Welcome Mafia Wars Game Designer TeeBS!!

Hey there Mafia Wars fans!

I’m a Systems Game Designer on Mafia Wars. Now what that means is that I’m the guy that is involved in making sure that all the numbers, balance and stats in the game make a great gaming experience for all types of players. It’s awesome to get feedback, both and positive and negative, from the fans of this game. It’s the passion that you show as fans which makes this game so great.

As Mafia Wars heads into its third year, there are a lot of decisions made and game structures created at the time of the game’s release that really didn’t account for Mafia Wars being played by over 20 million players per month. One of these game features that couldn’t account for the game’s rapid growth is the Top Mafia reward. Top Mafia (previous to the recent change) provided a reward if you had high-level friends in your Top Mafia in certain positions (and an additional bonus if you were in a friend’s Top Mafia). We in the design team refer to these bonuses as “passive” rewards, as once you had set up your friends, you didn’t have to do anything to maintain the bonus. Now from a game designer’s perspective, this is pretty troublesome, as we are giving away free progress (in the form of Energy discounts and rebates) for little interaction in the game. Since leveling up resulted in a full energy, health, and stamina refill, it eventually lead to some of the high-level energy players being able to level up many more times in a single session. This leveling boost was against the spirit of play we intended for Mafia Wars.

We as a game creation studio go through a tremendous amount of research and discussion about each change we make to the game, and below is a little example of that analysis. The following is a graph of typical high energy players playing in New York (the Mafia Wars city, not the real life city ), and how much all the accumulated energy rewards gains for each player per level. The left axis is the player level, and the bottom axis refers to the percentage of XP required to complete level. As you can see, the Top Mafia reward accounts for a very large percentage of passive XP each level.

Why is this situation so bad that we felt we needed to change the Top Mafia rewards? To be perfectly honest, the current passive XP reward situation put us in a big bind when it came to creating exciting rewards for the vast majority of players. Also creating a big chasm between the high energy players and the more stamina heavy fighting players. We’re not going to sugar-coat the reality of this change for the power energy players. Some of you will initially be affected negatively. We are making this change to allow us to improve the entire game to be even more awesome as a whole. What this will do is share more experience to all Mafia Wars players, allowing the community to make it an even more social experience for all involved.

In the coming weeks and months, the Mafia Wars team is rolling out an aggressive number of new features that are targeted at the “fighter”/stamina focused players. As you can see with robbing, stamina is becoming a more important stat in the game, and this will be even truer with the introduction of Fight Club (which will provide fighters with a private Marketplace), Street War and Vegas Tournament Fighting. You’ll soon see an awesome revamp for Boss Fighting. Each of these fighting-centric features takes fights to the next level, and will make you care even more about how you defend your turf against other players. Player vs. Player interaction via fights has always been one of my favorite things about Mafia Wars.

If you are a fan of current fighting, we are not changing normal city-based fighting in any fundamental way (other than the exciting addition of the Animal type), so you should feel free to continue to add Skill Points to your Attack and Defense stats. Fighting will soon allow you to win victory tokens, which will give you the chance to purchase cool new loot in the Fight Club area of the Marketplace!

Ultimately, I would like to let all our players know that we try to listen to each different opinion they have and truly have their best interests at heart. We understand that some of our decisions may adversely affect some players (and some help them too), but it is for a greater goal of making this the best game experience that our users can have.

Until next time, may your Mafia be massive!

-TeeBS

System Game Designer , Mafia Wars

BOOKMARK THIS PAGE SHARE WITH YOUR FRIENDS AND CHECK BACK REGULARLY FOR FUTURE MAFIA WARS UPDATES