Retention through events and community

[Music] all right welcome everybody it's good to see you here when Pocket Gamer asked me to talk about retention through events and community I was thinking like how did we do that because we have a super active community but we actually happen to stumble upon it a little bit so this this talk is actually a bit of a love song I guess to the players in the game I hope that will become more clear as we progress so how we excellently created an awesome community in storm mound first a little

bit about paladin we are based in The Hague in the Netherlands and the team is right now 50 people sometimes is that it is actually sunny and warm in the Netherlands so this is our last summer at the beach in the hague we are primarily working with publishing partners such as these and congregate is the publisher for storm out I'll get back to that in a moment some of our games include Momonga people adventures Galaga Wars amazing Katamari Damacy tamagochi forever and a whole bunch of others that are service sort of cooking in the kitchen you could say but this talk is about storm out and let me grab some water my throat is already killing me I noticed so before I skip any more beads storm on is actually a game where you

collect cards you place them on the board and there's a sort of a chess component to it where you need to sort of position them carefully and defeat your opponent so the cards move automatically there's a ton of cards to choose from and it's highly tactical just imagine a nice soundtrack here with special effects and everything it's great alright it launched a year ago let me actually get to the facts lunch over a year ago again published by congregate and congregate has been doing a really good job with this whole marketing publishing thing and a lot of these items that I'm talking about it's actually sort of co-created between the players ourselves as a developer and congregate as the publisher so I just wanted to highlight that the core game is very compelling so

it's just like I just mentioned but that's it's a really deep core mechanic and it's also because of because of this it's pretty much of a little bit of a niche game that attracts a certain type of audience the meta game where a lot of you know the talks in in this section and mobile in general of course focus very much on meta game and events and all kinds of stuff we don't really have any of that so it's a super simple meta game you build up your card collection you can upgrade your cards and then you play matches in the monthly leagues we have daily quests that refresh every day but that's pretty much it so there's no in-game events or any anything of that I'm not saying this to be sort of humble or anything it's that's really the case and I think it this this specific game

is I think a very interesting case study to see how you can still have a super active community in spite of the lack of these meta game elements so let's look at 2018 this shows why storm mount has such an awesome community in January we did car balances we made some announcements in February we were going to launch it on PC and web we did a dragon update teased four new cards in March there was a big update which included a new type of units dragons in March we did some tournaments and and fan lore contests I'll get into that a little bit more Steve and web available in May in June

we had the rhyming contests April balance changes July new features kart balancing and tournaments and fan art contest in August we had car balances September we take our balances October extra life in October new set as well offense side more tournaments and a new set of cards in December so why does this show that the community is awesome well two reasons first of all these slides that I just showed were not made by me these slides were made by members of the community and these players kept frozen earth and BTD master put together the timeline of what we did in the game and what happened in storm mound I don't have a clue why did it but I think it's pretty amazing that they're sort of doing the work for us right I think it's one of those little things that that shows how engaged these people are and

the second is that unfortunately in the sort of second half of the year we had to ramp down the team for four reasons and even though the ramp down definitely impacted the frequency of updates and everything the community is still very much engaged so again this is a bit of a love song to the players and it really made me realize that it is all about the players so if there's any takeaway that you can get from the live operations that you're doing it's about the players the people behind the that are playing the game are actual people they have their own sort of wishes and everything but if you can facilitate that in a proper way then it's going to really engage the community so a couple of examples around that I'm just going to show you I mean again I don't have any massive like tactical takeaways for this but just want to show you what you can

achieve when the players are engaged so this is this is showing some examples of fan art that were created by players there's a ton of memes created by them mostly complaining about the nerfs that we're doing and the overpowered cards that are in the game you bass is is definitely one of the the critical ones that will come back later let me just see does this work no my buttons stopped working oh here we go okay the the effort that some people put in and the quality that they create is sometimes truly amazing up to professional levels I would say and it and it's all across the board and these these pictures were taken from discord so players shared

these images on discord and okay just like that and then players just engage with with each other like god is so awesome and COO you dude is or can you make this so it's really cool and I mean look at this paper craft units from Storm Bob I mean I don't know but it's just so awesome a comic so one of the players took it upon themselves to create a comic of the game and the reason that this is possible I think is because we deliberately sort of kept the storylines of the game very much into the background so we're not very explicit with the the story the setting of the world it leaves a lot to the imagination and this player basically created a comic around the factions and some of these cards and how they would sort of play out in real life

so these are all carte items heroes in the game so that's why we figure it out okay why not just do a fan art contest and let players compete against each other the winner gets a prize or the winners get a prize in the game it's a very simple setup we use social media for it and that's yeah let's just see what we get these are some of the winning pictures from that contest and that really was a nice highlight for the community and that was also mentioned in the in the overview another one is that we get a ton of card suggestions there are dozens upon dozens of ideas and suggestions floating around demands floating around and these are some of the examples that I could quickly find some people just write it down in text others they make the the the sketches

for the cards and there there's some amazing ideas coming from that so we figured why not create a competition for the community to jointly create a card so it we set it up in a couple of phases the naming the ability then a vote voting around for the card art and coloring etc and then the top ideas basically get some sweet prizes in the game and everybody who's participating in this event I guess you could say is getting the the community card for free so a couple of polls like these are three sketches that you can then vote on and whichever gets the most votes basically becomes the card and this was

done in six weeks we started with two input rounds just the abilities and the name and we selected the top ideas some voting rounds and in the end we had thousands of submissions from from hundreds of players which I would say is a nice success this is the result harvester of souls an undead cart which is a very complex cart to play very situational but it was the preferred card of choice then another thing we did was to name the cards according to the the nicknames of the honorable community members so these are some examples of cards that are in the game and the names that they are based on and this is just a nice little thank you for those

players that are very active also on this corridor the forum's they are moderators they are really engaging very well with the community and the funny thing is that the players that are have their card named after after them they actually start to evangelize these cards right it's like yeah conflicted drakes is really good card you know you should try it out in your deck and it's it's not because it's my name it's you know it's really it's objectively an awesome card of course everybody says that about their own card it's beautiful then you saw the comic there were actually also a lot of storylines popping up on discord in the forums so we also said ok that's great let's just do a storytelling contest and we invited players to come up with their own stories in the sort of the universe of storm bound and they could win some prizes with that as well and again there is no official lore manual or any you know Bible that you

need to stick to it's all open-ended we do have our own take on that of course but it's all up in the air and that leaves a lot to the imagination and there were a lot of entries into this people were really writing a lot of story content which is amazing even creating maps of the kingdoms and everything so it's maybe to take away there is if you leave things to the imagined then the community will fill in the gaps and we realized that storytelling contests great but you have to actually read through all the entries which is like it's a lot of work and we figured okay why not do a rhyming contest so a poetry contest for the community to to just share some some poetry yeah would you like me to read it okay a card we all hate is needle blasts it's almost as

broken as you bass players say it's the worst it's in need of a nerf because it's only five mana to cast well I think it's pretty good Ivan of course I love the bitter resentment that the undertone of it like discard socks guys come on do something about it which is what you usually get I'm not gonna read all of them but I thought it was very nice to see the creativity that goes into it and the yeah you know roses are red violets are blue of course these are just you know examples that really spoke to the imagination maybe one more with a mighty roar mommy charges into war appearing once more which basically is a reference to the cards ability when yeah when it doesn't die or when it dies it goes back into your hand

then there's the I would say the usual suspects I guess but this is a amazing website created by I believe by sunny player it's a website where you can actually create your own decks it's sort of a information database but yeah super nice beautifully done professional level I would say and we're super grateful for for these things to pop up as well as the wiki to store my wiki is very well maintained we didn't lift a finger for this so again it's all due to the players they are awesome then players even started organizing tournaments which of course we is something we can only encourage so there's two DGL tournaments being hosted so far you can yes sign up and then we have a friend mode in the

game which basically allows people to select who they're playing against so players actually post their own dis courts name and the in their own congregate name they are basically met matched up against each other they organized themselves to set a time for playing the match and then both players need to report the outcome of the match that's recorded by torx the organizer and then the the top players are actually rewarded with some nice in-game loot and then there's the faction tournament which is organized by a player called kept 15 players in each Kingdom basically battling it out to show which Kingdom dominates and for each Kingdom there's an MVP it's tracked in simple google sheets and it has room for 60 players that was filled pretty fast and it's another beautiful beautiful example

of with simple means if you provide the community with a bit of support and of course a game to actually do it then this kind of stuff can happen so three minutes left a couple of takeaways I would say the first and most important one players actually need to love the game when that happens you can start to see good things happening the the leaving things open end it I think that's an important part because that's sort of I guess it's it stirs the imagination and it's something that you can then work with as a player to fill in the gaps at second of course we need to give blessings and support to the community to all the content creators we need to facilitate that this can happen we have our own channels we got discord forums the fan kit which basically has all these the card art in one place of course the the the contests and

everything neat prizes they need a platform they need some recognition and of course when there's a really good art created being created then that needs to be in the spotlight as well so with very little effort we can actually do a lot in on those areas and last but not least the community can actually provide a lot of insight and inspiration as to what to do next right so we use these insights to determine our next steps for the game we are very transparent and open with the community and we are so for example against the lead designer for the game is actively engaging with the community if there are balance changes that is announced beforehand players can sort of say yay or nay to it not that they have the final say but we definitely want to hear about any issues that they're seeing and of course that leaves a platform for the haters that will hate

anything you do which is just something that comes as a package deal with the good stuff that's happening but that's fine so next for storm bound we've had a slow second half of the year but the development team will actually ramp up again quite strongly which is great news going to be doubling down on the community the next update is coming very soon it's Valentine's Day the plan is to create some new cards and have some nice nice Valentine's Day offers so it's a very romantic Valentine's Day if you can play storm bound with with your loved ones on the couch or maybe in bed you never know what happens of course and we have more exciting news coming very soon but just stay tuned for our website and we'll share everything shortly I just wanted to add this fan art one of the most beautiful pieces I've encountered so far amazing stuff going on and that's it

thank you very much and I think we have time for questions so thank you so the question is how do you organize the work flow between the community manager and the developers right so actually we don't have a community manager know so we have the team itself is basically doing the community management so it comes down to I see sort of a golden triangle of the producer Fernando is also here then we have Yance the game designer and Martine our tester tester is a bit of weird thing but actually when you think of it Quality Assurance figuring out bugs making sure that everything runs smoothly it's actually pretty good way of dividing the work so that's the that's the way we approach it and of course on Kongregate side there's our

community managers and they are doing a tremendous job with customer support figuring out the tickets and everything but in essence I think it's best if the development team is actually you know stripping naked in front of the audience basically not literally don't worry and then yeah engaging with the players themselves and that is very much appreciated by the players I have to say [Music]