Sunday, May 15, 2011

Declare War Chat featurette

The Declare ware feature was updated recently with the new Chat interface... First the basics


Click Chat, Get the permissions Popup. Click to give permissions, and then click to give permissions AGAIN


After you have given the permissions you should get the following popup in the middle of your screen, it should list players that are online and play Mafia Wars, so you can ask for help in your Wars
During my test, I actually logged into a Second account to try and ask for help from my account, Nope no luck, asked around and found another 5 players who where online at the time, had chat running, and where playing Mafia Wars... None of them came up as options either


This seems like another Epic Zynga Fail, 126 People ONLINE according to Facebook, and not one came up as a option to ask for help from

If you happen to find someone who is online and Zynga lets you send a message... This is a copy of what's sent, Dont expect to see this on your game, these message are sent without your knowledge, and wont popup like this


That's it, "Hey there, Please help me in my War. Tinyurl-here"

Now this is where the complaints start, First if anyone remembers the Link-A-Nator, when it was using the TinyURL Service there was many a day when the Tinyurl service had been overloaded, and Mafia Wars leaning on it isn't going to help!
The Second problem is ANYONE can type a message in the chat interface and drop in a TinyURL that could go to anything, and you would never be the wiser.... We all warn other users on Facebook not to click on TinyURLs that you don't know where they go, you don't click on anything you aren't 100% sure of specially with all the virus and scams going around Facebook every other week
Now if Team Spockholm can make their own TinyURL service the spockon.me redirects, Why can't Zynga? Why cant they make a http://zyn.ga/MafiaWars/my-war-url-here at least then it wouldn't be a public service, we would all know that its safe to click!
Lastly, if your Facebook account is hacked, Mafia Wars already has permission to auto publish to chat, How long is it going to take till the next round of virus use these automated chat messages to spread and exploit more players?

Thanks Zynga and the Mafia Wars Studio, this has to be the worst idea you have come up with so far, you have successfully put every account in danger, as well playing Mafia Wars a lot more dangerous for your Facebook account!

Well the Chat option makes 3 of the 4 updates we where promised, The good news is its fairly hard to stuff up click to heal, But we know Zynga will try their hardest to do so!

No comments:

Post a Comment