Social Gaming
Apr 8th, 2009 by Larry
I have never been a lover of games and I attribute this to the fact that I don’t like to lose. If you read my last post about Social Networking you know that I’ve been playing games on Facebook. I have managed to cut back on my game playing even though these games are very addictive. I can envision cutting back even more because of the lack of fairness in these games.
Zynga Games makes many of the games that are played heavily on Facebook. I can’t speak for My Space because I don’t have an account, but from looking on the Zynga website I believe the same games are played there as well.
As far as I can tell, Zynga games are all basically the same with a different theme. Four of the games that I have played are probably written on the same code base, and I assume the same is true for the others I have not played. Pirates, Mafia Wars, Vampire Wars, and Street Racing are all played the same way. Three of the games I am most familiar with, Pirates, Mafia Wars, and Vampire Wars, all have a number of tasks to perform. They call these tasks different things in each of the games like Plunder, Jobs, or Missions, but they are all tasks that can be performed to gain levels in the games. There is also a way to fight your opponents, i.e. other game players on Facebook. In Pirates and Mafia Wars it’s called “Fight” and in Vampire Wars it’s just “Combat” but they do the same thing, i.e. fight other game players. Of the games I’ve listed, they all have a number of items that you can buy like weapons, vehicles, and property. They may be called by different names but they have the same function and are used for attack and defense. Supposedly, they offer attack strength and defense against an attack by someone. I say supposedly because no matter how much of this you have it seems that it does very little in determining the outcome of a fight.
After playing these games for many hours, the conclusion I come to is the games are skewed very heavily in favor of the one that does the most fighting. As an example, in Mafia Wars I was a Master Capo at level 87 with 559 members in my Mafia, with attack and defense items for each of my members and lost a fight to a Master Street Thug (one of the lowest titles) at level 70. This person was 17 levels below me and I still lost the fight because the person who fought me had won more fights than I. This doesn’t seem fair to me. I think the algorithm used to determine the winner of a fight must weigh more heavily in favor of the higher level player. This needs to be corrected by Zynga.
Larry
