Mafia Wars Tips and Strategy Blog

Zynga has been a staunch supporter of helping Haiti which is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere and with the recent earthquake they have ramped up their efforts raising more than $1.5 million by allowing the players of their popular social networking games to donate safely.

I am an avid Mafia Wars player and even though I whack a few of my peers on a regular basis I am not cold hearted when it comes to helping a country that cannot help itself. Today I wanted to give you some information that may both save you some headache and provide some needed support to Haitians who desperately need it.

When there is a disaster somewhere in the world most countries rush to aid the stricken area as quickly as possible. There are also many charities which go into high gear to get some relief on the ground as soon as possible. However the misery suffered by the victims is a smorgasbord for scammers. It has been reported that there are over 400 websites, email campaigns and other scams working right now to take advantage of the plight of the Haitian people.

If want to give but are afraid of being scammed here is an excerpt from the FBI website regarding a Haitian Fraud Alert and how you can protect yourself.

HAITIAN EARTHQUAKE RELIEF FRAUD ALERT

01/13/10—The FBI today reminds Internet users who receive appeals to donate money in the aftermath of Tuesday’s earthquake in Haiti to apply a critical eye and do their due diligence before responding to those requests. Past tragedies and natural disasters have prompted individuals with criminal intent to solicit contributions purportedly for a charitable organization and/or a good cause.

Therefore, before making a donation of any kind, consumers should adhere to certain guidelines, to include the following:

• Do not respond to any unsolicited (spam) incoming e-mails, including clicking links contained within those messages.
• Be skeptical of individuals representing themselves as surviving victims or officials asking for donations via e-mail or social networking sites.
• Verify the legitimacy of nonprofit organizations by utilizing various Internet-based resources that may assist in confirming the group’s existence and its nonprofit status rather than following a purported link to the site.
• Be cautious of e-mails that claim to show pictures of the disaster areas in attached files because the files may contain viruses. Only open attachments from known senders.
• Make contributions directly to known organizations rather than relying on others to make the donation on your behalf to ensure contributions are received and used for intended purposes.
• Do not give your personal or financial information to anyone who solicits contributions: Providing such information may compromise your identity and make you vulnerable to identity theft.

Anyone who has received an e-mail referencing the above information or anyone who may have been a victim of this or a similar incident should notify the IC3 via www.ic3.gov.

If you have the means please help the people of Haiti but protect yourself in the process.

Technorati Tags: Haitian Relief, Help Haiti, Mafia Wars Haiti, Zynga Haiti

Mafia Wars General Haitian Relief, Help Haiti, Mafia Wars Haiti, Zynga Haiti

Lately it seems that Mafia Wars and Zynga have been having problems with many of their accounts. This morning I logged in and found that even though I completely finished Moscow weeks ago I am somehow back to chapter 1 in episode 3 Brigadir. I find it odd that every other episode is completely done except this one. Has this been happening to any of you as well?

Recently Zynga released the following on their Feature Updates/Release Notes page.

“User Account Issues: Some players may have been affected by a technical issue that happened at about 2 am PT on January 5th. We are extremely sorry for the difficulty caused by this issue. We’ve identified the affected users and are working to appropriately compensate everyone touched by the January 5th rollback, and we hope to resolve this issue within 48 hours. We will update you on after we’ve resolved the issue. Please don’t hesitate to contact Customer Support about the issue at http://zynga.com/support. Customer Support will have the list of users we have identified that have been affected by this issue. Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for the inconvenience.”

In this release they are speaking about a problem on January 5th. Evidentially the problem is not fixed since it is now January 11th.

On the release page they further stated the following.

“Bangkok Beta Coming Soon: We are happy to announce Bangkok will be going into beta very shortly. We will be asking some of our players to provide important feedback and make improvements for the final release. Please stay tuned.”

While that is all fine and nice it would seem to me that Zynga should be concentrating on getting the problems fixed in the current version of the game before shoving out another expansion. This has been a problem with many of the major online game developers over the years and many have suffered because of it.

Completing an expansion and then discovering that the developer has rolled back the game is a very frustrating experience. Zynga in my opinion needs to get the obvious problem fixed and restore all affected accounts to their previous state before they shove out the next expansion.

I urge anyone who has suffered a roll back to start a thread on the official Mafia Wars forums demanding that their account be restored before Zynga releases the Bangkok expansion.

Mafia Wars General

Mafia Wars is arguably the most popular of the myriad of social networking games that are available today and it was only a matter of time until Zynga took a harder line when it comes to suspending or even banning accounts.

The buying and selling of intellectual property is one of the biggest concerns for internet gaming companies. While the practice has been around for years many companies turned a blind eye to it because of the expense in prosecuting those who traffic in currency, accounts, and items.

In the last year or so many of the bigger gaming companies have done one of two things. First they have cracked down not on the sellers of such items but those who purchase them. Second, many have opened up their games for free play while requiring players to purchase the top items or even the all but bare necessities with micro-transactions using real cash. Some have done both.

Zynga has not missed what is going on in the industry and has started to follow suit by targeting those players who participate in the buying and selling of intellectual property. Presently they are suspending or banning accounts quite regularly. If you are a player who has purchased items or entire accounts do not be surprised if you try to log in one day and discover that your accounts is no longer accessible.

Leveling and acquiring the best items in Mafia Wars is too easy to put your account at risk. With a proper plan you can level to level 200+ in mere days and will be rolling in cash along the way so there is no reason to participate in such shenanigans.

Recently I have come across a few Mafia Wars “information” sites that are blatantly trying to sell items and accounts right on their front page. While I will not name these sites for obvious reasons I find the practice to be unethical. It is one thing to write a guide or sell a report detailing how to master the game but selling items and accounts crosses the line.

All of the site that I have visited which are doing this are also making use of graphics and logos from Mafia Wars and other Zynga games. I predict that somewhere in the near future the publishers of these sites will receive a nice letter from Zynga which will in essence order them to cease and desist in using the intellectual property of the company.

I will make one promise to all of my readers right now. You will never see accounts, items or currency from any game for sale on my sites. The only disclaimer I will make to that statement are those sites that earn revenue from Google AdSense since the end user has no control over which ads are displayed.

In conclusion, if you are buying or selling the intellectual property of any company and get your account closed, you have nothing to whine about …you brought it upon yourself.

Mafia Wars General

The year of 2009 is about to come to an end and I for one must say that it has been quite a good year.

Even though Mafia Wars experienced some glitches and hiccups in the later part of the year the folks over at Zynga have done a great job of fixing most of the problems that we have encountered.

The New Year looks like it is going to be a good one as well as far as Mafia Wars goes.

New Years Job

Expect a brand new featured job starting December 28th and continuing through January 4th. According to Zynga “This job will give you even more options than before including choosing different missions with different payouts.”

Bangkok Expansion

Originally the Bangkok Expansion was slated for release during the Christmas holidays but has been pushed back to a January 2010 release. Personally I am happy to see a game provider that is willing to make sure that an expansion is ready instead of pushing it out before it is ready. Bravo Zynga!

Other 2010 Features

Multi-Item Gifting – Zynga will be making it much easier to strengthen your Mafia Wars mafia. This feature will most likely migrate into other games which bear the Zynga brand as well.

Translations – Mafia Wars will become available to many more players throughout the world by offering it in many more languages. Once again I foresee this opening up other games as well.

Robbing – Zynga has heard the voice of its players and will be reintroducing robbing in 2010 with and new format.

Developers Days – This is in my opinion one of the best ways to improve any game. Zynga plans to hold meetings between the development team and player base in order to come up with new ideas.

Beta Testing – It seems that Zynga has decided that do more in the way of beta testing. You can never test enough when putting out a quality product. Everyone needs to keep in mind that even though a product goes through an extensive beta process there will always be the inevitable problems once the product goes live.

Free Stuff – It looks like we will be getting more free stuff in the way of weekly giveaways, rewards, contests, and more. Hey, free stuff is always good.

With 2009 coming to an end very soon I took some time to reflect back upon the year and realized that in the Mafia Wars world 2009 was a good year. We saw many new features and even though some were very good and others not so good, all in all we had fun and it was great. 2010 is almost upon us and I think that it is going to be another great year.

Technorati Tags: developers days, Mafia Wars 2010 Features, Mafia Wars Bangkok, mafia wars beta, mafia wars new years job, multi-item gifting, the return of robbing, translations

Mafia Wars General developers days, Mafia Wars 2010 Features, Mafia Wars Bangkok, mafia wars beta, mafia wars new years job, multi-item gifting, the return of robbing, translations