This will totally confuse most of my readership, but here goes:

I’ve been playing Mob Wars on Facebook. It’s a reasonably fun way to waste 5 minutes at the start and end of the day, attacking imaginary people you don’t know, buying imaginary guns and property, and doing imaginary criminal acts.

One thing that you learn quickly is that cash isn’t very safe: someone attacks you and they take a chunk of it if they win. And just like real life, there’s always someone better than you - with a bigger mob and more weapons are so forth.

So there’s a bank. The catch with the bank is that they charge you 10% to “clean” the money. You do need some clean money to pay the doctor’s bills, but 10% starts to hurt. And you don’t earn anything on any money in the bank.

Then there’s property. Different levels of property attract different levels of income, but some facts are consistent: every purchase you make means the next purchase of the same type will have a 10% higher price; and, If you sell property, you get 50% of the higher price back. Take, for example, an “Empty Lot” which is $5,000 to buy. If I buy it, the price for next time goes to $5,500. If I sell it, I get $2,750 (half of $5,500).  I also get a paltry $100 income from the empty lot. (the next price up is $6,000, not $6,050 if the 10% increase was incremental).

If I build a villa on it, for an extra $10,000, the $5,000 empty lot is gone, because now you own a villa. Same pricing rules apply though, next villa is $11,000, selling your first villa will return $5,500.

But the exploit is in the multi-buy prices. If I buy or sell multiple empty lots at a time, it actions them all at the same price, but applies the 10% increase (per property) AFTER the purchase or sale. So if I’ve got $50,000 to put away, I can either put it in the bank and have $45,000; or I can buy 10x Empty Lots, @ $5,000 each, which at 10% increase per purchase makes the new value $10,000 each, which when sold as a lot of 10 I get half back … ie $5,000 each. But I also earn $1,000 an hour on the properties themself that I hold onto them.

Anyone with big cash on them in Mob Wars deserves to get it taken off them for being too stupid to use their cash elsewhere.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.