Mafia Wars Devspeak: Fight Carnage

Mafia Wars Devspeak: Fight Carnage

Mobsters,

Last week saw the release of the Fight Carnage feature in Mafia Wars, which included several core changes on the Fight system in the game. These changes were successful in significantly improving the performance of the game.

This post aims to address some player concerns as well as provide clarity on the thought behind Fight Carnage. 

Purpose of Fight Carnage

Fight Carnage was designed to directly tackle two core issues:

1. Performance issues within Mafia Wars

2. Amount of time it takes to burn Stamina in Fights

Performance Issues:

Performance and loading issues have been a long-standing concern for our players. We identified the primary cause as a high amount of server requests originating from Fights – over a period of time, server calls have grown exponentially due to the number of Attacks required for players who want to burn through their Stamina pools. While we have pushed multiple technical fixes to address this issue, an intervention to core gameplay mechanics would address the issue directly.

We have been carefully tracking player feedback on this feature through various channels as well as monitoring the game performance. Over the past few days, we have continuously iterated on Fight Carnage and have pushed multiple fixes and changes to enhance gameplay experience based on player feedback.

Impact:

Fight Carnage has streamlined Fights and reduced load on servers, and as a result, we have observed and received feedback from our players about improvement in the game performance during the course of the event.

While some players are still facing issues, we are seeing widespread improvement in performance metrics across our player base. Our team continues to look into addressing these issues.   

Stamina burn in Fights:

As players’ Stamina pools have increased over the course of the game, the amount of time it takes to burn that Stamina has disproportionately increased. This has resulted in Fatigue amongst players in the long run and disinterest in core Fighting.

Fight Carnage attempts to address this issue by allowing players to burn higher amounts of Stamina per click, and inflict a proportionate amount of damage.

Impact:

The amount of time spent by players Fighting has reduced significantly while other Fight metrics have remained consistent – players are no longer required to spend hours clicking to burn their stamina, but still earn proportionate rewards and XP.

The initial roll-out of Fight Carnage led to a few issues and bugs that impacted XP ratios and Cash payouts in specific cities, but we have pushed changes over the last week, which have resolved these issues. 

We want to thank you for your support and valuable feedback regarding Fight Carnage.

In order for us to keep improving this feature, please do let us know how Fight Carnage has impacted your gameplay experience.

Click HERE to participate in this quick survey.

Thank you!

-The Mafia Wars Team