Live Ops in Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes

[Music] good afternoon everybody how's everyone doing good okay i'm gonna go ahead and say that we're gonna break the flow of the presentation near the very end because the pres the powerpoint gods hate me and so just close your eyes and we'll go and we'll transition into it but um i'm here today to talk to you about live operations in star wars galaxy of heroes for those of you that aren't familiar with it um galaxy of heroes is a mid to hardcore mobile character collection game with rpg progression elements say that five times fast um i was asked to talk about originally about our live events and about what we do and how we do them and the more i dug into it the more the presentation originally started to look like ah and here's this event that requires these characters and it yields x thing and that wasn't really satisfying

in the way that i had hoped that it would be and so instead um after digging a bit more i decided instead that it might be better to approach this as a post-mortem with a little bit of theory and philosophy and then at the very end sort of touch on our mechanics and how we deploy sort of the solutions from this philosophy into the way that we make and design uh live events and so before i spend 30 minutes just showing off my sweet key art let's go ahead and hop in and one of the things you're going to notice immediately in this presentation is the power of three star wars has a lot of trilogies and so i thought it was pretty appropriate to also have the number three show up quite a bit and so uh the way this talk is gonna be lined up is that we're gonna do some introductions who am i who sent me what do they do i'm gonna talk about the product uh galaxy of heroes itself and then we're gonna talk about the three fundamental pillars of the game and the three problems that come from those three fundamental pillars and the three solutions to the three

problems from the three fundamental pillars and then the three mechanics to the three solutions to the three problems from the three fundamental pillars sort of a nesting doll of of star warsy goodness um so moving forward if it will let me uh i want to give a big shout out to my team more than anything else these are the people that make star wars galaxy of heroes happen every day all day and some other like sports preppy stuff but um more than anything for those of you up there if i ruin this i'm so sorry for besmirching your good names um so who am i uh on my name is nick reinhart on the forums i go by tophat see that vader with the top hat that's me my school uh my schooling background is that i have a ba in political science and in m.a in international relations which means i functionally have two holes in my head um and i also have an ms in statistics which feels like a real like a real degree maybe um i did some unfun jobs for a long time like a lot of them but i think most

recently the most unfun was i worked in the oil industry where i did compliance and logistics and yes it is that dismal it is that dismal sounding i also worked in the government where i worked for the agency for international development on a joint task force with the state department that work was actually really cool i worked on the bureau for europe and eurasia desk and we came up with some really cool things but it was a little too slow and outside of my core competency which was mainly playing video games and so um then i did some fun jobs i started working as a data scientist which is another job that's sort of made up data scientists make up a lot of models that no one looks at but they do and then you use like one or two of them and they're pretty cool but one of them we did use and we'll talk about it later i also worked as a product manager and what a product manager inside of electronic arts is they're responsible for monetization design balancing the economy etc but currently i'm a car salesman also known as a life producer and so what i do is i'm specifically in

charge of the live game meaning my team owns making the game feel fresh and alive every day we accomplish this largely through releasing new characters ships and you guessed it events so um here are all the other games that i've worked on it's a lot um so so take this with a grain of salt all the things i'm saying i know that i am new to the industry and what i do but i hope that what i'm saying resonates with you all um so let me tell you a little bit about capital games um so capital games got established in 2008 you can see that there is a mochi store in that picture the development happened above the mochi store that's right back in the wild days of facebook games they were cranking out all sorts of crazy things and so um eventually after having some success there they moved into that middle picture which is actually where we still currently reside to this day which is capital games proper although we're in the process of

actually moving into a new building and starting another project um because of the success in some of their facebook games most notably superhero city click nation was acquired by electronic arts in december 2011 where if you do or do not remember they released a game called heroes of dragon age and let's go ahead and take a look at some of those real quick on the far left that's superhero city and on the far right is um here is a dragon age you could look at the far right picture because you can actually see so much of the dna that's galaxy of heroes show up right there but really what these games are mostly showing you is that the team as a whole has largely worked on rpg sort of core experiences for a very long time and it's in many ways the studio is just a reflection of all those previous games that have come and gone and galaxy of heroes is the culmination of that hopefully great experience yes excellent great experience so let's uh let's go on so let's talk about the product and let's talk about galaxy of heroes more proper so um so take a look at this picture and

just close your eyes let it come over here there's this feeling that comes from watching a star wars movie that is difficult to describe but we all know it um it's a sense of fantastic and wonder um and it goes beyond just watching the movies um most of us probably have a cherished star wars memory um mine i'm from alabama originally that's an okay place um in the backwoods of alabama we're out troubling around in the woods and me and my buddy we're like trying to force lift a log so that we can prove to a stump yoda that we're actually we could be jedi um but in that same vein um so many of us grew up playing with the toys and while this picture is clearly from the 70s i'm willing to bet that most of us played with the toys galaxy of heroes is an extension of that toy experience it's a sandbox where you can mix and match your favorite characters and engage in epic battles so it's no different than sitting down with the toys and saying i wonder what would happen if rey and luke fought count dooku

i tend to think of even weirder ones like jawas you know rhoda rancor that feels pretty good so um oh there we go so this is the game um these are some handy gifts um as you recall from earlier i described it as a mid to hardcore character collection game with rpg progression elements i failed the five times fast on that um so you can think final fantasy style combat with mix and match star wars squads across factions and eras those factions and arrows are represented on the characters as faction tags so if you're a stormtrooper you have an empire tag if you're a plokun you have a jedi tag but this isn't important now but it will be important later but just sort of put that in the back your mind so let's talk about the the game as it stands today or and you know and today in sort of a broader sense when we originally launched the game we had 60 characters we had several saga maps we had asymmetrical pvp with rank swap and we had a mode called galactic war

where we harvested pvp teams and served them up in sort of a pve style um you know a lineup now we have 170 characters we have 40 ships we've had 15 title updates um there's some argument amongst the team about what counts as a content update but i think we've had about 150 of them we release about every two weeks and often times in the every two weeks it's a new character it's a new event it's definitely a new something um some of the features we've released is we've released raids we've released guilds we've released territory battles you can think playsets where you fight against a big environment using a bunch of characters uh territory wars that's guild versus guild and grand arena which is player versus player leveraging a wide amount of the collection so um let's start to dig into these three pillars that we were talking about man this thing won't click over there we go um so we're about to get started and you're gonna actually hear

me regularly say okay here we go but before we get started so we can get a counter of it um but before we do let's talk about the retrospective nature of the pillars of a live service and the pillars of a live service as we understand them change as the game ages so when we were three days out of launch the pillars as we would have evaluated them would have been very different uh characters that they happen like it's just here have them please um when we were three months out of launch the pillars likely would be evaluated differently as well how do we find what is what is the value of having these characters and sort of thinking about it in those terms so what we're about to talk about right now is the pillars of the live service as as we understand it right now moving into our fourth year of service so um the the three pillars and this always it feels like there should be like a dork column or something um we'll review each of them but they basically boil down into an economy consideration the inherent

play pro the inherent play incentive that comes from playing the game and a player sentiment consideration as well so the first pillow the durable economy to talk about what a durable economy is you have to talk about what is a consumable economy first so a consumable economy is an economy where and specifically speaking about characters where you have uh characters that exist and other characters can absorb them and become more powerful so your roster is more ephemeral or something that's a strategic resource to be leveraged sort of the way to think of it um you can also have other parts of a consumable economy potions that give you power or you know speed ups things like that but um and while it's nuanced the the key difference between a consumable economy in the durable economy and specifically our durable economy is that the characters that you have in the game they last in perpetuity everything you do to them is is you know subject to the further perfection of that character right so um now that said there are

things in the economy that aren't durable for instance like we have soft currencies credits experience points etc but at its core the character is the most durable part of the economy and subsequently the economy itself so um you know sort of restated this is a durable economy not a consumable economy duh um okay second pillar incremental progress with durable characters we made a core systems decision to have rpg like gear and ability progression systems coupled with the durability of the character economy this means that progress is slow and incremental and you may say oh that sounds boring but what we have found is that our players love that that process of perfecting their characters it's a key motivation and satisfaction furthermore because of the incrementality players oftentimes use words like well my darth vader is gear 8 or my hermit yoda is maxed on their abilities this sense of ownership over the process is incredibly powerful and what this means is that

incremental progress is a key motivation and satisfaction and and the third pillar here is respect investments so when players start developing a language of their darth vader and as an outgrowth of the other two pillars it becomes incredibly important to respect the time and effort that they put in advancing and crafting their characters changing a beloved ability or interaction can turn off players and make them not want to engage anymore that's why if we do have to change something we do our best to be transparent and we try to have a well-reasoned answer as to why and oftentimes we we try to do our best to make it as positive as possible we aren't perfect i don't think that any game team can tackle this problem perfectly but there's more on this later where i'm going to say some more mayo culpos about it but ultimately rampant nerfing equals bat okay so based on the based on the above at the game's core the atomic unit of value and this is really important it's like the single building block the atomic unit of value and fun in the game

is the character all considerations of time effort substitution demand putting is is driven by characters and characters relative to one another their power synergistically etc so let's dive into what are the three problems that arrive from these decisions that we've made if it will click will it click um okay talking about events not yet um but what we're going to talk about now are the three problems that come from it and the first of these is power creep you can see here this is supreme leader snoke's capital ship the supremacy um it's very big very big um and it's so big it dwarfs all other star destroyers that ever existed right it's like death star one death star two starkiller base and that's fine like you know things get bigger and they destroy more stuff very scary but um i think it's actually a really good analogy for games you know so with a game that has such a focus on characters power creep is necessarily going to occur

you launch a game with 60 characters you have strong base combat and a good litany of buffs and debuffs and over time though you can't just keep recycling the same abilities and buffs you have to add something to enhance notability rotations or even just throw in things just to flip it on its head managing that meta that that that larger play experience of how all these characters interact together is critical but that but that also means that you necessarily have to keep making it more interesting and then keeping it more interesting if you have a bunch of characters that are durable how do you keep them all relevant can you keep them all relevant so let's talk about too many toys second problem as you add more characters into a game you need more and more ways to engage with the entire collection let's look at darth vader here he's he's looking pretty boss he's got uh he's got his stormtroopers and and you know and that's a pretty compelling fantasy there right i think all all people whether you're lightside or darkside have thought about like this sort of

thing right i'm leading them into battle that's super cool so how do you keep a player interested or organized around having stormtroopers one two three four five how do you keep them around wanting five and six and seven and now layer in all the other troopers you've got short trooper you got death trooper you've got snow trooper you've got range trooper and there are more believe me um and then you also have general viewers who's very good with stormtroopers great leader dies in an ata team now later on you have to collect all these toys but then you also have to be able to show them all off so with 170 characters this is a real problem for us how do you get players to engage with the toys and not let them collect dust on the shelf and our third problem is preventing nerves now i just said respect investments but we can respect them but sometimes things go wrong right in fact if you are a player of the game you will notice last week we announced we were making some changes to some beloved characters and their interactions

hk47 being most notable of them um preventing nerfs is easier said than done because of the expanding size of the roster the number of interactions betw between characters grows exponentially and over time there are plenty of things that either a are interactions that we could never have accounted for no matter how much testing we do or b are abilities that made sense at the time of their release but maybe deserve a second look or maybe don't make as much sense in the way the game has like progressed you know going back to this idea of the retrospective live service that's an important part of it right you may have made a decision in the past but you have to be open and willing to sort of till it but in tilling it you invite some snakes and some other scary things to maybe come after you so the problem for us is how do you prevent nerves or if you do have to nerf how do you make it as positive as possible okay so let's talk about three solutions not events yet but soon um

solution number one for us is called managing diversity so you have all these characters and they all do different things and they've all been released in various parts of the game's life cycle meaning some characters are newer and perhaps more powerful and some characters are older and perhaps less powerful so you could just let the characters exist where they are with many of them being edged out over time and at this point you're considering a practical roster versus an actual one or you stated another way how many characters are actually used versus how many actually exist and if you think back to our problem statements this fits under like all the headings too many toys power creep and in some ways preventing nerves so if you instead recontextualize designing characters and in a as an ecosystem you can instead think of them as animals filling very specific ecological niches instead of all of them being apex predators at the time that they exist right or in some instances one apex predator

that everything else is fodder so similar to our pond up there we think it becomes a more interesting problem and one with some interesting gameplay impacts uh for for how you how you design and develop inside of it now the character discussion becomes when you think about it as an ecosystem which characters beat which other characters in pvp which characters are useful in one mode or another what places can we create that these characters shine and that you feel good for using them regularly and if some characters have been edged out by power creep then maybe we can target them for an update and flip the ecosystem like literally say oh short trooper death trooper they just need range trooper and they'll be much better and and all the while we're still introducing new creatures into the system so it's constantly evolving and changing which for a live operation i think it's actually that's really the most exciting part right the game is not static that it changes all the time so as such we've even gone so far as to

use biodiversity measurements and statistics to analyze our game and to think about all the different characters and the ways in which players use them and where they use them so we seek to manage the diversity of the system rather than consider it from one local optimum to the next one character to the next um this manifest is creating events that are unique to certain characters areas of the game where some characters perform best reworking old characters and introducing new characters that revitalize old groups back to this idea of nesting utility so they're back star wars stuff um when we sit down to release a character we oftentimes work backwards from the place where we release a high affinity uh game-changing character and think about all the other stuff that has to go along with it and so the example i oftentimes use here is commander luke skywalker you know him as luke with lightsaber and beige fatigues um but empire strikes back luke so we

looked at ourselves and we said it'd be super cool to put this luke into the game but what do we think players want to do well they probably want to want to put luke with his friends princess leia han solo okay so those characters they're old we're gonna have to do some work around them to make sure that's fun right oh but wait a second luke is missing his best buddy r2d2 okay well let's make a kit for rtd2 and let's put him in the game and he's going to do well with luke but wait a second r2 is a big deal right like you can't you can't just release r2d2 and you have to create some sort of aspiration having r2 is a mark of a mark of honor a badge you know that you've done something great in the game okay well so who's looking for r2 the empire okay we've got these faction tags we talked about earlier so now okay so you need imp the empire's looking for r2d2 for the plans for the death star let's let's make empire characters get r2d2 okay well let's go look at the empire characters okay they're old and not so great too not the empire itself but our abilities our old school abilities for them

aren't as good as they used to be okay so now we need to rework the empire as well so now it goes empire characters need to be reworked and then we release r2d2 and then you get r2d2 and then luke's friends get reworked and then we ask for you to have all of them to get luke that sounds like a content roadmap that sounds like a way in which we can release characters to to light up the entire amount of the people's rosters and collections as they go through and and that actually was what we did that that is one of our very successful ones but it's also in many ways it's the spine it's the spine of a content road map right players can can sense and see it once you start showing it to them hey like they've got bigger plans here and the things that i'm doing now roll up into things that are going to happen later and by being able to show that time and time again they sort of they stick around to see what that experience looks like so in many ways we think of that as it's a year's worth of content

and we've created an interesting game story as players follow along okay so let's talk about solution number three authenticity and i'm gonna go ahead and preface that i'm lucky to work on a star wars game and not everybody has the ip of star wars but i do think the result here and especially if you just watch the candy crush talk i think it shows that it generalizes that the ip that story that's told is important we exist in what we think of as an enviable state star wars as we talked about earlier with the toys is a story that is very well understood and in many ways we get to leverage our audience's nostalgia for characters that they love to serve them the content that we believe they will love all of the characters in star wars have relationships between one another so we get ready-made play interaction so from row one sheridan bays they're best friends they're life they're life bonded their character abilities actually reference one another if jared is present if base is present back to that idea of the troopers from empire strikes back we have general veers a commander of imperial trooper who provides powerful synergies for all

troopers this boils down to abilities that reference other characters characters having factions they are a part of with game relevant outcomes we aren't telling any new stories in star wars galaxy of heroes what we are do though what we are doing though is remembering them which we think the fans really like okay a lot of talk about characters but i hope that you can understand that this is the you know it goes back to that idea of the character as the atomic unit of value right and fun and that you really can't have a conversation about how you do anything else in the game without first considering the way that characters fit into it i've been describing how we use events to release characters how characters you need other characters to gain access into events the character is ultimately serves the value and the fun of the game and so you have for us you can talk about the events and what all we do with them but you first have to talk about characters you have to be very mindful of that okay so one more before we get started

one more um i i i want to make just a technical note but it's one that should be made and that we think of our live events portfolio as covering both our feature events quotations things that require significant engineering and our regular events and those are ones where the system is well understood the designers can easily implement inside of it they can just hop in and do some xml and attach assets to the reason we think of both of them as a part of the live events portfolio is because the daily excitement of having different experiences turn on and off as something that has to be managed and can be optimized to provide what is hopefully the ideal player experience so as we talk about our mechanics and our events design bear in mind i'm talking about both large and small scale events and and that they are relatively equal in our mind all part of the day-to-day mix of experiences and galaxy of heroes okay so you can draw a pretty straight line between managing utility and managing diversity here um what we mean

by that is that i said let's create a niche in the ecosystem right well events are very easy way for us to do that you can think of the pond as a metaphor for a bunch of events and that different characters fit into that where they are very good or not so good in some other places so we regularly use our events to create a home for languishing characters upcoming characters or characters we don't even know about yet i mean we know about them but they don't exist yet um so up there to the far left and on the far right you can see the raincore and the aat those are two raids um and the middle one is for our playset battle the battle of hoth um the battle of hoth requires rebels and empire characters and and the rancor and at the raids um early on there was a really novel ewok jedi squad that could best the rancor and whereas before the jedi and ewoks weren't doing so great so the mechanics of designing events to manage utility is twofold it can give us a direction on how we design and rewear characters such as let's make

this character good for a raid it can also be a place to show off the vast roster of characters that exist with requirements uh second uh second mechanic is faction gating which um i actually described perfectly earlier with r2d2 but more broadly stated or defined nesting utility is using specific groups of characters to get something in game credits mods other characters etc so r2d2 gets you luke you can see there in the middle there's chewbacca chewbacca is always being chased by bounty hunters take some bounty hunters get some chewbacca but we use faction gating even outside of uh just unlocking characters uh scoundrel steal credits the empire fights ewoks the jedi fight sith uh and those all yield rewards as well so in doing so we can light up different parts of the player's collection regularly and make their toys feel special in the context they are being used and in using an event structure we believe we can keep the experience novel by requiring different things on different

days and finally let's talk about telling a story i want to reiterate that we do not tell any new stories in galaxy of heroes but we do lean into the stories that have been told so wherever we can we use our events to make nods to the stories that have been told and in some instances create retellings of stories with the characters that exist in the game above you can see the panel art from our journey event type that's jedi knight revan that's rey and that's luke skywalker we just announced darth revan who's coming soon the details of the requirements of this event type isn't really that important what's more important is that we acknowledge that there is a broader universe and that universe is something our players want to engage with as often as they can and as deeply as they can so ultimately our game enables fans to experience the full breadth and depth of the star wars universe through hall tables set in a cantina we never tell the players where they are when they are so we can always bring new star wars content into the game without messing with the narrative timelines and this is where i had some really sweet transitions that all broke

so we're going to pause for a second yes that's ronald reagan riding a velociraptor um [Music] [Applause] wow statement this should be fun [Music] observation now that is the master i remember [Music]

that's a trailer for our latest event and you can see even just across all of the language it's about remember relive remember the story that was told so we're we embraced that wholeheartedly and it's a really important part of the way that we make the game so what i want to do now is of course go to the cool this is neat um i am not taking questions right now but i will catch you guys in the lounge but i do want to make sure since i've used up all the time available that i leave my email address and if you have any questions feel free to email me at uh my email address that ended terribly i besmirched the good name of my people um thank you everybody for your patience and everything else