Who are you? Can I join your mafia?

Submitted by Ava Tagliano on Thu, 05/28/2009 - 11:13
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In Mafia Wars, I'm known as Ava Tagliano. My real name is Jen (short for Jennifer... egh, I hate having one of the most popular '80s names.) I currently live in southeast Virginia. I am a Leo and I love chocolate cake. I know all the words to way too many songs, movies and TV shows at the expense of more vital information like the Schroedinger Equation and where I left my cell phone. Sadly, quoting the Big Lebowski won't help me pass a physics test, nor will singing A British Tar let my husband know to stop on the way home for milk. Tragic :(

I've only been playing Mafia Wars for about a month, but I enjoy it more than is probably healthy. It's nothing new though! I've been into video games all my life -- I was playing them at the age of 2 on a Radio Shack home computer that took cassette tapes. CASSETTE TAPES!! Ahh, how I loved Grover's Number Munchers...

It's only gotten worse as I've grown up. I cannot survive without the internet, which tends to reinforce my gaming habit, which reinforces my internet habit... you see where this is going. I first met my husband through an MMORPG. Kind of hardcore, I know!

I hope you find the site helpful and that it increases your enjoyment of Mafia Wars. I'm amazed at the wealth of knowledge out there for Mafia Wars and wanted to try to bring it all together in one place to make it easier on you. Most of the credit goes to people who have contributed so much to the MW community, like Bobby Heartrate, Giancarlo Morillo, Verbaldi, The Wanderer & many others. These guys have shown incredible dedication and generosity by doing the legwork and making such splendid resources for us.  I am amazed by and  <3 them all!

I'm always excited to see your comments, receive new questions for the FAQ or hear feedback, so do make yourself at home. I'm continually adding things to the site and revising what I've already got, so drop by when you get a chance and see what's new!

I'll gladly accept Facebook requests for Mafia Wars adds:

Thanks for visiting!

A special shout-out to all my [FSM] peeps.

dkillo's picture

Adding people to your mafia

Submitted by dkillo on Mon, 06/29/2009 - 15:55.

First off, love the site.  I've been using Heartrate's and some of the others' bookmarklets for quite some time.  Since Zynga screwed everything up and now the Add to mafia bookmarklet is no longer working, I've been searching to see if/when something is done get around it.  I noticed on Bobby's group page that you had developed a way to add people to your mafia w/o them having to be friends.  I can't seem to find that anywhere.  Can you tell me about it?
On a side note.  I'm sure you've heard of the FreeGift bookmarklet that Vern has.  One of my facebook friends told me that Zynga posted in their forum that they've developed a bot to tag user accounts that use bookmarklets so they can ban them.  Have you heard anything like this?  I'm wondering if using that particular bookmarklet is the cause.  Any info about this would be wonderful. 
Since you're in contact with all of the "tool makers" for mafia wars, I'll volunteer as a beta tester should any of them need one.  I'm a mafia wars fanatic and pretty good on a computer.  I am by no means good with programming or coding but as far as using bookmarklets etc, I'm pretty good.  I'm disabled and can't work so I play mafia wars well over 10 hours a day. 

Ava Tagliano's picture

Thanks!

Submitted by Ava Tagliano on Tue, 06/30/2009 - 19:51.

Hi, welcome and thanks! :)

  • Add to Mafia is still having some issues, yes. Haven't really been able to pin down what's causing them, since they work great for me but lots of others are having no luck with them. Not really sure what can be done about it yet, but keep monitoring the Heartrate discussion board for any developments!
  • Adding people to your mafia when you aren't FB friends seems to have been changed -- it's back to having to be friends first, as far as I can tell. I never tried it when it was working, but supposedly Add to Mafia worked on non-FB friends. It doesn't appear to work anymore though. Zynga probably patched it back to the way it was.
  • I've been semi-monitoring the kerfuffle over 3rd party tools on the offical MW forums. So far the only official stuff I've seen was them saying you couldn't discuss the tools on the forum. They never explicitly said you couldn't use them, just that doing so was at your own risk. The moderators over there don't appear to be actual Zynga employees or have much official authority other than forum moderating powers, so I'm not 100% what the deal is. There have been lots of tales of "friend of a friend" getting banned and using 3rd party tools being part of the story, but it's all quite unsubstantiated so I don't put much store by them. I've not used any of Vern's tools so I can't speak to that. Nor have I even tried fancy linking strategies with regards to the Free Gift thing, since it runs a little too close to exploiting for my own personal standards (same reason I didn't do multiple jobs months ago, avail myself of free Godfather points a few weeks ago or do any dollars-to-pesos smuggling in beta. That plus I am lazy.) As with many things in life, be wary of anything that seems too good to be true. No such thing as a free lunch and all that, just be careful whenever using a bookmarklet that seems too clever for your own good.

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