Mafia Wars Game Play Update

The game developers have a released a bit of what they are planning for the future of the game. With these plans, they are making fighters very happy, and energy players very upset. First the plans, then I'll explain the basics of how this will impact players.
===============================
In the coming weeks and months, the Mafia Wars team is rolling out an aggressive number of new features that are targeted at the “fighter”/stamina focused players. As you can see with robbing, stamina is becoming a more important stat in the game, and this will be even truer with the introduction of Fight Club (which will provide fighters with a private Marketplace), Street War and Vegas Tournament Fighting. You’ll soon see an awesome revamp for Boss Fighting. Each of these fighting-centric features takes fights to the next level, and will make you care even more about how you defend your turf against other players. Player vs. Player interaction via fights has always been one of my favorite things about Mafia Wars.

If you are a fan of current fighting, we are not changing normal city-based fighting in any fundamental way (other than the exciting addition of the Animal type), so you should feel free to continue to add Skill Points to your Attack and Defense stats. Fighting will soon allow you to win victory tokens, which will give you the chance to purchase cool new loot in the Fight Club area of the Marketplace!

Vegas will take Mafia Wars to the next level. You’ll be able to run your own casino in the Las Vegas expansion, as well as bring your fighting skills to assist in completing jobs.
=========================================

A simple run down on the impact:

*Energy players are going to find themselves hurting.
*They appear to be targeting the main group of energy accounts, loot accounts.
*They are making you work for your loot, making it hard to max in the top loot. Making it so you have to earn and buy the loot from the faction store, making a large quantity of the top loot non-giftable, and I can only guess on the tokens, but it will prevent players from accessing funds to buy the loot by fighting their own loot accounts.

They will continue, after Paris, to throw Challenge Missions into the mix, so prepare in the coming months to be overwhelmed.