EpicMafia

I, Rednose put this question to you and to the EpicMafia community in general. Should EpicMafia be continued and if so is a revamp necessary?

Chapter 1 - Backstory

EM has been DDOS'd (Denial of Service, to continuously flood the site with more demand than the site can handle in order to deliberately take the site down.) for around a week. The DDOS' has been getting more and more some what critical, with the maximum outage times creeping into 23-24 hours.

Chapter 2 - EpicMafia's the victim, who's the perpetrator?

Many speculation has been thrown about, but most rumors point towards the user Rifle, which personally I know nothing about. I hear he has a vendetta against lucid, personally for not implementing the lobbies together e.g combining them. Him being butthurt = Him deciding to DDOS EM, capiche?

Chapter 3 - Response from the community and Lucid

The community can't exactly voice their opinion(s) when the site is down. However, once the site is back up, there is often attention in the forums/lobbies but play is usually resumed without the knowledge of this is a planned "attack" and is a pretty serious and repetitive process.

Chapter 4 - What now?

Lucid has said he doesn't mind shutting the site down for a hiatus or possibly permanently, however he has not yet commented on this specifically, only leading to more rumors. (Situation will be updated with screenshots/relevant links within the upcoming hours.)

Chapter 4.5 - What now?

I, personally have a friend who wishes to remain Anonymous. They say that they have the money to buy EM, which they Lucid apparently asked 8k for. (That's $8000) - Buying the site off lucid would mean a variety of things. Lucid is a student in the medical world, this would relieve him off only a hobby and somewhat of a past time but perhaps it would also allow a breakthrough and shine a light on possible improvements which EM obviously needs right now.

Chapter 5 - Research

I just checked some information on EpicMafia. These figures come from (http://www.worthofweb.com/website-value/epicmafia.com) and may or not be accurate. Though, they correlate with other website valuations.

$ 34 / day
$ 1,020 / month
$ 12,240 / year

Some stats on views

2,339 visitors / day
70,170 visitors / month
842,040 visitors / year
11,533 pageviews / day
345,990 pageviews / month
4,151,880 pageviews / year

A lot of information can be gathered from these figures. If they are accurate, which I believe they are then it raises some interesting points. Lucid himself has stated advanced DDOS protection costs $1000 a month but I do not know how much he makes from tokens as the above figures are only from advert revenue from Google Adsense etc.

Chapter 6 - Finale

I hope I've enlightened you with some information but in reality this asks more questions than answers questions. I, myself am confused. In some respects, I'd love to watch EM stay and still deliver that unique experience that no other website can possibly achieve however find myself questioning whether a new approach would be suitable as new development or a possible shut-down may benefit us, as the EM community.

It's up to Lucid.

Written by Rednose/Zuck at 5:28 PM - 2nd April 2013.