Racketeering in Mafia Wars

6
Oct/095

My apologies for the lack of posts over the last week or so, but I have been trying to develop a solid understanding of the new Racketeering feature that Zynga is now testing in Mafia Wars.

Rackets are a feature that Zynga is testing and it is not available to everyone as yet. It seems that all new accounts have access to this feature as well as some current accounts. Personally I have over a dozen active accounts and none of them have access to Rackets.

In order to test out Rackets I started a new account. With this account I am not going for super fast leveling, eventually it will become an account that I use to work the hitlist for experience and profit, but in the mean time I will use it to get a firm grip on the concept of Rackets and take you along for the ride. As I learn new things I will post them here so we can all learn together.

Along with the Rackets feature you will notice that you have a new pool called Influence. The points in this pool are used with the Rackets feature. Instead of simply collecting money from purchased properties you now spend influence points to “shakedown” a business.

Rackets open up at level 4 and you only have two choices to shakedown.

Three-Card Monte
Strip Club

To shakedown these businesses you begin by clicking “Ready to Collect” and then “Shakedown”. Each of them have a time frame for the shakedown to occur and you come back in the appropriate number of hours to collect your illicit gains.

Another interesting aspect of the feature is that you now have an experience bar for each business and you level them just like you do for jobs. What the rewards are I do not know yet.

You may purchase new businesses to shakedown. The first costs $5,000, the second $10,000 and I am assuming that the expense goes up from there. I cannot attest to this but I have been told that you may have a maximum of 5 shakedowns going at any one time. I will let you know on that part as soon as I can.

The concept of this feature seems to be to keep players more involved in the game and give them less down time. If you have a copy of The Ultimate Mafia Wars Leveling Guide you already know how cut down time to a minimum and thus the feature will have little impact on you.

Many seem to dislike the feature because they have to come back and collect at intervals dictated by the racket that you are working on. The Strip Club has a 22 hour wait to collect and I believe that Three-Card Monte is 4 hours.

I am not sure how Rackets are going to impact the game as yet. I cannot form an educated opinion due to my lack of experience with the feature thus far. I asked others who play what they thought of the feature and have heard everything from how much they love the feature from some and how much they hate the feature from others. There is even a small group that is ready to quit playing over it.

I would love to hear your opinion on it so feel free to leave comments below. Let’s get a discussion going.

Filed under: Mafia Wars Tips

5 Comments

Comments (5) Trackbacks (0) ( subscribe to comments on this post )

Hope
12:11 am on October 7th, 2009
I started recently with Mafia Wars (level 50 now) and I am a “maniac”. All I have are rackets. I don’t have the opportunity to buy properties at all. I have to say that I think the rackets suck. The ‘influence’ take forever to restock and if you miss your time limit you lose the influence completely. They don’t produce enough money or attack or defense to be worth the time they take to produce. I know that my partner is a ‘mogul’ and all she has to have is money to buy her properties. I have hundreds of millions of dollars, but they don’t help a bit because all you can use is influence.

I feel like it’s a hindrance to how well I can do at Mafia Wars because I have to opportunity to buy the property/businesses. I wish I could switch.
brandon
4:11 am on October 10th, 2009
Rackets are fine i was mad at first but i stuck to them and if you fully upgrade the striper club to massage parlor you make 900k for 26 infulence then you upgrade that the escort and you make 110million in 24 hours and you can have as many of them going as you like but you need to purchase new areas which progressivly get more expensive so after 24 hours i come back click collect and re shakedown to everyone and your good and when you infulence increases over time i like to buy small rackets to fill in the spaces where you dont have enoguh infulence for a escort service so then you can collect from a few and not waste enfulence
Duce
4:07 am on November 20th, 2009
Rackets suck for the first month or two working them. in addition to an energy only farmer you will want an influence only farmer. it takes some time to get the ball rolling but if you never let them bust through the early rackets you can master all of them build the influence and your potential influence grows to MUCH more then you actual max level of influence. Additionally you can accelerate the process when you have leveled enough to get a full influence refill with say 500 influence this is actually a good thing. While an energy refill is pretty much a waste Influence is never lost unless you bust. the job racket rewards are lame but if they improver the racket reward there is a lot of positive potential for boost harvesting. IMHO. Cheers! -Duce
Phillip Scott
11:50 pm on November 20th, 2009
I agree Duce, I am not fond of rackets either.
Lolita Cruce
12:25 pm on January 30th, 2010
i for one love the rackets instead of the properties that can be robbed everytime you turn around. i had rackets until yesterday and today for some reason it is all gone and i have properties. i want my rackets back.