I never got into the “social gaming” back when MySpace was the big thing. Though that was probably because I hated visiting MySpace for anything other than getting info on a band or artist that I liked. Back then, I hardly visited Facebook. The something changed, and I started spending a lot more time on Facebook. I really cannot say what it was, though it probably had something to do with all my friends, family and coworkers being on there.
At any rate I slowly dove into the “social gaming” aspect. First it was the stupid quizzes and the things like “which 80′s rock band are you?” I’ll admit, every once in a while I still run through those stupid things just to see what they say. Out of every game I tried, the one game that stuck with me forever was Mafia Wars by Zynga. It was simple, fast, and something that only needed a few minuets a day to play… the perfect game to jump into before heading off to work or while I was waiting on my wife to finish getting ready. Back then, the simple interface could even be operated through my iPhone while I was out of town. It wasn’t the best user experience, but it did work.
Despite the simplicity of the game, one thing was obvious if you wanted to have any level of success in the game. You needed people on your mafia. Now, here is where things start getting frustrating. To add someone to your mafia, you have to be a friend with the person on Facebook. This alone is bad on some many levels, especially if you don’t know the person, but we’ll skip on over that detail.
Like most players, I added people via a mass email list. This hooks you up with hundreds of other mafia wars players, but also adds hundreds of people to your friends list. If you are smart, you then have to go in and assign each person, to a group where you have restricted the permissions as to what they can see about you. Facebook doesn’t offer an easy method to do this, so you have to go through your list clicking and clicking and clicking some more. Hopefully you get everyone. This process could be so much easier if Facebook would add a “friends not in a group” filter.
Now that you’ve gotten all the people you don’t know in a limited account things should be good, right? Nope. First, you simply have to hope that the settings work as intended, and a bug or change in Facebook’s privacy policy or business practice doesn’t open the group to see your information.
Now with all of your hard work in filter those people you don’t know out, you still see all of their wonderful and often not in your language posts appear on your wall. Now you get to go through and hide each person from appearing on your wall. Splendid. Oh, and once they are hidden, you would expect it to stay that way, right? If you happen to use a mobile Facebook application, like Facebook for the iPhone, all of those people you have hidden appear on your wall. Why? Because the stupid Facebook iPhone app doesn’t recognize the stupid hide flag.
Filtering the friends was a pain in the ass, but Zynga and Facebook have another one that sucks just as much. Notification, wall posts, and all of that other crap.
Now that you have your Mafia built up to 500 or more, you’ve got a bunch of people that want to send you stuff in game or have you send stuff. Thankfully, Facebook has this not-so-great thing called the notification screen. Before I quit playing, I would easily see over 100 notifications from Mafia Wars where people had sent gifts, requested gifts, requested to join my mafia, and whatever else it is they send notifications about. Unfortunately, aside from the pending mafia requests, there isn’t a way to accept/decline all. So it’s a constant back and forth between Facebook and Mafia Wars… 100 requests can easily be 200 or more mouse clicks. I’m sure that is great for Facebook and Zynga’s page numbers. It sucks from a user experience.
Remember that simple but effective UI that I mentioned earlier in this long winded post? A few months ago Zynga decided that simple wasn’t good, and they added a bunch of crap using FLASH. Right away, there went my ability to do anything in the game via my iPhone. It really didn’t bother be that I couldn’t play on my iPhone any more, since now I usually VNC into my system when I’m on the road. What did piss me off was there is nothing that the game does that should require flash. As a result, I now had a game that was annoying the hell out of me with notifications AND a useless web technology.
When I thought Zynga couldn’t possibly make things any worse we start getting these messages that notifications are going away soon (thank God!) and that we will need to share our email with Zynga. What?!?! Now all of that crap that use to be on my Facebook notifications is now going to be in my email?! No thanks. Oh yeah, you can also get SMS updates for all of the stuff to. Lord help the fool that goes way over their message limit thanks to a stupid Facebook game.
Sure, there are a lot of other stupid things that Zynga has done with Mafia Wars. But to be honest, I’m tired of typing. Yes, I realize that some of Zynga’s issues are related to the way that Facebook’s system operates but there are other games on the Facebook platform that provide a decent user experience. It just takes someone creative enough to think outside of the box.
Needless to say, I’ve deleted the Mafia Wars application, blocked all notifications, and removed all the “friends” that were simply there because of the game. The game has just grown to be more trouble than it was worth.
Oh yeah, I’m still pissed off that Zynga released a “Mafia Wars” iPhone app that was in no way tied to your character in the Facebook game. That was stupid too.