Top Mafia has finally turned Two, Just a month before Mafia Wars turns Three!
So in 2 Years of Mafia Wars and Top Mafia whats changed?
Well TopMafia Started out small, on the 13th of May 2009 The First TopMafia Fan page was born!
Back then there was no one else posting any news, reviews, or giving any real insights into game play. In just over 2 months we Rose from just a handful of Fans to over 90,000 fans! As well as starting the first Mass Add Email list!
Top Mafia - Adds, Invites, Tips, Tricks, Etc. was also the first to enforce the No Spam Policy with this little image here.
Naming and Shaming those who posted Add Me's on the wall!
And something we started Over 2 years ago, is still adopted by MANY Mafia Wars fan pages today, Still removing and banning players who comment with Add Me's still adding these players to Spammer lists!
But on the 22nd of July 2009 Facebook disabled more then half of the admin's Facebook accounts, and blocked the pages publishing rights. To this day we still DO NOT have a answer as to why we lost publishing rights, or why the admin's accounts where disabled in the first place
This is where "Boss Don" my first account a Fighter account, with over 4,000 God Father Points (Old fashioned RP) spent on it was lost, and Facebook still hasn't answered me as to why it was disabled in the first place......
With no answer from Facebook after 2 days, and only some of our admin's getting their Facebook accounts back we decided that time couldn't wait and we needed to keep doing what we do, to continue with the fan Page, So on the 24th of July 2009 TopMafia Disabled came into life
TopMafia - Disabled was originally a fan page to use for a few days whilst we waited on Facebook to get back to us, and restore our original page back to its glory. Days turned into Weeks, and weeks into months, and the new fan page became our home... Back in 2009 Zynga was unreachable for support at the best of times, and was no help in the matter of disabled accounts unlike now were they have support systems for disabled Facebook accounts. As for Facebook support was as good as it is right now, send a email and you MIGHT get a reply this year.... Maybe..... if your lucky
During our stay at our new home, we followed Mafia Wars as we had done in the past, posting both news and updates as they happened, as well as re-posting old tips for players that may of missed them in the past, Doing give-away's every month if not more often, as well as answering players questions as often as we could. We continued our Ban on Spam, and perfected the Mass Add Email Lists.
In the 10 Months we posted over 1,100 posts, and Gained over 60K fans, 15 Million Views and kept you the Fans up to date!
TMD as it was more commonly known became such a big hit, it lead us to create the first public forums for Mafia Wars. One that wasn't limited by Zynga's Terms of service and allowed for free speech of the game, the bugs, the glitches, as well as all 3rd party tools. In fact quite a few of the script writers had their own subsections, and most bookmarklets were tested in house by the TopMafia Team before going public, Arun creator of
Brawler was once part of the TopMafia Forums team, as where many others, at our Peak we had over 30 Admins, just to keep the page & forums running, and making sure that information was posted as soon as it was available! TMD has lead to many offshoots, the
Mafia Wars Manic can be seen in her first post ever
here referencing our forums, the group that is
Mafia Task Force are all Ex TopMafia Admins, and the
MWLootLady also referenced our forums
time and
time again.
But during TMD's life time we saw many changes, Script writers came and went!
Bobby Heartrate of "Bobby Heartrate's Mafia Tools" Retired, Vern of "
Verns MW Tools" also Retired, EZK a Ex TopMafia Admin creator of "EZ Knight's MafiaWars Tools" also Retired from the game, Dirti Martini of "
Dirti Martini Item Analyzer" also retried passing his work on to "
Blofeld's Mafia Wars Tools" Who Last heard sold his domain and the Analyser script.
lastly I had the pleasure of meeting Martin the Founder of
Spockholm, another Constant in Mafia Wars History it seems, Martin was always hard at work developing scripts to make Mafia Wars just a little bit easier. Martin welcomed advice, as well as ideas for new scripts and maintained a long list of his own scripts, finally expanding the team of one to include
Pistol Pete, and Eike and changing Spockholm into Team Spockholm, Script central for Mafia Wars!
Team Spockholm picked up the slack maintaining others scripts when their authors retired from the game or Zynga threw a curve ball update and broke everything overnight. And they have become a stable in the game as well as a force to represent 3rd party tools inside Zynga games!
In this time the Game did Change!
Cuba,
Moscow and
Bangkok were all added, The Daily Chance was introduced, Bringing us our first taste of
SPAM, We worked out the
Combat calculations, Shortly afterwards Zynga changed the
Combat calculations completely,
Declare War was first added,
Rackets were added for some accounts, We asked questions of Zynga, that never
got answered, The Godfather Crates got revamped, and
Cuban Crates were released, for the first time having stats that where better then in game loot, Stamina no longer cost 2 Skill points, Zynga rolled out a limit time event that happened to be timed for the same weekend as the second
Boycott, Oh and the first
Class action Law Suit again Zynga started, Robbing was
removed and finally
came back to us 5 Months later!, Oh Zynga did their first contest, letting you
suggest a name for limited edition loot, And the Chop Shop and Weapons Deport were
added to the game, With 5 Stamina for a Rebel 2 and 5 Energy for a Solar Flare!!
But that's just the highlights! So much changed in the core of the game, With the decrease in the cost of Stamina, Health became ever so important, more and more players put skill points into health, At The Same time Fighters Changed with the addition of the Chop Shop, rather then having the same amount of skill points in attack as defence as your level, players started having 1 and a half times, or 2 times their level in attack and defence, and Finally Energy accounts became the Rage! With the rising energy costs of Moscow, furthered by the Rising money and Energy costs in Bangkok many players started making extra accounts, going to the fightlist and finding someone who auto healed, and levelled every 10-15 minutes was common. And a Energy account wasn't ever considered a 'good' account till it had over 10K Energy!
Finally the Spam, this was the first year of Mafia Wars that started the Spam, as well as our first taste of Popups...
When Mafia Wars first Started, Life was simple, do some jobs, fight some people and ask for some help! and you where done for the night, the only thing you had to time your life around was a energy pack every 23 hours....
But the game changed slowly at first, adding more spam with the Daily chance, and giving players the ability to "share" their tickets, Like anyone cared that the 5 numbers you chose were, 1-2-3-4-5? Clicking on the posts gave nothing to anyone who clicked, it was just pointless Spam It got so bad that the first ANTI-Mafia Wars Spam page was made
Keep Your Balls Off My Wall!. Zynga after seeing the amount of Spam people would publish JUST because the option was there decided this was a good thing! And oh how did the SPAM increase, Slowly at first, they added more
popups for buying items in the
marketplace and more
events, But back then
events where FUN! and people looked forward to them!
During the reign of TMD we also had the down time, once or twice a week Mafia Wars would go down for a hour or two. These where great, we knew that this is when the updates were installed, this always lead to a hour of pressing F5 waiting for the game to load!
To bad these have been replaced with the "slow rollout" method instead. With some roll outs being so slow they they are removed before they even get to all players Many players missed out on Mini Energy packs! Not to mention Rackets!
Iceing was
ADDED to the game, Yep when Mafia Wars first came out there wasn't such a thing as ICING a player! and yet ANOTHER
popup was added for the ICE
After TMD had been our home for 10 months, we decided it was time for yet another change, between our own domain and the Topmafia Blog, it was time to start looking at our fan page and incorporating our domain into the fan page..... On our first birthday the Last fan page was started
TopMafia.info for the past year this has been our current home, serving us well in its service, the No Spam policy has been enforced, and the number of admins have slowly dropped off till I being the last who remained.... In the 10 months of service before swapping over to Blogger 1,195 posts were made there are 35,000 Fans, and 45Million views of the fan page!
Thats more then any other MW News Fan page!
During out second year, Our original blog was finally decommissioned after someone hacked the database (thanks for that by the way!), and our forums suffered data corruption and we had to start again. We had a bit more luck with our
forums, 2nd time around and now they are finally stable, but due to the overwhelming demand of just keeping up with Mafia wars, there are now less competitions run by TopMafia, and now there is hardly a chance to re-post something that's old again.
Being the lone admin, I finally got around to organising the
photos and the method of storing them on the Fan page, so things could be found and referenced back to, But with Facebooks limit of 1 photo per album per hour, that finally made me push away from the Facebook platform and into the Blogging method of posting that you see today
The game we all play called Mafia wars never stopped changing
Las Vegas,
Italy and
Brazil were all released
Animals made it into our game... Still not sure why... we had our first out of game promotion the
7-11 Promotion, Zynga registered
Zyngalive.com and we all hoped for a REAL Social platform to game on! Instead the fighting with Facebook started, a week later the two children stopped their infighting after
signing a bit of paper... The Gift Safe House was renamed into the
Crime Spree that we all know today, The year of the cross promotion started, With
Poker,
Vampire Wars,
FarmVille and
Treasure Isle, and
CafeWorld! Mafia Wars Finally turned
2 and the Daily
checklist was added.
Oh and the
Tagged Glitch, The TopMafia
Nerf, the Loyalty program was released, and
Cracked, And the New York Boss Agostino Cleto started a
Music CareerWith Zynga's Previous year of Spam they decided to up the stakes and throw even MORE
Spam at us! Zynga decided that All players were bots, well all REAL players were being caught by the
anti-botting system yet the bots kept playing 'undetected'!
The End result of the Second Year of Mafia wars? The player base started falling away in droves dropping
4Million players in just 2 weeks..... and the numbers haven't slowed down yet!
Now with under 10Million Monthly players and 1.5 Million Daily players You would think they would listen a bit and slow down after the Year of SPAM
But with Home pages like this and 7 Tabs of things to notice, 5 Events all going on at the same time, Some of which I've finished others I'm still working on, its all become to much!
So after 2 Years of doing my best to be objective about Mafia Wars, post tricks and tips as soon as I can, not to mention all the glitches and bugs over the last 2 years.... 2 Years of putting up with players pointing out that I'm wrong over this detail or that detail, tell me I'm doing it wrong, that my spelling sucks my grammar is worse! Being told off for posting glitches, Like Zynga doesn't know about them, its all over the news feeds already!
Being ICED and sat on for days, just because someone didn't agree with my post... and for those idiots that have to drop the comment "old news that came out hours ago" I'd like to point out that Zynga use to roll out updates at 11pm, that was nice, it was 4pm my time and I was always the first to post! Now they roll things out around 11am, which is 4AM my time... enough said?
In last 2 years I've my best to better the game with my
Letter to the Devs posts and the
2nd edition reformatted to be Zynga compatible,
posting and
reposting bugs, talking directly to the head of customer support as well as the community managers, signing Non-disclosure statements, and joining the PAC months later all in a effort to try and improve the problems we all see inside the game.
So after 2 years of trying to follow Mafia Wars, as well as play the actual game, I have finally decided its time to step away from the daily grind that is Mafia Wars, stop trying to post every update that comes out to the game, specially as the last few Months as Zynga have decided to turn up the heat and deliver more and more back to back events, leading to more and more posts, and less time actually playing the game I'm writing about!
So what does all that mean for Me and TopMafia? Well we aren't out yet, you will still find news and posts on TopMafia, sure there are going to be less of them, they are going to be less objective and a lot more FUN
I hope, much more like our
Release notes I was doing in the past, as they were FUN to post!
Sure you will still see our
City Recaps, as well as other posts from time to time. But being objective and trying to get 4-5 posts per day, wont be happening any more.... Instead I'm going to try to spend more time playing the game, and making sure my life doesn't revolve around a keyboard and a blog! Now all I need is Zynga to make Italy and Brazil loot DROP so I actually have something to do in the game!
But in saying all that, This is defiantly not the end of TopMafia, there are still unfinished projects to be completed, and I will continue with my work in the PAC, trying to bring this game back to what we all enjoyed, rather then the Event ridden popup spamfest we have been experiencing for the last year!
So for the moment
Tchau from Brazil, and remember after 2 Years of TopMafia, we will still be around, even if we aren't in your news feeds every day!
Quick PAC Update: Gifting Events