Like a lot of people I’ve been playing Mafia Wars on Facebook for quite some time. You can usually check your progress once or twice a day, which probably takes a couple of minutes at a time.
Yes – it is addictive
No – Nobody will ever win.
But it’s still semi-amusing and keeps me vaguely entertained.
However they may have gone a little bit too far now with their latest addition – SMS notifications.
If you are a player based in the US you will be able to signup to get alerts when you are attacked etc., which means that you will never really have any peace from the game, which I don’t think is a particularly good idea for the players. For Zynga, of course, the more time people spend on their platform the more money they will earn.
Here’s what the offer looks like:
Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I still see it as being a bad move.
This isn’t Zynga’s only poor decision of late.
I’ve been playing Farmville, finding it a harmless bit of family-friendly diversion. Just the other day they introduced a new item, which was only available to players who were also Level 10 or above in Mafia Wars.
Now, I used to play Mafia Wars, once upon a time, and have nothing against it. However, I didn’t need it intruding on the peaceful experience of virtual farming.
End result, no more money for Zynga out of my online gaming.
And I’ve given up on Mafia Wars.
Harmless bit of fun … but … I’m no longer seeing any point to it … and figured it was eating into my time I could be creating pictures of my cat 😛 (which looks to have become my new obsession)
What I did / do like about mafia wars is you can’t get “farmed” as happened on the likes of Travian which then starts to eat into your nights sleep as you start to think .. ah I’ll just check if any attacks are incoming.
The attacks thing doesn’t make sense to me at all … it happens and has to be a money making way for Zynga to do business an possibly will appeal to younger obsessed generations without concept of paying for their mobile bills ? EEK
Simply deciding to play mafia wars is going too far!
I’m not a fan of games that reward players who can timetable their play time as the game desires over certain intervals. Maybe I’m just bitter over what happened to that field of corn on farmville when my internet went down for a day…
Did you see how much they charge for SMS Notifications?