Big Changes In Mafia Wars
24 August, 2009 – 10:32 pmI am surprised myself that I have been spending way too much time playing Mafia Wars on Facebook. I know I said that I would not be addicted to such a game that only requires me to click my mouse, in doing jobs, fighting and robbing, but heh I am playing it the whole day, at night and even in the middle of the night when I am not able to go to bed. Maybe that’s why I am at Level 176 now after two months of continuous play. I do know there are people who leveled up faster than I did but 176 levels is pretty fast to me.
Anyway, Zynga rolled out major changes to the game a couple of days ago. There’s a new Cuba level called “El Cacique”. I am still stuck in New York doing Boss jobs so I am not worrying how tough that could be yet. New York Underboss and Boss levels are already killing me with the consumables like Untraceable Cellphones, Illegal Transaction Records, Computer Set Ups and Blackmail Photos. I wonder if these are sold on eBay. Luckily we could manufacture our own Politico Corruptos!
With El Cacique comes new loot items like the Track Loader and Canonazo though we could also loot them fighting in New York, new collection items to vault and also a new prize item for mastering all three tiers of El Cacique. I haven’t reached that stage yet but El Cacique has given us a clue that following Cuba, the next crime world will be in Russia. That would be interesting.
In this rollout, I really hate the big ass images that boast of players leveling up and the number of people we have iced. Images of job requests have similar size images which make it so difficult to differentiate one from the other. Also, our wishlist which used to allow us to post five items has been reduced to only three slots. Gifting is so much more difficult now and I know that if people are not able to meet our wishlist, they would not take the trouble to gift.
One of the best features in this rollout is Mafia Favors, a small widget on our Mafia Wars homepage which allows us to view our stats, help our friends in job requests, in gifting, in sending energy packs and in adding friends to our Mafia family. This widget isn’t perfect though. It would miss out jobs that are still available but it sure beats scrolling through our Facebook news feed and clicking on every job request; a task that is way more time consuming and tedious now with the large images of “Nothing Personal”, “Family Values”, “Respected Worldwide” and “Help Needed”.
This widget would sometimes show a job that’s available but when we click on the “Help Your Friend” button, it would say that we are not able to help those who are not our friends. This means that the person is in our Mafia family but has removed us as friends on Facebook. This could be easily solved by going to the My Mafia tab at the navigation bar and choosing to remove Mafia who are not friends. This feature seems to have gone missing at this point of writing but I figure it will be back soon. I have never bothered with it previously but with all the unavailable jobs on my Mafia Favors widget, I decided to remove non-friend Mafias and it works.
Well, if you play Mafia Wars too, what do you think of these changes? Love it or hate it, I’d love to hear from you!
Tags: Cuba, El Cacique, Facebook, Facebook game, Facebook games, Mafia Favors, Mafia Wars, New York, Russia
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