A Walkthrough of Arena -taken from lootlady

1. Enter the Arena. 

If you get lost or can’t find it, don’t worry there are many ways to arrive. Dumb luck should probably do it but if you have difficulties, click your heels twice and say “There’s No Place Like The Arena”. Once you are in the Arena, you are out of Mafia Wars. Anything you may have going on in other windows won’t work. 




2. Get A Room

There are 2 types of rooms. One will cost 100 stamina to join and the other 500 stamina. The main difference is in the stamina costs per attack and the health range for yourself and your opponents. Health hogs do not have a great advantage in the Arena. There is a cap on Arena health and no player can have less than 400/2000 or more than 800/4000. The main rule with health is that Arena Health and Arena Health Refills are not the same thing as your Mafia Wars characters health or Health Refills. They are two different animals. 

Cover	Attack	Power Attack	Health Range
100	10	50	400-800
500	50	250	2000-4000

To pick your room, go to the Lobby and click on the “Join” link of a room already created or start your own by clicking on the “Fight Now 100” or “Fight Now 500” buttons. There is no advantage or difference between joining or creating a room. You may have to wait as no fight will begin until there are 4 players. The Lobby process works just like online poker tournaments. 

3. Kill People…Run Out of Stamina….Wait....

Try not to get mesmerized by all the pretty lasers. Just keep jamming and before you know it your stamina will be gone. In case you are worried that these lasers are Flash and will cause havoc, they aren’t. The lasers are made possible by html5.

4. Get Rewards

Once the wait, kill, wait cycle is over, admire your rewards. There isn’t much to get excited about here. The experience/stamina payout isn’t the greatest but not terribly bad. At this time most are reporting a ratio of 2.1 in many different scenarios. I started this Arena with 18,734 stamina and used 18,452 of it. My experience payout was 39,375 giving me a ratio of 2.13. I can do better than that from fighting, robbing or stamina jobs in Las Vegas. The benefit here is that it only took a couple of minutes to burn it. 

In addition to the useless for me loot rewards shown above, I got all the same crap that drops from fights and robs. Of all the rewards I received for the Arena fight, only 2 of them have any value to me. The Power Card (which are capped at 10 per day) and the ices. 

In this sea of rewards the ices are useful because they count toward Family Progression. For my stamina expenditure of 18,452, I got 12 ices. You can get many more ices from regular fighting so I’m not sure players will use this feature to get their Family Progression ices for the day. If Arena ices could count as 3 or even 4 ices then we would have a winner. 

At this time I see the purpose of the Arena to be a stamina dump. When you don’t have a lot of time to play but a lot of stamina to burn, this is one way to get rid of it. All the stamina you bring with you to the Arena can be utilized so this feature will also help prevent players from wasting stamina due to level ups [1]. If you time your trips to the Arena strategically, you can end up with a nice experience bump into the next level. 

You can craft or purchase Power Ups to help you get a better Arena score but honestly they aren’t really needed [1]. I found that my experience ratio is about the same no matter what the outcome of the fight or how many Power Ups I used. 

Getting more Respect doesn’t appeal to me because there is nothing I can do with it. Appearing on a leaderboard does not improve my character so to me, it’s meaningless.  If ranking high on a leaderboard gets you hot and bothered then you should worry more about your Arena score and use more Power Ups. 

One thing that some will find useful about the Arena is bullying doesn’t apply. What happens to you outside of the Arena does not affect you inside the Arena. Players who are targets of repeat attacks now have an option to get ices and can no longer state that they can’t play the game.