"Zynga has asked us to stop the boycott in order for talks to proceed please decide if you wish to play or not this weekend yourself"/Bossy Don
It's evident from the comments on this blog that there are many different views. I would like to add that some of us, including me, are very addicted to this game. I live in Las Vegas and it is a town that can fuel many addictions. I feel that Mafia Wars is a better option than alcohol, cocaine, or gambling and I'm grateful to be addicted to this than something way worse. Maybe I should get a life and go outside more often but this game makes me happy and I don't want to give up on it. I respect the views of all my readers and encourage you all to continue to share them. Please just stop with the bad words or blogspot might make me change this to a mature rating and you will have to click more to get here. F@!k or something similar will get your point across.
David Reedy of The Kingpin Trading Market and Mafia Wars Unified Trading Ratios issued the following statement.
TO ALL THE SUPPORTERS OF NO PLAY, CLICK OR TRADE:
We had to pull the event for 2 reasons, 1) the sake of the talks with Zynga and 2) FB had it so screwed up we couldn't edit or alter it anymore.
If you want to know the status of the strike, for the integrity of our Zynga talks, I will answer it cryptically... I have decided to take a 2 ...day hiatus from FB.
I will return on Monday. Have a great weekend! Peace/out!
Ram Krish, creator of The Elite Traders Club provides more details of what really happened in this statement.
About 3 days back, Zynga discussed with us and stated that they would agree to a few of our demands and that we would have to wait for a couple of our demands to be met. The bangkok loot became giftable for the same reason.
The programmers from Zynga were supposed to give us a written statement stating that these are the issues that would be taken care of now and these are the issues that would be taken care of down the lane. This was supposed to be delivered to us within 24 hours of the talks which they did not care to provide even after 48 hours of the discussions with them.
They then came to us at the eleventh hour, about 4-5 hours before the boycott stating that they would take us into the discussions with their developers provided we took the event/boycott down because of which the event was taken down (I know that you people have been searching and thinking where the hell did it go?)
We took down the event, and about 5 mins towards the close of the meeting a couple of our people were invited, which means that they did not care about getting us in with their developers at all or they did not intend to do it. Basically, we got played into their hands by this. All Zynga wanted was to get the event down since it hurt them bad. I can tell you that Zynga really did notice this and they were not happy with the progress we made on the event. They wanted the event taken down real badly...
We (all the founders/owners) of the trading sites are now trying to come to a decision as to what we are going to do or what will our next move be to make Zynga hurt real bad this time...
Thanks for all your support so far. People who want to boycott the game for now are always welcome to do so, and I am hereby declaring the wall open for trading, until we can come up with an solid plan of action to counteract the menace that is Zynga. Once again, thanks for all your support guys....
I guess the event has been called off as Ram Krish has stated that the wall is open for trading.
ReplyDeleteAs a daily player since April 2009, I can come away with two things on this situation.
ReplyDelete1. There should have been better coordination between of the player groups and agreement on what "our" demands are to be.
2. This is the second time Zynga has fucked with player reps... like the old saying "Fuck me once, shame on you... Fuck me twice, shame on me"
Zynga doesn't give a crap about us as long as they can get cash out of us.
The real boycott should have been, not to buy any RP from Zynga. Playing doesn't really hurt Zynga, the reduction of income from stopping RP purchases does!
I disagree that not playing doesn't hurt Zynga. As posted on this blog before, there is a trend in the graphs. The boycott would have made a pretty nice blip on that graph, one that Zynga could not explain away. They get their negotiating power with Facebook and such because of the volume of users. This means advertisers will pay more money.
ReplyDeleteI wont disagree that it's Zynga's game but I wont agree that they can do what they want because it's free. It ain't free! They said the stopped the ability to trade to level the playing field, but you can still buy skill points, refills and super high end loot, you just get it from Zynga. Part of my game play is I like to fight. I'm in a clan. I'm at a level where I have some pretty good loot that longer helps me. I want to pass it on the the lower level players in my clan. It is suppose to be a social game after all, and it is my loot, I clicked for it and I paid for my reward points etc. They say that trader bog the servers with the high volumes of gifts. So easy to fix, let them transfer bulk items in one transaction. These aren't difficult concepts but they are the reasons that Zynga gives. They just don't hold up to even basic scrutiny. Don't think that my arguments are because I'm a trader. I am definetly not!. I have nothing against it, it's how others play the game. Some fight, some do jobs, some trade etc. I looked into trading when I needed some items, but I can't stand the whole process, I just like the fighting. I do jobs to get loot but I don't want to trade. I give my loot to the lower levels in my clan for free.
It's capitalism, Zynga needs to make money. Sure, but what they are doing is going against that. Lets say I want to build some railguns but I don't have enough parts. Another player with 20,000 energy has tons of weapon parts because they play the way they want. I want those parts. I can pay cash to some traders and get them, but Zynga still makes money. How? Well the energy player has a reason to play and they keep the daily number up, duh, but there is no cash there. Well, how am I going to use all those parts that I just paid another player for? I'm going to buy Reward Points from Zynga and spend them building cars and weapons. If I can't get parts, I don't buy Reward Points, I have no reason to. This can go even further in Zynga's favor. Let say instead of cash for the parts I want, I buy Mafia Wars gift cards and send them to the trader who then buys more energy from Zynga withe Reward Points. I also buy more points to build stuff. Round and round it goes, Zynga making money. Zynga makes it hard for me to play the way I want, hard for the energy player to play the way they want. The numbers go down and nobody needs Reward Points. I really don't want those energy players to go away even if I didn't get loot from them. Have you seen a fight list lately. All Iced already. It loads with dead people. Found one that you think is alive, nope, someone else got them, you just wasted your stamina that you bought from Zynga.
I am the player that Zynga wants. I spend money on the game. I pay that money to Zynga. I'm even a platinum purchaser. Under the current conditions, I wont be doing that again. Then there is the bugs that are never fixed and the slow slow game play. I am a PHP programmer for a living. The same Language that Facebook and Zynga use. I know there is no reason for there to be this many problems. If I wrote code that was even close to as buggy, I'd either be out of work, or I'd be working for Zynga.
I disagree that not playing doesn't hurt Zynga. As posted on this blog before, there is a trend in the graphs. The boycott would have made a pretty nice blip on that graph, one that Zynga could not explain away. They get their negotiating power with Facebook and such because of the volume of users. This means advertisers will pay more money.
ReplyDeleteI wont disagree that it's Zynga's game but I wont agree that they can do what they want because it's free. It ain't free! They said the stopped the ability to trade to level the playing field, but you can still buy skill points, refills and super high end loot, you just get it from Zynga. Part of my game play is I like to fight. I'm in a clan. I'm at a level where I have some pretty good loot that longer helps me. I want to pass it on the the lower level players in my clan. It is suppose to be a social game after all, and it is my loot, I clicked for it and I paid for my reward points etc. They say that trader bog the servers with the high volumes of gifts. So easy to fix, let them transfer bulk items in one transaction. These aren't difficult concepts but they are the reasons that Zynga gives. They just don't hold up to even basic scrutiny. Don't think that my arguments are because I'm a trader. I am definetly not!. I have nothing against it, it's how others play the game. Some fight, some do jobs, some trade etc. I looked into trading when I needed some items, but I can't stand the whole process, I just like the fighting. I do jobs to get loot but I don't want to trade. I give my loot to the lower levels in my clan for free.
It's capitalism, Zynga needs to make money. Sure, but what they are doing is going against that. Lets say I want to build some railguns but I don't have enough parts. Another player with 20,000 energy has tons of weapon parts because they play the way they want. I want those parts. I can pay cash to some traders and get them, but Zynga still makes money. How? Well the energy player has a reason to play and they keep the daily number up, duh, but there is no cash there. Well, how am I going to use all those parts that I just paid another player for? I'm going to buy Reward Points from Zynga and spend them building cars and weapons. If I can't get parts, I don't buy Reward Points, I have no reason to. This can go even further in Zynga's favor. Let say instead of cash for the parts I want, I buy Mafia Wars gift cards and send them to the trader who then buys more energy from Zynga withe Reward Points. I also buy more points to build stuff. Round and round it goes, Zynga making money. Zynga makes it hard for me to play the way I want, hard for the energy player to play the way they want. The numbers go down and nobody needs Reward Points. I really don't want those energy players to go away even if I didn't get loot from them. Have you seen a fight list lately. All Iced already. It loads with dead people. Found one that you think is alive, nope, someone else got them, you just wasted your stamina that you bought from Zynga.
I am the player that Zynga wants. I spend money on the game. I pay that money to Zynga. I'm even a platinum purchaser. Under the current conditions, I wont be doing that again. Then there is the bugs that are never fixed and the slow slow game play. I am a PHP programmer for a living. The same Language that Facebook and Zynga use. I know there is no reason for there to be this many problems. If I wrote code that was even close to as buggy, I'd either be out of work, or I'd be working for Zynga.
all tradeing sites should ban the trading of mw cards for loot for a month or 2 keep all tradeing in game. thats there weak spot.
ReplyDeleteAccording to these two graphs, daily player activity shows a gradual decline after peak usage trends:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/10979261223
http://statistics.allfacebook.com/applications/single/mafia-wars/10979261223/
To the fighter/clan commenter, you got it exactly right. Energy/loot players also buy RP, lots of them to get quantity of loot. Fighters do the same to improve their fighting ability.
ReplyDeleteThis dynamic is what caused the MW game to really take off in popularity. Remove that and you get the opposite - demotivating the main character types in the game to interact at all and shutting down most of the networking aspects.
This game is about chasing fighting loot for the most part to improve our characters and shutting any aspect of the enthusiasm for that down is just about a perfect way to ruin a great game.
So what Zynga has done recently is remove the energy character, for all intents and purposes from the game. It is similar to Mogul now - useless. That is proven by the design for Las Vegas.
Does this make Mafia Wars a better game? Well, I think it is obvious the game has been going downhill for months now coinciding with this slow (by design) shift to the eventual goal of no gifting (of anything worthwhile). Fighters cannot even trade or gift their loot to their family now although Zynga's marketing has done a good job of acting like they are catering to the fighters.
The traders involved in this boycott are in it for themselves just as the clans that have their Skype meetings with Zynga are.
I can't blame them but there is this sort of tunnel vision that takes over and I think people lose sight of what made this game great. It was the interaction of all the player types - well except for the people that had the misfortune of choosing Mogul. This not only should not have been discouraged but encouraged instead.
So, just like the clans did before, it looks to me like the trading groups involved in this jumped at the carrot for a chance to get one of their big problems solved - keeping good loot giftable and ability to move it. They, like the clans, will get screwed over and used by Zynga and be left holding an empty bag. Because imo Zynga has shown by their actions in recent months what they want - no gifting and iron fisted control of not only those items but how players play. They are not going to give that up. They just keep moving right along in carrying this plan out.
I've pretty much done all the roles in this game so I can understand the varying perspectives - clueless punching bag, fighter, trader, seller - of which most went right back into RP for Zynga, gifting machine - because that can be fun too. While I respect the people that try to effect some positive change I think in the end it will just take time for nature to take its course.
Social networking is what made this game rise so much in popularity and social networking can and will take it back down. Only then will Zynga take a serious look at where it all went wrong. $ is the only thing they have an ear for.
While I still play, I have spent $2.50 in the last few months when I used to spend $150 per 700 RP at a time and did this many times. My character is a very balanced one - strong fighter/high stamina/high energy and I have no motivation whatsoever now to spend money on this game.
I have definite ideas on what could change that but that would be another lengthy post. In a nutshell, it involves actual gameplay ideas and the gifting etc. becomes almost a non issue as a result.
Good luck to everybody involved - all player types.