The past year in the world of online social gaming has seen the rise of turncoats and thieves, a fitting backdrop to two of the industry’s frontrunning applications, Mob Wars and Mafia Wars, games designed to run on networking sites like Facebook and Myspace.

It was David Maestri who built the winning architecture of Mob Wars, in which the allure of leveling up with ?favor points? from ?The Godfather? induces users to fill out paid online surveys, apply for services, and even pay out of pocket. But it was a fact he was far from keen to publicize when his profits soared in February of 2008 (they would eventually level off at about a million dollars a month).

At the time, Maestri was employed at Freewebs, the parent company of SGN (Social Gaming Network), and anything he created should, according to his contract, have been the intellectual property of that company. Despite this fact SGN’s suit against Maestri failed, their only concessions an undisclosed cash sum along with the right to produce similar text-based mafia games in the future. SGN’s ‘Mafia:Respect and Retaliation’ was released to the iPhone app store this February, sporting 3-D graphics along with offline functionality.

But for Mob Wars maestro Maestri the drama looks set to continue, as Mark Pincus? company Zynga appears to have emulated the exact theme and structure of Mob Wars with Mafia Wars. At last tally, the active-user-base of Zynga?s game had already outgrown Maestri?s, drawing in similarly huge amounts of money.

Maestri?s decision to sue Zynga may well echo across the entire industry as it reflects on legal issues surrounding intellectual property ? should his motion fail, the Mob Wars creator could find himself with diminishing returns, what with the rash of clone games that seem to have appeared online.

Gaming tactics are the subject of many a forum and Facebook group. Some favor the Bulletproof boss, whose faster health regeneration allows him to engage in more prize-fighting, or the Tycoon’s faster pay-offs, which allow him to do more business. Still others prefer the higher energy levels of the Insomniac, by which he can accrue more experience by doing more jobs. One thing everyone needs to keep in mind is that it’s best to do everything in bulk. The bigger your mob, the more enemies you can take on, so start adding, deleting your new ‘friends’only once they’ve joined your posse. The bigger your property portfolio, the greater your hourly cash-flow, and the bigger the inventory you can maintain to equip your mob with the best armor, weapons and transportation. The trick to developing a big property portfolio is to wait until you have enough cash to buy, say, ten of a given property type, as their prices increase with each purchase.

As for shortcuts to big money, one sneaky tactic involves the Hitlist, on which high rankers with money to shred frequently post rewards in the hundreds of millions. By striking the killing blow to mobsters already weakened by other attacks, players can defeat bosses vastly more experienced than themselves, thus reaching the upper echelons of the game without the drudgery of honest criminal living.

And sure, filling in surveys, applying for services you probably don?t need, even forking out your hard earned cash are all effective paths to favor-point abundance. The flipside is to make like a real mobster would, and take advantage of the game?s blind spots, among them its susceptibility to Javascript-based add-ons that automate gameplay (check out userscripts.com). Since their inception, the Mob Wars team has done little to combat such cheating, allowing players to rack up the impossible point scores needed to reach the top tier of players (virtually all cheaters). Whether deliberate or not, it?s a lesson in business as much as it is in gaming. You want to make it in this world without getting your hands dirty? Fuhgeddaboudit!

It is no doubt that World of Warcraft is a popular game online. As proof, you can see there are many guides on the game in the market. While some of them are for free, the best kind of guides usually will cost you a few bucks. It is up to you whether you are willing to invest the dollars in such guides to help achieve your goal for the game.

Usually the popular guides include, gold making guides and leveling guides. To be exact, there are five guides that are really reaching to the stars with its popularity. These guides are in conjunction with the release of Wrath of The Lich King expansion pack.

First of all, we have Zygor Alliance and Horde Leveling Guide. This is a high quality leveling guide that offers top quality tips that are definitely useful and there is no where else you can find it. The Ultimate World of Warcraft Guide is simply all rounded offering both leveling and gold making guides.

Extreme Leveling Guide is a very detailed guide that offers level 1 to 80 leveling guides and also a separate Dark Knight guide. Joana on the other hand has released a new version of her popular Horde leveling guide. Team iDemise is also having a new version of its Team iDemise Leveling Guide.

Overall, these are not bad choices when it comes to learning how to level your characters fast and easy because without these guides, you probably won’t be able to level as fast as you have imagined. Of course, you will need to play the characters and do everything the guide teach you in order to reach your goal. Leveling guides are indeed useful in helping your characters to reach higher level and at the same time harvest more Gold from the game itself.

There is no reason why you should not get the leveling guides. In order to be an expert, you need to learn from an expert and start with one of the leveling guides today.