About:
I built/maintain the economy and progression for NBA BallStars.
Platform: iOS/Android
Engine: Unity
Tools Used: Unity, Excel, Perforce, Brick, Visual Studio (JSON), proprietary tools
Duration: 1 Month to Build, 9+ Months of Supporting/Iterating
Release Date: April, 2021
Role Detailed Info:
In NBA BallStars I built the economy and continue to updated/adapt it to account for additional features, changes in LiveOps strategy, and general improvements based on player data. By doing this I manage the player’s progression and have control over their experience. I keep tabs on player data using periscope and make adjustments to the economy to get the desired player experience. Because I built the economy, I’m put in a unique position where I know where the pinch points are and what players would want at which point in their progression. I leverage this information to further influence our LiveOps and Monetization Strategy.
When I’m not tweaking numbers in spread sheets I’m hunting for economy/progression issues which cause players to have a poor experience. One such issue I discovered was the following:
The Gear Issue:
A few months into soft launch we rolled out the gear feature. Users could equip gear they crafted/earned to their characters to improve their power. We built a Christmas tree system for crafting (every higher tier gear could be crafted using larger amounts of low tier gear). This system could be short cutted via the player collecting gear tokens and spending them on gear grab bags. The grab bags would drop Tier 3+ gear allowing users to progress to higher levels. We rolled it out and after about a week of examining player data I had enough to prove they weren’t getting enough lower tier gear to craft higher tier gear. This was mainly in part because I placed the gear drops a little too deep in the LiveOps Milestone progression. There were a few possible routes to fix this solution:
Rework the economy and inject additional low tier gear into earlier parts of the game to make them more accessible.
This would have been an intensive overhaul of the economy and the rest of it was functioning fine. After further examination I discovered users were receiving currency required to pull the grab bags in decent amounts, but because they couldn’t unlock the player’s T1 and T2 gear they were unable to engage with the system. This lead to solution 2:
Add an additional Grab Bag with T1 and T2 Gear inside.
This would allow users to pull the grab bags and get them the gear they needed to engage with the system. Solution 2 ended up winning out because it was much less intensive to the game and the economy. Less than a week later we pushed it out to players and the chart displaying gear engagement exploded. Needless to say the users were happy we made this adjustment.
Later on when I did an update to the economy for Events V2 I kept this in mind and actually reduced the amount of direct gear we handed out in LiveOps and instead handed out the equivalent in the estimated value of gear tokens. This would allow users to engage with the system, get the rewards they wanted, and gave us the flexibility of rewards which would make it easier to sustain a healthy LiveOps team.
All artwork was created by the amazing artists at Kung Fu Factory