As the Arena is rolling out, many of us have been referring to the FAQ. I must say this is a great piece of work and is more encyclopedic than anything we have seen published by Zynga. The only problem is it’s a little long and many players don’t have the patience to read through it. It’s also hard for players who don’t yet have the Arena to follow. Because of the detailed FAQ, I don’t need to spend my time repeating what is already out there. I decided to make a quick down and dirty guide which will hopefully provide the gist of the Arena. I’m still on the fence as to whether I will utilize this feature regularly. There are pros and cons and it’s too soon to tell.
1. Enter the Arena.
If you get lost or can’t find it, don’t worry there are many ways to arrive. Dumb luck should probably do it but if you have difficulties, click your heels twice and say “There’s No Place Like The Arena”. Once you are in the Arena, you are out of Mafia Wars. Anything you may have going on in other windows won’t work.
2. Get A Room
There are 2 types of rooms. One will cost 100 stamina to join and the other 500 stamina. The main difference is in the stamina costs per attack and the health range for yourself and your opponents. Health hogs do not have a great advantage in the Arena. There is a cap on Arena health and no player can have less than 400/2000 or more than 800/4000. The main rule with health is that Arena Health and Arena Health Refills are not the same thing as your Mafia Wars characters health or Health Refills. They are two different animals.
| Cover | Attack | Power Attack | Health Range |
| 100 | 10 | 50 | 400-800 |
| 500 | 50 | 250 | 2000-4000 |
To pick your room, go to the Lobby and click on the “Join” link of a room already created or intsa join a room by clicking on the “Fight Now 100” or “Fight Now 500” buttons. If a room is not available, this option will create a new one. There is no advantage or difference between joining or creating a room. You may have to wait as no fight will begin until there are 4 players. The Lobby process works just like online poker tournaments.
3. Kill People…Run Out of Stamina….Wait....
Try not to get mesmerized by all the pretty lasers. Just keep jamming and before you know it your stamina will be gone. In case you are worried that these lasers are Flash and will cause havoc, they aren’t. The lasers are made possible by html5.
4. Get Rewards
Once the wait, kill, wait cycle is over, admire your rewards. There isn’t much to get excited about here. The experience/stamina payout isn’t the greatest but not terribly bad. At this time most are reporting a ratio of 2.1 in many different scenarios. I started this Arena with 18,734 stamina and used 18,452 of it. My experience payout was 39,375 giving me a ratio of 2.13. I can do better than that from fighting, robbing or stamina jobs in Las Vegas. The benefit here is that it only took a couple of minutes to burn it.
In addition to the useless for me loot rewards shown above, I got all the same crap that drops from fights and robs. Of all the rewards I received for the Arena fight, only 2 of them have any value to me. The Power Card (which are capped at 10 per day) and the ices.
In this sea of rewards the ices are useful because they count toward Family Progression. For my stamina expenditure of 18,452, I got 12 ices. You can get many more ices from regular fighting so I’m not sure players will use this feature to get their Family Progression ices for the day. If Arena ices could count as 3 or even 4 ices then we would have a winner.
At this time I see the purpose of the Arena to be a stamina dump. When you don’t have a lot of time to play but a lot of stamina to burn, this is one way to get rid of it. All the stamina you bring with you to the Arena can be utilized so this feature will also help prevent players from wasting stamina due to level ups [1]. If you time your trips to the Arena strategically, you can end up with a nice experience bump into the next level.
One thing that some will find useful about the Arena is bullying doesn’t apply. What happens to you outside of the Arena does not affect you inside the Arena. Players who are targets of repeat attacks now have an option to get ices and can no longer state that they can’t play the game.
Not a lot then to get excited about . . . thanks for the low down.
ReplyDeleteI was asking for Arena For Dummies and by gosh you all got it. Thank you. But it does seem that it is nothing to be really excited about. I haven't even got it in my game yet, so no idea of what it is really like. Might have to give it a try and see. Thanks for keeping us all informed.
ReplyDeleteyou did a super job, thanks for doing this just for me, lol ~ Monika
ReplyDeleteI think this would be nice if we could play this in the family, little fights to see who is the strongest in the family.
Zynga have been looking for a way to cut down server traffic from fighting for months. They had two choices, spend hundreds of thousands on network improvements OR get their lazy assed coders to write in game features to burn huge amounts of stamina in one hit! The increased power attack/stamina ratio was a failed example. Looks like they have found a way at last, BURN a load of stamina in seconds. In theory it's a good thing for the game because it should improve their network traffic thus improving 'In Game' performance. Will it be the death of the revolving bullets? I hope so!
ReplyDeleteas already said a lot of speel to make you spend your Rp's another well thought out gimmick to get money into the zyngarobyoublind.com fund
ReplyDeleteMafia wars is a fremium game, so yes they will try and make money where they can. They have to pay ppl and pay shareholders etc, just like other companies. So stop your whining and get over it, or play another game.
DeleteA nice thing about the feature is you don't have to spend reward points. You can still burn your stamina and get a ratio over 2.0 if you burn it all and don't buy any power ups. Your Arena score may not be as good as some but you still get the benefit to fast burn your stamina. The only thing a good Arena score gets you is respect and that is totally useless to your character. So bottom line is if you don't care about your score and use this as a leveling tool, there is no need to spend rps.
Deletethanks for the summary. does not appeal to me very much. am struck with the impression this is something of a weak attempt by Zynga to accord high stamina players something to do perhaps because they screwed up early on by placing far too much emphasis on fighting and not nearly enough on other gaming elements (strategy for example). will give it a shot but am probably unlikely to play this element regularly.
ReplyDeletestrategy wow wished i would see that word more instead of BOTS
Delete(whew) was hoping for this. Thank you, Jennifer. You're a gem.
ReplyDelete~ Frank
If it takes away ice stealers from the FL then im happy. Im low Stam so this will crush me. I already have a tough time getting my ices because all are in att and defense.
ReplyDeleteFor me the good news is - they finally start to give HTML5 a chance. Hopefully they see it is the BEST choice to run a modern browser game. All this crap with Flash causes the real trouble in the game and maybe .. my little wish for 2013 if the world doesnt end on Dec, 21st (lol) is that they start to convert the game step by step into HTML5.
ReplyDeleteI love the html5 element of it. It's so smooth. Wish joining a room was also set up this way. I'm starting to hate hard clicks!
DeleteI am not one of those high stamina players that is in a quandary about what to do with it,so this is not something I will be using
ReplyDeleteI agree that players with a low stamina pool may not find this feature as enjoyable. I have about 19K stamina and often run out before the fight ends (in a 500 using the power attack). Using a stamina refill is an option but I found that you end up with too much experience and level up while you have full energy so it's wasting. If the ratio was always what I could get fighting, I would go anyway just to get the fast experience and not worry about my score.
DeleteThanks for all this info. You did great job again. I was wishing that the Arena would be something for our families, as so many members are just getting bored icing, icing, icing all day and night. But of course not, why set my standards so high when all it will do is crush any enthusiasm I may have left for the game. When will they ever wise up?
ReplyDeleteThat is a good idea. The Arena is brand new and in beta so the developers are really listening to feedback at this time. I'm sure the feature will evolve. Since there are so many similarities to the online poker tournament process, I could see them adding options to the joining process in the future. Maybe let players host private rooms where they control who joins. The only problem with that I can see is the players who have tons of minis will just fight their minis and exploit it but honestly who cares? If they want to go through all that trouble then why not.
Delete(y) I will start playing again if that happand.
ReplyDeletewow another copyright infringement... funny how much effort you go to at making sure other people don't rip off the stuff you have stolen from zynga, and at the same time you steal rights from other corporations too... guess you missed out the ethics classes somewhere along the line
ReplyDeleteYou must be from one of the sites who I constantly have to file DCMA reports on. The difference is I actually know what is a copyright violation and what is not. You should maybe read up on it because you are clueless. Type in "for dummies" in google and see what you get. There are entire web sites devoted to it and multiple generator tools. If the maker of the for dummies book series felt posting their image was a violation, a good chuck of the internet would be in violation. Go back to school on this topic as you lack understanding. It's not unethical for me to use a generator tool and post it on my blog but it is unethical for other sites to pull my concepts, words and images and post them as their own. I will continue to report the ones that do and google will continue to remove their content out of the search engines. Not a big punishment but halts their growth. There is a reason this site keeps growing and the ones that just copy it don't. Eventually people figure out the real source and the prefer to go to the site that actually does the work.
DeleteI didn't publish your next comment because none if it is true and just shows that you are the pathetic one and not me. Sorry your site isn't doing well. If you think mine isn't growing, scroll to the bottom to see the page loads then compare that to any other site out there. Just face the facts that I know what I'm doing. As far as working for Zynga, that is something I wouldn't want and as far as saying I never will work for them, I already have when they hired me to write for their blog so please get your facts straight before trying to troll a better site than yours. And please for the love of crap, learn the basics of copyright law. Your ignorance about it is laughable.
Deletewtf... after the tutorial.. i only get black blank page when i enter the fight.. then i get the result.. not able to att etc.. demnnn
ReplyDeleteVery common problem. The #1 reason is you have another window of Mafia Wars open. It's best to close all windows and tabs before entering the Arena.
DeleteCheers! Lootlady does it again! When will Z come to their senses??..( as of yet, not sure if they have any..)
ReplyDeleteI.VE NOTICED SINCE STARTING JUST TODAY THAT MY MAFIA WARS PAGE IS SLOWER THAN NORMAL, I WONDER IF THE ARENA IS THE CULPRIT?
ReplyDeletei like it, good way to get my ices in a real short time :)
ReplyDeleteI would like to know if there is a secret to getting good loot. Sometimes I get 1st or 2nd and the rewards are poor and other times I get lower places and get better rewards. This happened several times. Then I had another good win and got one power card and thats all. Is it a fluke or is there a strategy to scoring the good loot? Maybe it has something to do with how many shots you fire rather than placing? Anyone got a theory?
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone here use Torch ? - can not get to the arena - goes to a white screen then back to mafia wars home page. How do I fix the problem ?
ReplyDelete