Central Mainframe Access Secret Code

As you do jobs and fight, you will have a random chance for this pop-up to appear:

Apparently, players can enter this secret code (blurred for privacy, of course!) in at the Mafia Wars app home page for a special bonus each day.

Many players have not reported seeing a place on the home page to enter the code. There seems to be a refractory period (of about a few hours) between which you get your code and the space appears on the homepage that allows you to edit it. The box to enter the code is big, so once it is available you can't miss it:

Additionally, this bonus is also only meant for one account - if you enter the wrong code into a different account, you won't get a bonus (or worse, who knows), so make sure you keep your accounts straight and do not share your code with friends.

New "Top Mafia" Page is NOT Live

Shortly after the introduction of Paris and robbing in all cities, the Top Mafia page has undergone a major stealth change, as I am sure many of you have noticed:


On this page you can promote mafia members to one of four tiers: Captains (holds 2 members), Lieutenants (holds 4 members), Enforcers (holds 6 members), and Street Thugs (holds 6 members). If you have an entire tier filled with players, you can collect a bonus item every 24 hours (per full tier). Unfortunately, the bonuses do not seem to be very good; I received 30 xp and 2 mid-level boosts as rewards.

The catch is that only "active" players (I am guessing they have to log in at least once every few days) will count, so good luck filling your street thug tier with active players who have to be under level 19! Don't worry though; you can send players who are MIA messages so that they will log in:

Hey "The Beast", mind logging in to I can collect my 30 XP bonus?

At any rate, aside from a few lame bonuses and the 3 achievements associated with the Top Mafia slot, there doesn't seem to be much use from the top mafia. You can see that a function called "Street War" will be in game soon and will somehow make use of this new system.

---

Okay, now onto the elephant in the room. All your old Top Mafia bonuses are gone! That means each job now costs 11% more energy and pays out 11% XP! Combine that with the fact that you can no longer get Top Mafia Wheelman or Top Mafia Mastermind bonuses and we end up with a pretty big job XP nerf.

This goes for all jobs in all cities. But hey, you get a few chances a day to get a boost or 30 XP, who cares about losing 22% efficiency?

Seriously though, if this stays as is, this is a major game change. You will no longer be able to level up energy accounts. This may not seem like a big deal at first, but this essentially cements in the "status quo" of the game. Most of the more serious players already have very high level energy account(s) and possibly a high level fighter account. These accounts were built by taking advantage of synergistic game mechanics, and now new players will no longer be able to take advantage of this.

Why is this important? Because new players will never be able to catch up to high level players unless some new system comes in that will allow players to torch through old cities and get 1000 attack / defense accounts within a few months. Otherwise, any new player just won't stand a chance and will end up quitting. It happens with all role-playing games - with each new expansion, less and less players enter the world, as there are more hurdles to jump before they can play at the same level as other more established players.

At any rate, sucks if you don't have an energy account. Everyone that already has one will now have an advantage over you! Sorry!

While one could argue that since this is happening to all players, it's not really a "nerf" to anyone since everyone is being brought down to the same level, but that is just not looking at the whole picture. What it all boils down to is that most people play this game because, at a very basic level, they like watching numbers go up. Really! Moving from level 487 to 488 and seeing the "Congratulations" text pop up with the guy smoking the cigar leads to a little bit of dopamine release and encourages the player to continue playing. And if leveling rates are reduced, people will enjoy the game that much less. I just can't see one reason for a change like this given the game's age and established player base.

On the Topic of Game Changes..

As many, of you may have noticed, there are a bunch of new minor features in game:

1. Players now receive a reward point for logging in each day. Pretty cut and dry, can't complain about that!

2. There is a new add mafia and gift accepting tab when you open up Mafia Wars:

What a lovely name...

Adding people to your mafia is now definitely easier and faster than before. The gift accepting thing still seems to run through Facebook so it is about the same speed as before.

3. Players now have to click an extra button to help people on jobs. Originally, it seem that this change cut out the experience points bonus:


However, this was later changed back to getting an XP bonus:


I think the problem with this "nerf" (even though helping people for XP is not a massive source of XP) is that people are inherently selfish and can't be bothered to click a help link unless they are going to get something for doing it!

---

However, it still seems that the developers are looking for ways to get rid of power-leveling with energy accounts. Different changes are being experimented with and we really can't be sure of what might change in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, any major changes are about a year too late, as players of all types depend on current game mechanics to play their accounts.

I touched on this exact issue back in December in this post. The only reason players played energy accounts in the first place was because at that time, there was no other meaningful activity else do to besides spend energy. There was no real reward from fighting. This is the only reason energy accounts existed.

While I'm not going to rehash on why energy accounts exist, I will repeat that the best way to draw players away from energy accounts is to make fighting more appealing. I will also restate that nerfing the amount of xp per energy point simply encourages more people to put points in energy. An attack/defense heavy account has a hard enough time completing content as it is, anything that negatively affects them will only make it worse.

So far, I would say the developers are doing a good job since the turn of the year in promoting fighting. Robbing so far is a nice addition. It provides pretty good XP per stamina, and the Diamond collection is pretty valuable.

The Chop Shop and Weapons Depot also give fighting characters a meaningful method of progression, since players can rob for weapons and car pieces and earn permanent stat increases each day. It would be a nice change to allow the "rare" weapon pieces, like the railgun barrel, to drop from good records on robbing grid clears. This would allow a true balanced account to acquire these rare pieces which are currently most easily gathered from jobs.

Apparently there is some more fighting-oriented stuff in the works like the Fight Club and Street War or something along those lines. Adding these things in will draw people into the fighting game and out from mindlessly putting points into energy.