To the Mafia LIVE! Community:

A tragedy happened in the Mafia LIVE! community about 2 weeks ago.

One of the top players, Jason Ray (Jdizzle), was killed in a car crash, leaving behind a young mother and his new-born daughter. Many threads were started about Jason, his family, and the current state of affairs.

Here are a couple frequently visited: http://getsatisfaction.com/aftershock/topics/mafialivelivesonin_memoryofthejdizzle_family http://getsatisfaction.com/aftershock/topics/thankyoufromjdizzleswife

We were particularly touched by the kindness offered by many of the Mafia LIVE! community either assisting or donating money to the family. There were many top players who sold their accounts and donated the proceedings to help with Jason's wife Shauna and new-born daughter Hailey.

We were truly touched by the strength of character of players of Mafia LIVE!

Following in the footsteps of our players and inspired by their ideas (in a similar fashion as we source ideas for our games), we were able to make some contributions to the family as well. Although we were not able to use Aftershock as a Company as a vehicle for donation, the Aftershock Team came together and made personal contributions to the trust fund.

The World today is in disarray. Financial scandals, corrupt CEOs, and unrighteous government officials constantly make us doubt human character and the intentions of others. However, the actions by our community in the past weeks made us realize that love and care is in fact all around us.

We are truly blessed to be a part of such a great community.

Yours truly,

Jeff Chen and James Zhang Founders of Aftershock

We can't say this enough, but these games are only great because of our fans. Thank You!

Thank you fans!

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Wow! The team is pleasantly surprised that we had HUGE uptake on Undead LIVE!

A big Thank You! to our fans!

We launched Undead LIVE!

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Start your ruthless Empire today...

First of all, I'd like to apologize for the server issues starting around 6:30pm pacific time. I usually watch the server graphs pretty religiously but it was due only to the vigilance of a player who had my personal email, that I finally got wind of the problem. Thanks Jason :-). Now it seems whenever something goes wrong it happens on Sunday night and when everyone else is taking their well deserved break.

The really strange thing is that this time, it happened without warning. Usually there are warning signs, such as some server starts to swap memory or requests gets slower and slower over a few minutes. This time, the server graph seemed show our database suddenly hit a wall and started spitting blood. At first I thought it was some weird interaction between memcache and the database, so I started rebooting memcache one by one. Everything would get better. Five minutes later, everything goes to hell again. I started to reboot a few of the servers trying to isolate the problem, but the problem seemed to be across the board.

Fixing server problems is a bit like being a detective. If you guys read Sherlock Holmes, you'll know that when you have eliminated every other possibility, whatever remains, however improbable must be the cause. That's exactly what I did. You guys may have noticed that the servers kept coming in and out of maintenance. This is because I had to change things, test, and when that didn't work, try something else. I'm sure it was frustrating as you're trying to play the game, but just imagine how I felt. This was not the way I wanted to spend my Sunday night.

I ruled out everything from caching issues, to database swaping, to cyber attacks. Finally, I found the problem and I had to admit, it was pretty stupid. We needed an index on a database column. If you don't understand what that is, think of it as a very standard technique to make requests go faster. Now, we're not idiots, so of course you would think we'd have an index on that column. In fact, I had assumed that we always had that index... it was inconceivable that we didn't. But I guess it was missed, all this time. I'm surprised we were able to handle as many requests as we did without that index. Shocked really.

Of course, the problem that took me more than an hour to finally track down, took only 9 seconds to fix. We're not perfect and we make mistakes. Sometimes very stupid mistakes. For that, I can offer nothing but my sincerest apologies and the promise that we'll do better in the future. And I think as loyal users, you guys deserve a very transparent view into what happened tonight.

Thanks and have a great Sunday night!

Hey guys, we just made fabulous updates! New and improved product at your fingertips-- First, we added a help page for your convenience; and 2. the Consigliere now only shows 30 invites at a time. This will reduce the amount of people on the invite list being attacked and also solve the problem of the list timing out due to the length. Enjoy!

-- Aftershock

Hi everyone,

This is a post that will be on the support site, on the itunes store, and on our blog.

Many players have complained that people have negative cashflow, but have a lot of items. This is not fair, and is not realistic. They are essentially cheating. We agree. We are changing this.

To give fair warning to the players, by Feburary 5th, 2009 11:59PM Pacific Standard Time, the following rules will be enforced: 1) If you do not have cash to pay for upkeep, it will come directly out of your bank. 2) If your bank account reaches 0, weapons/armor/vehicles (starting from the most expensive) will be confiscated by the Godfather WITHOUT reimbursement until your cashflow is positive.

THESE RULES WILL BE ENFORCED on Feburary 5th, 2009 11:59PM. PLEASE plan accordingly as the Godfather will NOT be reimbursing for any lost items.

How Fighting Works:

Thanks to everyone who wrote in! We believe we pretty much have a balanced fight system now. We may need to tweak a couple of constants, but the general structure should be close.

The basic idea: There's basically three major factors: 1) Equipment 2) attack/defense scores 3) family size. We wanted it to be balanced such that people who are strategic with equipment purchases and raising attack/defense scores should be able to beat people who simply searched the web for family codes. It took the majority of last week with tunings in our algorithm and hearing your feedback to derive the final result. So, thank you again!

Calculations: Your fight score is calculated based on: 1) The amount of attack strength in your equipment (only YOUR equipment matter, ie if John is in your family and he has XYZ weapon, those weapons do not matter). You may only use one weapon, one armor, and one vehicle PER family member.

2) Your attack/defense score is then multiplied by some number and then added to your equipment score (a lot of tuning went into finding the balance here) NOTE: attack score matters when you are Attacking, defense score matters when you are defending an attack. Only YOUR attack/defense matter, your family members' stats have no influence. Your family size does have an effect of how much your attack/defense scores are magnified, but the effect is limited in scope. (took a while to derive that balance)

3) There is a little luck factor involved as well.

We're open to suggestions, questions and comments if you still feel that the system is not balanced. We're going to listen to all the feedback and tweak the formula above.

Thanks to everyone's support.