Myspace Mobsters Basic Background Info
The past year in the world of online social gaming has seen the rise of turncoats and thieves, a fitting backdrop to two of the industry’s frontrunning applications, Mob Wars and Mafia Wars, games designed to run on networking sites like Facebook and Myspace.
Take Mob Wars creator David Maestri, a.k.a. Jason Gilbert, the pseudonym intended to hide his identity in January of 2008, when his game began to rake in revenue at a rate that later peaked at a million dollars a month. The game gets users to fill out online surveys and apply for services to receive favor points from ‘The Godfather’(assuming they’re not willing to buy them straight up with a credit card).
At the time, Maestri was employed at Freewebs, the parent company of SGN (Social Gaming Network), and anything he created should, according to his contract, have been the intellectual property of that company. Despite this fact SGN’s suit against Maestri failed, their only concessions an undisclosed cash sum along with the right to produce similar text-based mafia games in the future. SGN’s ‘Mafia:Respect and Retaliation’ was released to the iPhone app store this February, sporting 3-D graphics along with offline functionality.
Meanwhile, Maestri finds himself on the opposite end of the brawl. He’s sueing Zynga, a company with a superstar cast of developers and idea-men, among them founding figures of MTV, Friendster, Freeloader and Tribe, that seems to have ripped off Maestri’s game in every important way, changing only trivial details of storylines, categories, and even titles. As of a few months past, Mafia War’s active-user count has superseded that of Mob Wars by two hundred thousand, weighing in at 2.7 million.
The outcome of Maestri’s suit will carry important legal implications for matters of intellectual property, especially considering the host of other clones popping up on the web, which threaten to render Maestri’s vendetta as hopeless as the music industry’s war on piracy.
Gaming tactics are the subject of many a forum and Facebook group. Some favor the Bulletproof boss, whose faster health regeneration allows him to engage in more prize-fighting, or the Tycoon’s faster pay-offs, which allow him to do more business. Still others prefer the higher energy levels of the Insomniac, by which he can accrue more experience by doing more jobs. One thing everyone needs to keep in mind is that it’s best to do everything in bulk. The bigger your mob, the more enemies you can take on, so start adding, deleting your new ‘friends’only once they’ve joined your posse. The bigger your property portfolio, the greater your hourly cash-flow, and the bigger the inventory you can maintain to equip your mob with the best armor, weapons and transportation. The trick to developing a big property portfolio is to wait until you have enough cash to buy, say, ten of a given property type, as their prices increase with each purchase.
As for shortcuts to big money, one sneaky tactic involves the Hitlist, on which high rankers with money to shred frequently post rewards in the hundreds of millions. By striking the killing blow to mobsters already weakened by other attacks, players can defeat bosses vastly more experienced than themselves, thus reaching the upper echelons of the game without the drudgery of honest criminal living.
Of course, if you like you could always pay for favor points, fill in the online surveys or apply for services you probably don’t need. Alternatively, you could get into the roguish, cutthroat spirit of things, and become a cheater. There are a range of Javascript-based add-ons (like those available at userscripts.com) that allow mobsters to automate gameplay. These apps can run indefinitely on their own, reaching humanly impossible levels of experience. They’re the secret of most of the game’s top players, and aside from the introduction of a few inneffectual Captcha systems, the maintenance crew have done virtually nothing to stop them - silent acknowledgement, perhaps, that in gaming, as in business, fair play just lands you sleeping with the fishes.
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