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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."
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.