About:
Starting in December 2020 I joined the LiveOps team. I planned our LiveOps strategy which would support healthy monetization and fun player progression. Since then, the LO team has been refining and iterating on it using player data. Ultimately this would get us to where we are today with jackpot gachas and Contests 2.0 which encourage even more engagement and fun for players.
When I’m not in periscope looking at charts or tweaking numbers in spread sheets, I’m typically training up additional designers to take over my responsibilities in LiveOps. This allows me to be more creative, improve our KPIs, and mentor even more young designers.
Platform: iOS/Android
Engine: Unity
Tools Used: Unity, Excel, Perforce, Brick, Visual Studio (JSON), proprietary tools
Duration: 1 Month for Initial Strategy and Balance, 9+ Months of Support/Iteration
Release Date: December 2020 (Soft Launch), April, 2021 (Global Launch)
Role Detailed Info:
Working in LiveOps was one of the most fun and challenging experiences of my life. I took a holistic view of the economy and the features available to me and created a well oiled machine which promoted retention, player conversion, and was most important of all: fun. I designed out how everything flowed together and continued to support LiveOps when we shifted to targeting ARPPU/ARPU. I managed LO needs via communicating with design/art/production to get events out on time, and created organizational systems within LiveOps to make the process smoother after we expanded the team, and trained a team to help alleviate LiveOps’ reliance on me.
Overall strategy:
Before we get into how these pieces fit together let’s go over a brief breakdown of the pieces;
Events - An event is a set of Contests, Gacha, and Offers. These would run from Monday to Tuesday, Wednesday to Thursday, or Friday to Sunday. I called this a 2-2-3 system of events due to the amount of days each event was in each week.
Contests - These are daily or multi day missions users could grind for rewards. They could complete a milestone track for the users that just wanted to do their usual grind and they would be ranked on a leaderboard for users who wanted additional competition or to unlock the best characters early.
Gacha - This was a gacha which would rotate alongside the event having a different chase character with each event.
Offers - These were offers which a user could purchase with real world money that would typically expedite progress or increase a players collection of characters.
Showdowns - This was a gauntlet style game mode where the user would need to win X games in a row to unlock a major reward. After completing all the games in a showdown they could sim the showdown via using sim tickets and just receive the rewards without playing it again.
PvP - In PvP the players could compete for trophies. The more trophies a user had the higher rank tier they would be in. the higher rank tier they were in, the more rewards would be earned or lost from each PvP game. In addition to this rank tier system the user had a milestone track where they could collect rewards while playing as well as a leaderboard which awarded resources and reset each week.
How they fit together:
When planning out my LO Events I always started with Contests. Since contests required users to compete (and in turn spend against one another to get a leg up), when I introduced a character I would introduce them here. At the end of the event the top leaderboard users would be awarded the shards to unlock the character they were chasing in the Contest. The next `Contest would highlight the unlocked character, typically by tasking the players to level up a specific class of character or use that class in a game mode. After a few weeks the Character which was in the Contest would make his way into the Gacha.
Second to the Contests was the Gacha. I selected characters for gacha primarily based on how good they were in game as well as what was good for the current Contest. For example if the current contest required a user to play with an Agile class character in Versus, the gacha character would be a powerful Agile character. Later on I started to factor IP value and what is going on currently in the NBA into my decisions as to which character to run. For example if LeBron James was injured I’d try not to run him. After a few times in the gacha, once the character isn’t making as much money anymore I’d move him into Offers.
The rotating offer strategy had gathered primary focus of expanding a player’s roster so they could engage with all the formations and have players which worked well together. On Monday-Tuesday Events I ran a character which is not as popular as the gacha characters. On Wednesday - Thursday, I ran a formation offer which included 3 characters which were good at specific formations but low in power. And on Friday-Sunday I ran another character offer. These fit into the holistic view of LO via complimenting the gacha character in specific formations and being immediately useful in one of the minor Contests. After a few cycles of a specific character being in the offers I would eventually move them into the general gacha population or showdowns. This pipeline structure of moving characters through the game made it easy for our users to understand what was coming and not feel like the game was pay to win and they could get their favorite players without paying, they’d just have to wait a little longer.
But what about Showdowns and PvP?
Showdowns and PvP were connected to Contests in the sense that they were game modes and users were tasked to engage with them as part of the contests. Showdowns would eventually get characters which made their way down the track.
Showdowns would rotate every day. 2 new showdowns would be available and would rotate out every 24 hours. The big showdown was the Friday Night Showdown. Being a fan of the dramatic, I would put a particularly interesting showdown on Friday to kick off the weekend. One of the first ones I ran featured Steph Curry, and was a lot of fun! Aside from that, showdowns function was to award specific character shards which made it worth the challenge.
Color System - fixing ribbon issue in armor
In Atari Combat: Tank Fury we had an issue with the ribbons (this is our internal language used for currency which is required to increase a character’s star value that isn’t character shards). The problem was that we restricted them to LiveOps events and when a specific color wasn’t available in the LO event, the game couldn’t point to where the user could get more. My solution to this issue was my color system. Within NBA BallStars there are a variety of LO features which can hand out ribbons. Within each of these features I created Colored Tracks, each color track would have a series of items in them at various amounts based on the color of the track and feature it was attached to. Because each of these features would be active at the same time I was able to make each of them have a different color track of rewards. This fixed the issue of users not knowing how to progress their characters with no engineering support required.
Art was created by the amazing artists at Kung Fu Factory