I like many millions of people got downright addicted to the original Mafia Wars game not long after it was released. It was far from a perfect game, but it didn't require any time commitment like a traditional game. You could play for hours on end, or if you had 30 seconds between whatever else you were doing. It many ways it was a perfect game for a the modern society of people that have issues focusing. The game continued to grow and grow, as did the number of both daily and monthly active users. I'm not going into great detail about the exact gameplay because lets face it, if you got this far, you know the game.
Then game started to expand, offering more and more items to collect, and eventually opening up new cities to explore and take your 500 best mafia buds with you to conquer. Along the way, fans discovered that Zynga either didn't care, or had a large group on vastly inferior programmers. The only thing worse than the programmers are the customer support people that obviously don't play the game and understand the issues that people have. Improvements were made, but rarely were they properly beta tested before hand. Often any improvements that were added took away or broke other aspects of the game. The diehards moved on with the game though. As I write this even they are working out the bugs in the newest city that went live last night, then was taken back down when a major glitch appeared that affected thousands of players accounts. Now it appears that Zynga is ready to screw the pooch again, as they get ready to launch Mafia Wars 2.
A preview trailer has appeared today on the Facebook page for Mafia Wars 2, but it shows absolutely no game play, and only poorly animated 'scenes' from the game. This is poorly conceived on two fronts for the fan base. First off, the company has never once shown that they are capable of coding a game properly. Now they expect us to believe that they can code and properly made a 3D fully interactive game. I'll never believe it. The other side to this coin, is that while this is a free game, there is the option to pay to improve your character ( I would say gameplay but that's just not true...) and many people have put in anywhere from $5 to several thousand dollars on their characters. Regardless of how long they hang on to the original Mafia Wars, creating an entirely new game let's players know that eventually they will phase out the original. I just don't get why they don't leave well enough alone and keep 'upgrading and improving' the product that has gotten them this far. Fix what is broken before you move on to something new that's even more broken.
There I've said my piece, though that's not what this blog posting was originally going to be about. Expect another Mafia Wars related post in the future.
