The Players Have Spoken & The Numbers Dont Lie / Plus A Mafia Wars Poll
It seems I hit a cord with the Zynga Games Community with my blog yesterday. It seems from all the Skypes, emails and comments that they are all upset with Zynga.
Is the clock ticking down for the social game giant? I hope not not just because I play the games but for the industry as a whole. Social gaming is big business and if Zynga falls what about the other companies who are investing heavily and trying to use Zynga’s model as a guide. Does it mean the end of social gaming across Facebook or will they learn from the mistakes of the social giant and avoid those issues with the players ?
I think they all will be fine but you never know as this is a very unpredictable business. They players are the ones that keep the social games alive by playing and spending money on virtual items and if they are not happy the wont play and if they aren’t playing they are definitely not spending money. So the motto here is “KEEP THE CUSTOMER HAPPY” which is basically the motto in the real world too.
And remember if the social games fall it could also mean the failure of Facebook who relies heavily on them for alot of their revenue ( 30% of every dollar players spend on the games virtual items and advertising dollars ).
Here are some very scary numbers from Allfacebook.com for Zynga in regards to Mafia Wars. It is time for them to wake up and do something to please their user base. The numbers have been a steady decline for months now going from just over 4 Million in July to it’s current level now of just over 2 Million.
Daily Active Users ( DAU )
3/9/11 – 2,375,905
4/9/11 – 2, 046,710
( – 329,195 DAU )
And the (DAU) numbers are steadily dropping for their other games too. For instance Cityville has dropped over 680,000 in the past month, Farmville has dropped over 1 Million in past month & all of Zynga’s games overall (DAU) base has dropped over 3.8 Million in past month
We are also conducting a Mafia Wars Poll and want your input that we can send right to PAC and Zynga. Also feel free to comment below and tell us your thoughts on how they can fix things. Remember the numbers don’t lie and they are going to have to listen if they expect to survive. Click all that apply to you & please share this poll. We want your voice heard.
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Heya i am for the first time here. I came across this board and I find It really useful & it helped me out much.
I hope to give something back and help others like you helped me.
My biggest issue with MW is the problem with everyones health. I play this game to have Mafia Wars and for no other reason. When in a clan war you can no longer ice anyone because everyone has so much health from building warthogs that it now takes having thousands of stamina to even play. I play to ice people, if I can not ice people there is no reason to play. Also always loved gifting the new topend loot to my MW family but zynga has screwed that up also. I am also quitting MW and I believe most of the MW clan I am in is doing the same 😦
Only the cheats can finish anything…honest players are left out as the cheats demand more of this, more of that, rights to do this or that…no limits on their ability to play with robots…the little guy can’t have any fun…can’t finish anything…we just get lost in the shuffle. Losing the cheats that finish in ten days what it would take a lifetime for honest player would be a great loss to the company, but not to the game…
The fact is that MW has turned into a ‘RICH MAN’S GAME’ now.
The game has gotten ridiculous, and I’m sure that in true ZYNGA fashion, one day soon they are going to stop supporting MW
Zynga has gotten out of control.. Way too much crap going on and it has gone from a game I used to enjoy to it almost being painful to log on and deal with all the pop ups!!! DAMN you ZYNGA!!!!
The mini energy packs I find Ok, you don’t lose all the energy as you would if you only need little to level as you did in the past. However having to beg for them and hope your mafia isn’t fed up with clicking on pop ups to get these mini refills. They should be given automatically without having to ask! When in a mock or real war, Having these pop ups constantly stopping the game play and making you lose to an opponent is unacceptable! If Zynga wants to reward me with an item, good! But send it to a special loot section where I have X amount of time to collect it later so it does not affect my game play! Customer support needs to be fair across all the players! I know for the same exact problems with game play, some are rewarded with reward points, high end loot and so on. Where many others are just told, sorry! There is nothing we can do but we will notify our developers of the problem. Is there anything else we can do for you?? I am a platinum player and over the years have spent $10K+ on this game and feel I am treated like they don’t care if I keep playing or quit! Lately the game play has gotten very poor! I have several of the latest and fastest computers on the market connected to a high speed cable internet. Everything I do on the net is very fast except when it comes to playing Mafia wars lately! Constant revolving cylinder, blank MW’s pages I have to reload and white pages sometimes for hours on end! And on a good day 15 to 45 seconds to load a MW’s fight page! Zynga has also taken away the ability to gifts high end loot! I have collected 2 to 3 times needed of much high end loot that I cannot share and help my fellow mafia! What good does it do for me having hundreds and in some cases a thousand+ of loot that does me nothing but can help someone else! Gifting of all loot needs to be brought back! If things don’t change, I will be joining the many that have walked away from this game very soon!
Zynga are going for the overkill!!!!
THE ALL NEW ZYNGA MAFIA WARS, BIG BEG GAME!!
Play now, go lower yourself, Go and BEG. Send out hundreds of request begs, in the hope you get a Great, worthless piece of cyber space back in return. But wait, if all else fails you will be reminded often by Zynga pop ups, throughout the game that you can SPEND BIG BUCKS buying those very same useless bits of cyber space junk. Stop reading and get back to begging.
The game’s losing its charm. Everything is becoming RP driven. Making money out of the game is understandable but now Zynga are turning MW into a buck making monster. It is more stress n less fun n I may quit soon despite having a combined 15K account.
Too many events (If you are tired then buy RPs), Making players beg for everything (If you don’t want to buy RPs), Not letting people gift n trade (If you want more loot buy RPs n gain skills) etc. are making this game go cold. Let the game settle down Zynga.
It was fun upto Bangkok…Since then MW is spinning out of control. GIMMME MY GAME BACK!!!
Zynga is making me a mindless clicker!! Begging for this and that and the other thing is making me crazy and I am just about ready to ditch the whole game.
I believe the biggest reason for the decline is ability of any player with money to spend to make life liserable for other players. Zynga’s cash flow machine is also it’s undoing. All the other reasons listed are irrevalent because they can be ignored. How can you ignore a player (this is becoming far to common) who’s attack and defense stats are 10 and sometimes 20 times higher than what the everage player can build up to for their level? What fun is the game if you know that no matter how hard you try you will get beat by someone who uses their credit card to artificially inflate their egos & stats?
too many events, we are not given time to rest, all these events so not special anymore because too many events that we should do,,
Consider in fighting right” does not make sense,, should I opponent level 5-7 levels above me, why do not you combine all of them from the beginning till the highest level,, how can we fight?? see only our been confused,,
most of that list bugs me, but without a doubt, the spam bugs me the most. I actually do have friends that don’t play, who people will never check my feed b/c it’s full of MW junk. Even other MW players don’t like seeing the spam. Next the system and speed are archaic. What’s the purpose of that? Sure, some things are probably facebook issues (40 req per day and other such things) but there could easily be ‘accept all’ buttons and ‘send all’. Instead it’s each gift at a time, and 3-4 pop-up windows to actually return a gift to our friends. You’d think Zynga was actively tyring to discourage us from sending these requests back to friends, except with event after event after event, clearly you want us to send more, but make it increasing more difficult and mind numbing to do.
With the opening of brazil and stam based jobs, I can burn through my E and stam and be done playing wtithin literally 5-10 minutes. Yet gifting/spamming/requesting takes me hours. And while for whatever reason I have continued to do it up to this point, rest assured that no matter what your click data says, I most certainly do NOT love the tediousness of this daily spamfest you have turned this game into.
Let us be able to play, provide more features and incentive to play that might actually convince us to 1) spend to upgrade our characters or 2) spend to extend our playing session. But more spam events to increase our daily gifting quota to keep up is NOT doing anything to improve our gaming experience not making MW something we would recommend to others to try out as something they would enjoy.
I have been playing this game from the start. When you had to be a certain level just to get into Cuba. These days anyone can do anything. I am getting crushed by levels half my size. I am not sure when I actually noticed it, but also getting real tired of people hitting you just for hitting you. That use to be called bullying. Now it is just plain stupid especially with the fighting the way it is showing who is still alive. In the past we had to work our ass off for what we got. Not anymore now I have to beg and beg a lot. I have spent money in the past on this game but I can guarantee I learned my lesson a long time ago I would not spend another dime on this game. Not with the threat of it leaving. To me MW has gone down hill big time, like a lot of people have said, it is no longer a social game but a begging and everyone is out for themselves.
There are to much going on ontop of each other all the time.
Give us some time between events and collections so we can enjoy playing the game. today it is all to stressful at times chaceing after items for collections and other events.
And then the limited times you can send requests gifts to your mafia. If I have sent gifts I can´t ask for help in missions. That is just wrong and shouldn´t be counted as sending gifts and vice versa.
Thats my opinon!
Malin
Jeez, where do I start? Begging for endless gifts take up hours of play time plus upset my friends. Mini Packs? What a joke…I planned my play around when I would get them..now I have ‘hope’ my friends will send me one. Closing cities? Well have no problem with that providing you don’t reopen them a day later. But my biggest irk is the ‘All New Reward Ville”. Fight and earn points to buy loot. Well I have done that and bought the damn loot only to learn it was not given to me and the ‘customer service’ guy said “we have no record of your purchase, it’s in beta” so TOO BAD. Pop Ups? Really…in my world that is span…pure and simple. Been playing this game for 3 years and may I say? The thrill is gone. with the lackadaisical, oh well attitude of Zynga . This was once a social game that required skill and smarts, now it’s a social ‘welfare’ trick to get players to forget about actually playing and dig into their limited pocketbooks or stand on the street corner asking for handouts.
I started playing MW about 2 years ago and really enjoyed it. Now, I’m spending all my time and energy doing all the stupid “Missions”, collecting crap, sending crap, scanning the news feed for crap. Just not the game it once was. There should be a challenge to the game, but not in the direction it’s going now. You should be able to play it solo or with your MW family. It’s not how much money you dump into the game, but the strategy in how the game is played. I don’t own an iPhone, so I’ll never be able to play Atlanta.
http://m.mafiawars.com/
You dont need a phone to play it u can play just like normal
you can play Atlanta here
http://m.mafiawars.com/mobileweb
The only thing that bothers me about the game is everyone’s constant bitching. I finish gifting events within minutes finish new cities within days and out of over 1,000,000 fights I have lost less than 50,000 Either I have the greatest mafia in Zyngaland or some people just like bitching
Most of these issues are annoying to a greater or lesser extent but I have a bigger problem that I think will be the death of the game. When a player has 5,000 health or more the average player has NO chance to ice or kill them . The ice or kill is the goal!. In 6 months the number of fighters that can be iced will be way less…ruining the game for most. They need to fix this monster problem before the game is useless. Too much begging would be my next gripe with the gifting being limited coming in a close 3rd.
Not everyone uses scripts to do all there gifting for them or uses MWAP to do everything while sitting on there ass
Some of us fight for cash and loot who cares whether I ice or kill you that’s not what I’m after
I borrowed this from another player who said exactly what I am feeling about the game also. It was posted by Solly and so I am using their exact post.
The game used to be a lot of fun, with many people joining together to interact and form relationships. We all used the game as an escape from what we do every day for work and personal. Now the game has become a job, no relaxing, not fun. We want the old game back.
The continuous changing/lowering of the energy scheme coupled with the pop-ups while fighting are the biggest problem. It seems Zynga just wants to force you to buy energy so you can keep playing. They are too greedy trying to force cash out of as many players as possible. They keep their developers creating new chores for players while the code used is so buggy the game freezes and is slow. Why don’t they try having their developers clean up all the code and make the game play fast and STABLE. Stop introducing so many new “Features”. The ones who really spend $$$ on this game are clan warriors. We want the game stable and consistent so we can come up with a strategy for building our character and stick with it. Seems like I have to revise my plans every week now. Would rather focus on beating down warriors in other clans and having fun.
i used to be a die-hard mw fan, but i agree–i am getting tired of all the pop-ups, the continuous begging for every single thing you need to play. in more than 2 years, i have never received any of the chance collection in ny. and the begging for energy too is simply unacceptable. the fact that people from double and triple the levels are CONSTANTLY KILLING ME and fighting and snuffing has just drained the life from me. i have never had full energy EVER for more than 10 minutes. come on, people. that is just absolutely no fun at all, and it’s very very old after a few years of playing. i know the idea is for people to purchase stuff, but quite honestly, nobody is going to buy anything if the game sucks. and you’ve constantly got serious loading issues that need to be addressed. unless these concerns are addressed quickly, i’m going to be a total non-gamer, because i’ve already dropped all the other games for these exact issues.
Pop ups during fighting? come on they a jamming it down our throats. All the darn pop ups. I spend some money why do I have to be forced to sen a gift to someone? The mini packs are great gives me better control on how much energy I get better to level I think. The events are coming so quick you barley have time to play. The loot drops suck and you can’t gift the high end loot to your friends the only choice you have is stuff no one needs. I mean come on Zynga loosen up a bit you are squeaking when you walk. Let us play the game and have fun like we used to be fore you became money hungry.
The thing that kept this game fun was the interaction with other mafia wars addicts. There aint no time anymore for that … too busy collection somthing or trying as hard as I can to finish something before the time runs out … … instead of having a mafia wars family its now a group of individuals with a “every man for himself” attitude.
ZYNGA GIVE US OUR GAME BACK — WE JUST WANT TO FIGHT — THATS ALL
Energy packs should be freely given to us by Zynga instead of having to request them from our friends. I don’t really care if I get 6 minis or one big one, as long as they are provided by Zynga automatically. A full one every 12 hours would be my vote if I had that option.
Live Chat support should also be available 24 hours a day and not on whatever randomly scheduled scavenger hunt I find myself clicking through to eventually come across it.. It’s called customer service and it should be more readily available and easily accessible.
Bangkok was a REAL pisser for me. I ended up not finishing and selling all my stuff within minutes of closing time. Less than 24 hours and its open again. Zynga, do you REALLY think I’m going to go buy everything needed again just to finish the last level? Like hell I will. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
WAY too much wasted gifting with the mini energy packs and saving all that crap to go through it three times is really taking away from what MW is supposed to be about – FIGHTING! Not saving trinkets!!! Make the loot drops for fighting – and rewards for tiers of icing rather than saving a bunch of junk up!
i think theres to many things to colect at the same time it makes it hard to finish any of them as soon as you start one then you have more come up and you have to colect other things and cant colect fast enough to finish any
i have been playing mafia war’s from the start and seen many changes happen it bothers me now that we are palmed of rather then the issue sorted i have been in a email arguement with zynga now 3 weeks and the issue is still not sorted. also all the events that are out i struggle to remember what one i am doing aswell as the city jobs
I have had over 300 friends leave the game since they started messing around in the servers and closing citys when some maybe most of them had not time to finish, I was shocked they decided to allow Bangkok to remain open. Butthen again They had lost so many DAU that they had to stop and take notice.
Stop ruining our gaming experience and sort out your shit. Gifting has gone up the wazzoo with useless ultimate rewards that will be obsolete within amonth or so. GET A GRIP YOU ASS TARDS.
Zynga needs to have there chat support available to fix an addresses issues an normal it is down 24/7
The game used to be a lot of fun, with many people joining together to interact and form relationships. We all used the game as an escape from what we do every day for work and personal. Now the game has become a job, no relaxing, not fun. We want the old game back.
Def agree… Now is called either help me wars or Mafia Chores
I had to quit for 3 months after Zynga damaged my game and its taken me a long time to get them to admit they did the damage and I got 20GF points for 3 months of virtually no play.
My main bug bear is the numerous pop up’s one on top of the other, for crying out loud if I wanted pop up’s I wouldn’t have a pop up ban in use in my anti virus. As for these stupid mini energy packs, good idea as long as they let you request them when you return one. Also who thought of the day after collection things, just a day to go on one and another starts grrrrrrrr
The nonstop spamming. I made the mistake of playing the game using my actual profile instead of a dummy profile. I can’t tell you how many real life friends removed me from their lists because of how annoying MW is. On top of that, the constant popups. I wound up using MWautoplayer just to be able to click the buttons fast enough, while I was at keys only, because the game itself is a giant clusterF of confusion and disorganiztion.
I had to quit playing almost a year ago. I have so many friends that I wouldn’t know if not for MW but now, with vision problems, there is such a lack of accessibility, it is impossible to play.
Being the eternal optimist that I am, I check back ever so often.
I have said it before, why would I expect a game about criminals to be fair?
But that does not explain Zenga’s evident wish to self destruct. Or Facebook for that matter. What began as an enormously successful social network is now turning into an annoyingly cluttered jump off for hundreds of applications.
My homepage is filled with posts and requests for so many applications, I am hard pressed to find posts from my friends. I am forced to block all those apps just to find the posts I want to see and that involves a lot of time.
I suppose that when my Facebook page becomes so cluttered that it is unusable, I will have to just leave and try and find another way to keep up with my friends.
I just tried to share this on my FB page. FB has blocked me from sharing it because it was SPAMMY! Is that calling the kettle black? LOL
The game has become unplayable and not enjoyed by many. Our clan is becoming smaller and smaller because people are quitting because of the game.
I find the PIG quite annoying
me to,and we’re probally aint the only ones
& don’t get me started on the “Try Refreshing”
When I tried to share this on Facebook, I got this:
“This message contains blocked content that has previously been flagged as abusive or spammy. Let us know if you think this is an error.”
Just thought you should know.
I also hate that Moscow & Cuba are closed. I used those cities to heal in because I didn’t want to use NY cash in trying to get $$ achievements there. Now with the really high amounts of health & mock wars, it is driving me to bankruptcy. I may have to reconsider participating in mock wars now that we don’t have any other places to heal with “free” or unused money (like Moscow, Cuba).
I would heal in Vegas… with a cap at $50mil, my money’s just sitting there. But I haven’t played for the past 2 or 3 days & I have to say I don’t miss it.
I am in the boondocks, and the only high speed internet connection I can get (forget satellite) is Verizon wireless, which is metered. I find that it requires several gigabytes a month to be a very active mw player. This is a lot of data! Game performance would be much better for all players if they would take steps to reduce how much data transfer is required. How about storing some on my computer, like all the pictures, which don’t change, instead of having us download them over and over and over?
I have high speed internet via cable, and the performance is still very slow in MW, it’s not just you 😉
Zynga knows that a portion of the players are unhappy with all the begging in the game of MW. Zynga continues to ignore those unhappy people because everyone does not write in to Zynga, they just leave the game instead of letting Zynga hear what they think. People are leaving the game at a rate far greater than are joining MW play. Seeing the numbers in black and white should give Zynga a clue. Instead Zynga is betting that all our begging posts are going to attract new MW players to the game. Someone at Zynga needs to realize that even us diehard players are getting real tired of the continuous additions of more and more collecting of 150 items to get one HEL.
The glitches in the game need to be ironed out and fixed. There are too many small things wrong with the game on almost every gamer. Half the players get mini energy packs, the other half don’t. Keep the game even, keep it fair. We all need to enjoy the same working non glitched game of MW.
Amen! Well said!!
“DITTO” and all the double handling of gifts 1 click to collect and return would make life so much easier …I get sick of seeing 90 odd gifts to be accepted each day, now that we have mini energy, mission and crew request clogging the request page
I voted for my most annoying problems 1 and 4. My hope is that Zynga read it, in particular the CityVille developers. Mafia Wars have maybe some bugs or bad gameplay, but overall it’s okay. But CityVille? The list of bugs and feature requests is endless. Each 2-3 days you get new events and game changes that nobody wants. If you ask about the reasons, you get only a warning from the forum moderators. (I have 12 at the moment). Overall I tend to say that zynga want to catch most new players as possible, they are not interested to keep the “old” players.
Zynga has created a real Frankenstein monster here. On the one hand, with all the spamming for stuff that can’t be gifted, if a player is going to get anywhere they end up having to run scripts like MWAP and FBAA, but on the other hand Zynga goes out of their way to break scripts from working at every single opportunity they can. Making it virtually impossible to play the game without scripts, and virtually impossible to play the game with scripts, is a recipe for disaster.
On top of that, they seem to be continuing the same kind of shady dealing that they’ve done from the start, and they seem to think that treating customers in the worst possible way is the best way to get people to love them. But I guess if you’re the Marquis de Sade, then everyone looks like a masochist.
I think it’s ridiculous that they don’t fix problems..
and if they’re going to add so many things , they need to put limit on each one , instead of making you decide what to do , what to blow off ..
making you go back to jobs , to get items to do jobs is sooo redundant .. The whole game is a waste of time , that’s just rubbing our noses in it ..
closing cities that I’ve worked to complete for months.is more rubbing our noses in it ..
really want to show us we’re wasting our time ???
would hate to have to quit this game 4 yrs now and finally learning to appreciate it
I’m tired of nothing getting fixed!! Then they keep adding things whether they work or not!! overlapping each other! maybe if you have a couple thousand mafia you can get all the prizes 3 times, but they don’t want you to add people you don’t know….. just the whole thing is ridiculous!!! Almost NEVER get live chat! Email chat is a joke!!! No wonder your stats are falling!!! Bad business!!!
Reload page until live chat comes up….this advice worked for me
Maybe having more Mafia is good for these 3X3 collections but it sure has its draw backs,
1 you learn how to feel really rotten that you can’t return all gifts because of the limit
2 you miss helping sooooo many people because of the fast feeds
3 And the one thing that may suprise you, so many jobs and request on the feed go undone because people thing someone else will do it, example 5 days to get 3 terracotta tiles once 😦
I feel all the free skill points are a joke along with the daily take, simply because if they encourage people to spend cash on the game, why give so much away free? It means if I miss the odd day a week, within no time, free gamers will be almost as strong or stronger.
I’m tired of better customer service leaning towards who spends the most money. In the real world if I buy an item. the customer service is not tied to how much more stuff I buy.
Game play is not equal with all players. Some players get more than others. Just not fair Zynga!
i agree totally, what takes some weeks to collect takes me months on end to get even a fraction of what they got. i think making it easy for low players to get all good loot and rare to higher lvl players is a joke. level up bonus for a 1000 level player getting loot for a low level player is stupid. should give loot according to level as well. if we can’t use it then don’t give it to us, i say!!!!
I cant comment on the mini energy packs, as I dont get them, other than, Zynga creating an unfair advantage and disadvantage to players as they are not all treated equally. Those packs can either help a player or give a disadvantage to a player, allowing only a certain few in beta when cities open, is yet another disadvantage to players who dont get those releases. If mini packs are here it should be for everyone, especially since those mini packs offer bonuses for level ups for the players that do have them, as those without do not.
the mini energy packs are a joke…. you have to request them from your mafia… if your lucky and have a good mafia you will receive them, if not oh well your just screwed………
i dun get the mini energy pack request/receive systems… its stupid… i received energy packs when the msg says “send energy pack”. i send energy packs when the msg says my fren has sent me an energy pack…
sometimes the situation bcomes normal bc but most of the time, its reversed!
n i dun even know when is the limit or anything…
the energy packs used to be every 24 hours no asking for it
mini packs is a joke now you have to pester people to get some thing that was once a give