Editor’s note: The Facebook MMO Mafia Wars has approximately 14 bajillion players, largely due to its simple play style. To gamers like Sam, this sort of casual game is anathema. But what if you played it like a serious MMO? Could you quickly rise to the top of the leaderboards? Sam finds out. -Brett
If you use Facebook, you’ve most likely seen the ads for Mafia Wars. The game boasts nearly 25 million active users, and many of them have probably sent you an invite to join. Most of you probably just hide updates from Mafia Wars and the other Facebook games, but I was curious: Could I use what I had learned from decades of gaming to dominate one of the world’s most notoriously slow and laborious games?
Not knowing any better, I accepted a game invite on my real Facebook account and chose the Maniac character type, two of the worst things I could have done in the game. I was soon spamming my wall and my friends’ news feeds with every boring piece of minutiae of my progress through the game, which I did not want to do at all. I also realized that I would need at least 500 mafia members in order to be effective.
So I scrapped that particular mafioso. I blocked everything from Mafia Wars so that any friends who hadn’t already blocked me from their news feeds wouldn’t have to be inundated with any more meaningless garbage from the game.
But I wasn’t about to give up. I had cut my teeth min-maxing a paladin in arenas and raids in World of Warcraft. I had held waves of Modern Warfare 2 players on Xbox Live hostage to my nearly constant use of the tactical nuke. I’ve beaten more games on the hardest difficulty than I can rightly recall.
No, Mafia Wars would not get the better of me.
My second try, however, met with little more success than the first. Knowing I needed to get to 500 mafia members as soon as possible, I created a new Facebook profile (with a fake name) and joined a few Mafia Wars recruiting groups. The invites began to pour in.
Yet I had gotten a key ingredient wrong again: I picked the wrong character type.
In Mafia Wars, you use energy points to complete jobs the way you use mana to cast spells in World of Warcraft or bullets to kill people in Modern Warfare 2. The game uses other stats for other purposes, of course, but completing jobs awards skill points, which you use to get more energy in order to do more jobs and progress through the game.
So of course I picked the character type that would allow my energy to refill at a faster rate, just like most Mafia Wars players.
But I found myself always having to wait for my energy to refill. The levels just weren’t coming fast enough, and I could not quite level fast enough to get my free energy refills.
After some more research, I found what I’d been missing.
The Fearless character type, which seems like the worst because of its bonus to health regeneration instead of energy or stamina, actually has one invisible — but critical — bonus: You can be promoted to the “Wheelman” by other players in their top mafias. Then when you do a job, it will have a chance of not costing any energy at all.
With this information in hand, I rerolled to a new and improved Facebook account, where I joined the same Mafia Wars recruiting groups and got some new friends, created a Fearless character, promoted myself to top wheelman from my first Mafia Wars Facebook account, and started doing jobs.
I had just unlocked God Mode. I leveled past my new friends, who had been playing for months, and I quickly completed all the available content.
People flooded my inbox and my status updates with comments and questions every time I leveled up or completed another batch of jobs.
“Way to go!”
“How do you do that?”
And my personal favorite: “Is it actually any fun when you just race through everything like that?”
To which I replied: “Is it any fun when you don’t?”