Atlantic City Mobile

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I got into the beta test group for Atlantic City Mobile.  I've reviewed what is known so far in the two previous articles I wrote about it (1),(2).  Now that the feature is available to me, it all makes a lot more sense now.  The first thing I found odd was that you don't even need a phone and can complete the entire destination on your PC.  I asked what the point of calling it mobile was and Bossy Don explained that it's a mobile site so it has ultra low bandwidth and is designed for the small screens like you see on mobile phones. You might as well look at this as brand new city with limited features (this is very nice to think about with Italy looming in the very new future).  You get skill points for completing each job so it wouldn't be strategically wise to blow it off.  You can't really ignore it because it shows up on a game banner and on your home page message box.  If you happen to miss these, it's also one of the destinations on your travel bar.

If you travel to Atlantic City via the travel bar, you will be directed to the page that tells you some of the details.

You have to go to the mobile website http://m.mafiawars.com/mobileweb in order to start working on Atlantic City.

You must be logged into your Facebook account before you will get in.

If you don't have access, you will get the "Mafia Wars for mobile web is currently in beta testing. Check back soon" message.

When you get access, you will get the home screen with 5 tabs on it.

You can also get a bonus once every 24 hours.  I got 100 stamina points today.  I'm not sure what the other bonus are.

You can navigate the site from the home page above or from the drop bar in the upper left corner under you profile picture.

1.  Profile
The information available on your "mobile" profile page is all over the place.  Your Facebook profile image, Mafia Wars name, level, and experience needed to level up are located in the upper left corner.  Your mafia size and un-vaulted Las Vegas currency is in the center.  Your title, number of jobs completed and number of fights won, stamina,energy, health, attack, and defense is below.

On the far upper right corner is a drop bar that contains your current energy, stamina, health, cash, and reward points.

From the drop bar you can heal yourself.  There are no options to heal in other cities so you will have to use Las Vegas currency to do so.  If you're short on Vegas chips, leave your regular Mafia Wars account open in a different window and heal yourself in your city of choice.

You can also vault your Las Vegas currency from the drop bar.  If your vault is at full capacity, this feature will be useless to you.

2.  Properties
You can collect on all 5 destination properties.  It's a lot easier to do it here than it is from your regular game. You don't have to do any travelling and collect all properties on one page.  I stopped collecting on properties in Cuba, Moscow, Bangkok and even Las Vegas.  The only ones worth going through multiple windows for are in New York.  I plan on collecting from my other cities now.

3.  Inventory
You can see some of your inventory from Atlantic City.  The first category is the inventory items that are needed to perform jobs.  These are also Las Vegas inventory items.

The second inventory category is called Special Loot and these are the items that will drop while performing jobs in Atlantic City.  These are also all from Las Vegas.

4.  Jobs
There are currently 2 chapters available in Atlantic City.  Each one has 6 jobs to perform and each job has 4 levels of mastery.  I've only completed the Bronze Level on each.  Click on the images to see the energy requirements and the experience and cash payouts for each job.  I calculated the exp/energy ratios and they range from 1.32-1.43 for Chapter 1 and 1.36-1.41 for Chapter 2.  I hope these improve once I get to the higher levels of mastery.

Chapter 1 Jobs

Chapter 2 Jobs

All of the loot items listed in the Special Loot inventory will drop while performing jobs.  It was hard to calculate a loot drop rate because I have limited energy on my main account and there was no bookmarklet to keep track of it for me.  I did notice that loot didn't drop very often.

What's really nice about the mobile site is there are no pop-ups.  When you run out of energy, it says "Need Energy" in red and in the bottom left corner, you are told the time frame of when you will accumulate enough energy to perform the job.  There is no pressure to buy reward points.

When you master all 6 jobs, you move on to the Silver Level of mastery.

I took screen shots of my skill points before and after I completed the Bronze Level of Chapter 1.  I'm glad I did this because there is not any notification that you received a skill point when you master a job.This is why everybody need to complete Atlantic City.  You will miss out on the many skill points that are available in this destination.  I leveled up twice before I mastered the first level of Chapter 1 (10 skill points).  I did received the 6 skill points for mastering each job.

I went ahead and mastered the Bronze Level of Chapter 2 so I could see if there was a Chapter 3.  There isn't for now.

5.  Fighting
Fighting in Atlantic City was difficult because there is no way to tell from the fight list offered which targets are already iced.  This is very important because iced target will gain you minimal experience and no loot drops.  The only way I was able to figure it out was while I was attacking.  An iced target will only yield 1 or 2 experience points and there will be no loot drops.  If this seems to be happening, it's time to move to a different target.

When you initiate a fight, you will find your current health, stamina, attack/defense skills and mafia size.  Your overall equipment scores aren't listed anywhere. You get a list of your best 4 offensive equipment items and your opponents 4 best defensive items, the damage you suffered and caused, and the experience and cash that you gained.  It's a lot easier to attack from the mobile site because it's much faster and you can attack iced target as many times as you like without having to refresh the page. There is no Power Attack option.

When you ice an opponent, you move on by clicking "Back to Fights!"

When you lose a fight or decide you want a new fight list so you you can attack a different target, you have to go back to the main drop bar and click fights again.

The same loot that drops from our main game will also drop here.  I got all kinds of building parts and Cuba, Moscow, Bangkok, and High End Fighting Loot.

When your health runs out, you get a notification and can heal yourself right away.

Just like with the jobs, when you run out of stamina you are simply told "You do not have enough stamina to keep fighting".  Either Zynga couldn't figure out how to create pop-ups for the mobile page or they get that we already know that we can keep fighting if we use reward points for a stamina refill.

During the course of play, I was promoted a few times.  I received the promotion notification and had the option to add skill points to my stats. You can also add them from the profile page.  I both cases, you can only add one at a time and not 5 like we can do from our main Mafia Wars profile page.  I also wasn't told I received a reward point for my even numbered level up.

Another thing that will seem very familiar to you is the spinning bullets. There seems to no escaping this.  Zynga revamped the image and you will find the mini version on the mobile website. It's fast and it's everywhere.  Bossy Don was able to capture it, combine it with some older pictures I took, and created the image below(1).
(image from TopMafia.Info)

This is the part where I planned to show you images from my phone.  I was going to be the grand finale of this post. The ironic thing about Atlantic City Mobile is I couldn't get there with my mobile phone. I tried with my Blackberry and had no luck.  I remembered the initial instructions from our main game state that it's optimized for the iPhone or Android mobile browsers. I then tried accessing the mobile website from an iPhone and had no luck.  I hope they fix this soon because I think it will be great to have the ability to do so much in Mafia Wars when I can't be on line.
Da Irish Kid has also been working on Atlantic City and you can check for updates on the Mafia Wars Wiki Atlantic City Page.