Project Overview
I was part of GREE’s data science team while War of Nations was operating at the scale of millions of players and billions of gameplay events. We had no shortage of data. The difficult part was deciding which behavior actually mattered to the health of the game.
I used regression models and grouped players by behavior to study spending, event participation, progression, and retention. The goal was to tell the difference between a temporary burst of activity and a pattern that showed players were finding lasting value in the game.
I worked with product, design, and live-operations teams to turn those findings into changes they could use. That included recommendations for event structure, progression pacing, and the way the game encouraged players to return.
Finding Useful Signals in Billions of Events
A large spike during an event could mean players loved the event, that the rewards were unusually generous, or that a small group of highly active players had changed the average. Each explanation would lead to a different product decision.
Paying players were not one uniform group either. They were at different stages of the game and responded to events for different reasons. We needed to understand who was reacting before recommending what the team should change.
Overall Averages Hid Important Player Differences
Overall averages made the game look healthy while hiding important differences between players. They could mask fatigue among long-time players or make a small, highly active group look representative of everyone.
One-off reports also took too long to keep up with the live event schedule. We moved toward reusable datasets and consistent player groups so the team could answer the same questions again as the game and its audience changed.
Impact
The analysis helped shape decisions about events and progression and gave the team a clearer explanation for why a result had changed. Product, design, and live operations could discuss the same player groups instead of working from different assumptions.
War of Nations became one of the studio’s highest-performing titles and ranked among the top-grossing MMO strategy games on the Apple App Store and Google Play. My role was to make player behavior easier for the team to understand and use as the game evolved.
