Why Some Bookmarklets and Scripts No Longer Work in Mafia Wars

23
Apr/100

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I have had a rash of questions lately regarding why certain bookmarklets or scripts either do not work correctly or in some cases not at all. Today I hope that I can give you a small insight into why these things occur.

The Internet and online gaming in particular are dynamic environments and are always in flux. Things that maybe the status quo today may not be part of the equation a few days later.

Some online games suffer from changes introduced by the developer to improve the player experience and others feel the effects of changes to the virtual environment such as a browser-based game. Social network games like Mafia Wars are plagued by both, such as Zynga changing something to improve the game or your social network evolving to meet user needs.

What does all this have in common? Chances are that if you use bookmarklets or scripts for social network games or “add-ons” for other online games they get broken occasionally. When facebook changes how they allow games to interact with their environment it forces Zynga to adapt by changing some of the backend processes associated with the game.

While some scripts or bookmarklets will break when this happens the community, which creates them, is usually pretty quick at finding solutions. The thing to remember when it comes to these applications is that all of the developers provide them for free and since most have a real life and regular jobs, it may take a day or two, sometimes more to get an updated version created.

My advice is to be patient and do things manually until the developer updates the application or in the case that an application is permanently broken, you find a replacement.

You can find most, if not all of the most popular bookmarklets or scripts at one of the following links.

Bobby Heartrate’s Mafia Tools – http://heartrate.se/

Vern’s Mafia Wars Tools – http://www.vern.com/mwtools/

Spockholm Mafia Tools – http://www.spockholm.com/mafia/bookmarklets.php

Josh Miller’s Bookmarklets – http://joshmiller.com/JMWTools.html

Mafia Wars Autoplayer – http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/64720

As always, use bookmarklets or scripts at your own risk. I neither promote nor discourage use of them and believe my readers should make their own decisions. Presentation of scripts and bookmarklets and/or links to them on this blog is for purely educational purposes.