Finally Making Some Progress On Mafia Wars

I shouldn't be spending so much time on an online game, and it really isn't a game, more like pushing buttons to help grow this character and his properties.  This really isn't Dungeons & Dragons.  But I can report that within the last two weeks I have been able to master tasks to 100% and, in fact, complete whole levels of tasks.  Specifically, if I can recall correctly (guess that's an oxymoron), I had completed Level 1 of a London "area" and followed that up with finally getting down with Level 2 in a New York "area."  And this comes about three weeks, maybe a month after finishing Level 3 of the first Brazil "area."

If you've never "played" Mafia Wars it's hard to describe what I did.  Let me just say that my OCD has a way of forcing me to even out the progress of finishing the tasks and the levels, so that when I finally complete one task, I'm close enough to complete several others shortly thereafter.  That's probably why I clear tasks and whole levels one right after the other.

Don't get my navel-gazing wrong, this is great.  When you start out there is very little you can do in New York, your first theater of "war."  But once you get past the first tasks and levels you gain the ability to increase how much Energy you have, thus allowing you to do more tasks before your Energy completely runs out.  After a while, though, more places open up -- Las Vegas, Italy -- and you can start your mobbing and network-growing there, too.  Pretty soon you can go to four and sometimes (depending on whether the gamemasters decide to close a place, like they did recently with Las Vegas) five places, and you have a plethora of tasks you can partake in.  And within those places are different areas, and within them you can do them all and then go back and do them again to "gain master" of the tasks.  So, right now, there are about four to five dozen "tasks" I can do, and although I've "completed" them, I'm not remotely "finished" with any of them because there's more I can always do.

In other words, there is no rest for the wicked, as those playing Mafia Wars are.