New Fighting Feature

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Zynga keeps surprising us with changes.  I don't know many statistics or facts about everything yet.  All I know is that many in my mafia are getting the crap beat out of them way more frequently than before.  A lot more people are fighting than were before.  Many are working hard to gather statistics so more accurate information can be reported.  Once the smart people figure everything out, I'll be able to share their data with you.  Another change with fighting has just happened.  When you go to fight, you get the following options.  Random is the same but when you click Rivals you get to see who has most recently attacked you and who you recently attacked.  This is great because my player updates are usually full of messages alerting me that are vaulting collections or updating their wishlists.  The good stuff like who iced me is gone by the time I get to it.  I like this change.  Thank you Patrick Malouin Dacosta for sending me a screen shot.

"The streets of Bangkok run red with blood as the Triads and Yakuza struggle for dominance. Take on opposing faction members to improve your own faction standing, or betray your allies to improve your reputation with the rival faction.

If your target on the Fight List leaves Bangkok and travels to another city before you complete your attack, winning the fight will not affect your reputation with the Yakuza or Triads. If this happens, try attacking a different target on the Fight List"./Mafia Wars Fight Page

There are lots of discussions about the fact that players can still be attacked while they are iced.  Here are a few I found on The Zynga Forum Boards.  From our boy Fenris (a game developer), titled "Fight List" (1) and from a player expressing his true feelings, titled "Zynga have now COMPLETELY SCREWED THE GAME"(2).
One of my smart mafia members Tom Huges, commented with an interesting summary of things on one of my wall posts.  Here is what Tom had to say about the fact that dead people can still be attacked and appear on the fighting list.
This is a bad change, and here is why:

1). I have 3,320 stamina. If I were evil, I could point AttackX at some low level player and run it for 6 solid hours before running out of stamina. I could then quickly level up and then point AttackX at that same player for *another* 6 hours - for a grand total of 12 solid hours of attacks.  All the while, said player can have no health, loses money, AND loses 6 XP each time their health reaches 0 (which would be quite frequently). I personally am not "evil" and won't practice this, but I certainly know people who would.

2). While said "evil"ness is going on, this victim is *UNABLE* to put a temporary stop to the person who is attacking them. This means that they are not allowed to do jobs in cash-sensitive cities such as Cuba or Bangkok, because the attacker could potentially be draining all of their money from there.

3). I have played games where there is no health buffer on Facebook, back when Facebook apps were new. Those games failed very quickly because the new players were ALWAYS preyed upon by the stronger players. It was difficult to achieve, let alone maintain any progress in these games. Within 6 months, these games had lost nearly all of their users. I predict that Mafia Wars could potentially lose a lot of its new players if this occurs, as 6 XP between levels 1 and 100 are FAR more valuable than they are between levels 101 and infinity.

I can fend for myself, as I have 1,024 personal defense and 98,000 mafia defense, along with 265 health. I can run my auto-heal script all day long if I have to, and not really have to worry about it. Or I could bump up my defense a little more. But these are just minor changes for me. For others, I doubt they would be able to keep up with it.

By the time players reach levels 100 to 500, the fighting gets VERY rough, and it makes it extremely difficult to continue to level up when you have to keep pouring skill points into useless things like health and defense. For me, those are luxuries - not necessary for all. Now, it appears that we're being *forced* to fight, while many people strictly don't like fighting.

I miss the Mafia Wars which allowed its players to play the way *they* wanted to play. I don't think they're bringing it back.