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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.
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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?
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.