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."

Comments

Re:The problem is...

[johnlcallaway]

Yep .. it's viral. But many games are to some extent since they depend on us getting our friends hooked to buy more. How is getting all your friends together to play Counterstrike on a 'free' server (requiring them all to purchase the game) any different??? <sarcasm>Oh .. Steam isn't a greedy company that takes advantage of it's customers.</sarcasm> I guess it's OK when geeks like a game and overlook the hypocrisy of playing their favorite game v/s whining about how stupid Farmville is, when the games are much closer in nature. Ok .. Counterstrike is a crap load more fun and actually takes skill, but I don't have little 13 year old kids running around knifing me in Farmville.

And while Farmville encourages one to add friends, it isn't necessary. For one, the other account doesn't have to 'do' anything, so setting up 20 Yahoo email/Facebook accounts is all that is needed to get 20 friends. Secondly, it only takes slightly longer in Farmville if one doesn't get neighbors. I created a second account just so I could have enough neighbors to expand once, and decided to play the second account with only two neighbors. I am progressing along quite nicely. In fact, it's a bit easier since I don't have all the gifts to accept or neighbors to visit in it.

So yes .. one just has to be smart enough to figure out the basic concepts. And then take RESPONSIBILITY for deciding whether or not to sign up for Netflicks, spend real money, or invite all of their friends in order to progress faster through the game.

So those that get 'taken in' aren't just that smart, the ones that get taken in are also greedy. They want to play something for nothing, and don't want to take responsibility for their own greedy actions. I remember visiting the Farmville forum a few weeks ago when they were having problems and couldn't believe the number of people that were incensed they couldn't get to their farms.

Hastily hyphenated adverbs.

[HTH NE1]

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.

Correction

[MWoody]

You misspelled "cheater" as "hardcore gamer."