Loot Advertisements

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I got an interesting e-mail today and based on some comments from previous posts it's feel a topic I need to address.

If you look to the left, right or bottom of a post on my blog, chances are you will see a loot service advertisement. Since Italy loot became giftable, they have been quite popular and many of you are clicking on them.

I use several third party advertising services and they select which ads will appear on my blog. As you can see, I earn money whenever you click on an ad.

If you go to the Mafia Wars Wiki, you will see the same thing.

The advertising services make a lot more than me. The small amount of revenue does help off set the cost of all the Reward Points I buy to better document, explain the game and perform studies to gather statistics. Mike Nestor and I were the same level when I first started writing this blog. You can see by our current levels that most of my Reward Points have not gone into playing the game strategically. Yeah I know I'm a Mogul but I recently changed that because the last money achievement is the only thing I don't have in the game.

Any game with a virtual economy will end up with a black market. Mafia Wars is no exception. What Zynga does to monitor and control the black market is only known to them. The Community Management Team are not the game police and Zynga has their own Security Team lead by the person known as the Dark Knight (1). If you feel compelled to report activity that is against the TOS do so by sending an e-mail to INSIDERTIP@MafiaWars.com. Don't report things to me or use the comment section of my blog. I'm not the game police either. To learn more about virtual economies and how they apply to the real world go here. For more on the online gaming black market read this excellent article titled Real money trading--the black market of on-line gaming by AJ Glasser.

"Real money trading is not illegal in the same way that the government says you can't sneak into someone's house and steal their stuff. That's clearly illegal -- but [RMT] is not criminal. It's only illegal in the sense that you could land in court if [game developers] decide to sue you and most of them won't."/Greg Lastowka Rutgers University law professor

If you have more than a few hundred players in your mafia, chances are you probably get inbox messages on a regular basis from someone selling loot. Here is one with the latest prices of the top Italy loot.

The existence of a black market in any online game can help with player retention as it helps to keep many players engaged. In a few lines of code, Zynga could easily squash the entire black market. Your guess is as good as mine as to why they don't sell giftable loot items in the Marketplace at a comparable price to what you can get the items for on the black market. I can only speculate that maybe they want a black market to exist.

So back to the question at hand. Is it wrong to have advertisements for services that are against the TOS on my blog? Probably. The only way I can stop it is to remove all advertising services and make zero revenue. In effect I indirectly benefit from the black market. Unless Zynga decides to squash the black market or pay exclusive advertising rights to the sites that get the most traffic, you will continue to get inbox messages and see ads from loot service providers. Message Parlors that offer happy endings are illegal where I live. That doesn't stop them from existing on every street corner or advertising in just about every magazine and newspaper in Las Vegas. I guess it's kind of like that.

Article written by Jennifer Patterson, Creator of the MW Loot Lady Blog, The Mafia Wars Loot Lady Facebook Fan Page and Co-Host of The Informant Podcast. All material is protected by copyright law