Sharing Information

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My news feeds are filled with informative posts about Mafia Wars.  Posts relating to game strategies, tips, tricks and rumors are always appreciated but not always helpful.  Many times inaccurate information shared by others becomes believed by many.  When I see a post, I look for supporting information before I decide to make changes to my game strategy.  I know it's hard if you don't have the time or game knowledge to verify things on your own.  The proper way to share information is to state where it came from but many players don't do this.  I don't know if it's pure laziness or if they want to impress their friends and act like they figured it out on their own.  The following example illustrates how the same good information is shared by two different sources.  VCDBurn made the following post on The TopMafia.Info Fan Page:  (click on chart image to enlarge)
"I have heard people saying for awhile now the best way to spend your RP's ...was to reset your chopshop and/or weapons depot every 12 hours for 6 RP's. Now i hadn't really thought much of it until the other day when i cashed in that game card (scroll down for that post) and someone brought it up again and i put some thought into it. I came to the conclusion that this is false and the only thing that accomplishes is it takes you longer to cash in your RP's for the same outcome.
The Logic: (In this example i'm using 6 stamina gained from either rebel2 or robbers belt)
So in the top half of the screenshot its pretty straight forward you see that every 12 hours you spend 6 RP's to gain 6 SP's. So over the corse of a week you spend 84 and gain 84.
In the bottom half you see that you are getting a free 6 SP's a day. Now take the 84 skill points you spent doing your 12 hour rotation for 1 week and spend them directly after doing a free build. This results in 84 (total RP's) divided by 12 (cost to reset 24 hours to 0) times 6 (stamina payout each time) which gives you another 42 SP's Add those to the 42 you generated for free and you spent 84 and gained 84.
The Conclusion:
In 1 weeks time either way results in 84 RP's spent and 84 SP's gained so it really doesn't matter. You just end up taking the scenic route to get there./~~VCD

SAY WHAT???!  After reviewing this a few times, getting it wrong once (see comments) and having Bossy Don explain it in more simpleton terms, I think I finally got it.  There was a debate amongst some players over the best way to gain skill points utilizing the Chop Shop and Weapons Depot instead of the Marketplace.  Some players were saying it's better to spend your reward points every 12 hours instead of waiting 24 hours.  In the span of a week both players will receive the same amount of skill points, for the same amount of reward points spent (Thank You, Bossy Don and VCD Burn).  Since reading this, I have adjusted my strategy.  Everything I needed to know in regards to this advice is here.  It's amazing how VCD figured it all out and supplied us with statistical data to prove his claim. 

Word got out and many have been advising people to do this.  Here is an example of a post which contains the same information as VCDs.  Pablo means well but he failed to provide additional information and most likely I wouldn't have payed attention to his advice which isn't 100% accurate. 

Now that I got this, here is a chart created to explain this to the not so mathematically inclined.  This couldn't have been made without the hard work done by VCD (click on image to enlarge).

I've seen posts containing the same information supplied by VCD but there is no source reference.  That's not nice to do.  He spent a lot of time figuring it out and should get credit for his work.  He may not mind if people copy his work and call it their own because the information is still getting passed around.  I'm always searching for great sites to use as references for this blog.  I can't tell you how many I have found that just copy an article off The Mafia Wars Wiki Website and don't bother to tell the readers where it came from.  When I see this happening, I stop visiting the site altogether.