Mafia Wars Bookmarklets & Caution

I know you are always on the look out to make Mafia Wars less painful to play. [In a rush? Bookmarklet site links at bottom of article.]

I mean let’s face it – some of the repetitive, mindless button clicking you have to do to play Mafia Wars right is just maddening! Dumping your stamina after you level up without an AttackX bookmarklet would sprain your finger. Gifting and figuring Exp/Energy would gobble up all your time. There are a whole host of “busy work” tasks that, if you tried to keep up with them all manually, could make Mafia Wars…well, hellish!

And we want to have FUN on Mafia Wars! (Are you listening, Zynga?)

Have fun becoming the Mafia Wars elite’s newest member – here!

The bad news is that Facebook and Zynga don’t like the automation tools like Mafia Wars bookmarklets. Some players have recently reported receiving a warning from Facebook after using their standard go-to bookmarklets. Using the Mafia Wars bookmarklets to make your game time more productive is – technically! – a violations of ToS. That’s because any script that automates gameplay CAN be considered a “hack.”

Although I don’t personally see the use of Mafia Wars bookmarklets as “hacking,” do you?

I suspect that the “warned” individuals were abusing the Attack bookmarklets to target the same player over and over for days and weeks on end. Dumb, dumb, dumb! Because when the victim/whipping boy gets mad and reports you to Facebook for abusive gameplay, your use of bookmarklet scripts is exposed. And that makes it harder for everyone who uses any kind of Mafia Wars bookmarklet to get away with it.

Gees, spread the *ss kickin’ around a bit, alright?

There is more bad news. Every time Zynga makes a programming change (HELLO, every 10 seconds it seems!) it throws off some bookmarklets. Which means the programmers who write the scripts have to go back and re-engineer the Mafia Wars bookmarklet to make it work despite the Zynga changes.

This is only a problem because these bookmarklet developers are unpaid unless you and I donate to their cause. So they’ve got no monetary reason to make a fix. Since keeping up with Zynga programming changes works out to be a fulltime job, a lot of the Mafia Wars bookmarklet writers give up on updates so their scripts stop working unless another programmer takes up the baton.

That being said, when a Mafia Wars bookmarklet script is working it is a thing of beauty.

In order to use these bookmarklets, you really need to be running Mozilla Firefox. They mostly work in Chrome, too. But the bookmarklets like Firefox best, it seems. It’s a drag-and-drop-on-the-toolbar installation and you can get further instructions at the individual sites on how to snag them and use them.

Just to remind you: I can’t promise these Mafia Wars bookmarklets will be individually working on the day you download them. Or that they will continue to work as Zynga makes more changes in Mafia Wars programming. Understand that you aren’t technically supposed to use them according to Facebook and Zynga. And you risk getting warned and suspended if you use them.

But the Mafia Wars bookmarklets are COOL!

These guys are still updating all the time:

Josh Miller: http://joshmiller.com/JMWTools.html

Spockholm: http://www.spockholm.com/mafia/bookmarklets.php

More in Beta: http://www.spockholm.com/mafia/testing.php

These guys have done a fade, but still have some working:

Vern: http://www.vern.com/mwtools/

Bobby Heartrate: http://www.heartrate.se/

These bookmarklets are lesser known, but still handy:

http://martini.boatpartsrus.net/
http://www.ezknight.net/mwtools.php
http://keen-computing.co.uk/mwtools/
http://arun-nav.yolasite.com/

I hope these Mafia Wars bookmarks make playing Mafia Wars more fun for you.

Know what makes Mafia Wars THE most fun?