia, stops players from using mafia tactics (cheating) to win?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The author refers to botting as "script the game to optimize enjoyment". While i personally am not opposed to botting this is true of all botting. Most people refer to this as cheating because you're not playing the game but the reality is you are merely automating mundane tasks that we consider "below our pay grade".
Info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Gallo#Gallo-Profaci_war
http://tomfolsom.com/blog/
Crap! I just kissed my karma good-bye.
Do they actually care? From what I understand, the mere act of installing the app has given Zynga everything valuable you have. They have your demographic data, and the data of all your friends. If you play the game every day, they earn nothing new from you (aside from demo data of new friends). They've already gotten the milk, leather and meat from the cow. Right now they're just gnawing your bones hoping for some overlooked marrow. Otherwise, you can go away and they won't care. What good is the boycott?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
What about the player side of the social contract? You know, the side that says players will not try to garner an unfair advantage and will play the game as intended.
Or, is this just another case of mass hypocrisy?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Sure, you may be "smart enough" to not get suckered in by scams and their special offers from the partner companies and shady advertisers, but these games are inherently viral. Even when you don't pay money, they encourage (or force) you to expand your game social network (mafia size, number of neighbors, etc) in order to get past certain points of the game.
Unless you are playing in a bubble, and don't invite other friends or post links to the game and do other things to encourage more people to play, you are still promoting it as you play and helping it spread further and to help more people get duped. To say they should just be smart enough not to get duped is pretty naive. The average person is probably not as smart as the average slashdotter... and that's a scary thought some days. ;-)
for those of us that get laid on a regularly basis (ie, not you), it means something else.
If you want to complain about the game because it's stupid, I'm with you. (But in that case, I'd suggest forgetting about the temporary boycot; easier to just not play stupid games.)
If you want to complain about the company because it manipulates the game in ways that abuse the players to extract cash from them (which the company's executives brag about doing), I'm with you. (Again, the solution is not a temporary boycot; if you don't want to be taken advantage of, don't.)
But if you want to complain that they use counter-measures to prevent, detect, and/or punish cheating (which you've cleverly called "optimizing your enjoyment"), then get lost. "Hey, I'd enjoy this game more if I were winning more fights against other players, which I cuold do with a more powerful weapon, which I can get by reverse-engineering the URL that would be generated if I'd done something to earn such a weapon. I think I'll 'optimize my enjoyment'."
There's a difference between taking away a feature to which users are accustomed vs. fixing a bug that users are accustomed to being able to exploit.
1997 called, it wants its site design back.
As an addicted MW player, I've noticed that Zynga has strategically scheduled at least 2 long outages to occur during these 'boycotts'. I find that an interesting coincidence.
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
the hastily-deployed changes
You never hyphenate with an adverb ending in -ly. This is one hard and fast rule of the English language.
The purpose of the hyphen in this construct is to remove ambiguity over which words are paired. Since "The hastily changes" makes no sense semantically, there's no purpose served by the hyphen (that isn't served by the -ly suffix itself, i.e. "The haste changes" or more clearly "The haste deployed changes," vs. "The haste-deployed changes...").
"Family-owned restaurant" is correct because "Family" is not an adverb.
Then you have the instances where the hyphen is incorrectly omitted, such as "eight legged freaks" and "game changing performance". The game doesn't change the performance, the performance changes the game, thus "game-changing performance".
It's disturbing how often this error crops up not just in popular media but also on Wikipedia and modern journalism.
I'd have tagged the story as typo instead, but I seem to have no access to tagging anymore. Clicking on the triangle has no effect: it's not even recognized by the mouse as a clickable object. I run Firefox 2.0.0.20 because nothing newer will run on this workplace-provided operating system and I have no authority to update the missing libpangocairo and GTK+ dependencies.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I'm sure your reviews are righteen well.
I right a few movie reviews
I'm sure their great. :o
The actual history of "going to the mattresses" comes from the Joey Gallo and the war between him and the Profaci family. The term appeared in the headlines in the early 60's in the headlines in New York newspapers.
Info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Gallo#Gallo-Profaci_war http://tomfolsom.com/blog/
Also, this term appeared in the book "The Valachi Papers". From what I recall, it is supposed to mean getting serious about a mob war, where the various mob soldiers would live in rented houses/apartments, sleeping on mattresses, for the duration of the war.
Uh, no. Just like someone would be annoyed that someone in World of Warcraft got all the best gear by REing the game and using bots and exploits...same with this. It doesn't matter if you are playing a game about being a gangster of it is a game about magical ponies, if it has a multiplayer element to it, people want a level playing field.
A level playing field? In an MMO? Yeah, you're dreaming-- if you want to compete with other people on a 'level playing field', play a game that's actually designed to do that, instead of one designed to keep pushing the little addiction buttons in your brain so you'll stick around and be a good little revenue producer.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
You misspelled "cheater" as "hardcore gamer."
Crap, I can't believe I did that. Of all the SNAFUs I usually make that's normally not one of them.
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