Shop Heroes - Opaque UI

Shop Heroes is an item-shop game released on mobile and Kongregate in mid 2014 by CloudCade. The gameplay consists of crafting equipment for heroes, who then go on quests to find materials, which are used to craft more equipment. Players can gather in Towns to share the costs incurred by leveling up buildings, which unlock more heroes and quests.

CloudCade advertise striving for useability and superior gameplay. I understand that when they launched Shop Heroes, they were still a small studio. But their UI needs more work: it has too many screens, too many taps to start an action, too much information, and fragmentation/duplicate information. Sometimes, information is not just missing or duplicated. It's purposefully hidden, misleading, or manipulative.

Manipulating emotions

An example of UI manipulating emotions is the Roulette, which gives players one random award among 12. The UI shows each award equally likely to happen - 1 in 12, or 8% each. Yet the actual chance of keys, gems, and blueprint fragments is less than 1%. Why raise players' hopes so high if it never delivers? So they get 10 seconds of fiero after 10 months of frustration? It's as if a slot machine displayed the jackpot symbol with the same chance as others, but was actually rigged to nearly never stop on it. The gambling industry actually forbids such machines. One could argue that the Roulette is a minor mechanic in Shop Heroes, and that players may understand that it's rigged. A sincere UI would make the area of a reward on the wheel proportional to its likelihood.

Hidding information

An example of UI purposefully hidding important information can be found in the screen where players build their quest teams. Players send heroes on quests dozens of times per day. When heroes are strong enough to tackle the quest, a green smiley is displayed above their head. When they are not strong enough, the smiley turns to yellow or red, showing that they are more likely to be injured. Injured heroes are unusable for several hours, so players strive for green smileys. But each of the 8 equipment slots of each hero has a 1-10% chance to break during a quest. Therefore players equip their heroes with just enough equipment to reach green smileys, so as to minimize the costs incurred by broken equipment.

Yet players noticed discrepancies in the odds of injury. They asked on the forum whether increasing power above green smiley reduces the chance of injury. The community manager did not answer clearly at first, saying it's fun for those playing to figure out, and that it's impossible to create a tutorial for every single detail in the game. Players replied that 1) they are not asking for a tutorial but for explicit numbers to be displayed, 2) core mechanics should not be hidden, and 3) discovering 1%-likelihood mechanics is annoying and time-consuming. The community manager eventually cleared the matter, but why was this important information not explicitly provided inside the game? The in-game UI should, and can, do a better job at displaying the chance of injury, however small it is. One way would be to display the green smiley only when the chance is exactly 0%. Another way would be to display the percentage number, rounded up (0.123% would be 1%). Providing feedback through numbers is the only way that hardcore players can theorycraft and reverse-engineer the most intricate mechanics.

Game of War

Game of War is a mobile game currently making $1.2M/day and having 2.2M daily active users. Its developer, Machine Zone, is valued at $3 billion (while Zynga is valued at $2.7 billion and Supercell at $5.5 billion.).

The game is quite high up the charts of the App Store, only surpassed by Clash of Clans' $1.7M/day and 4M daily active users and probably Candy Crush as well. CoC and GoW are similar in that they are both free-to-play empire-builder war games for mobile. Whereas I find CoC to be a polished game with elegant mechanics, Game of War is said to be everything wrong with mobile monetization. Let's have a look!

Copycats

In an interview in 2012, Gabriel Leydon, Machine Zone's CEO, said they are making games that are very, very special and unique in the market. But in the same interview, he also said If you want to scale fast and you have the ability to do it cheaply, you just clone. With GoW, they did not go the special/unique route: they cloned 99.9% of their gameplay and UI from Kabam's The Hobbit (which launched for mobile in October 2012). Shameless cloning is a common practice among mobile games, and The Hobbit itself had cloned a lot of its gameplay and UI from Evony (a Flash game from 2009), which itself had cloned most of its gameplay from Civilization.

Going back to GoW, the trailer features a battle in real time scene that actually never happens in the game. In the game, the player can see their armies move in real time, but when battles happen, the player only sees a report of the troops expended and resources gained. No visual battling actually happens. So the game launched with a lot of hype and exaggeration. Since it's a clone of The Hobbit, the marketing team had to exaggerate to compete.

Translation vs innovation

When GoW launched in July 2013, Venturebeat wrote they were using advanced technology, including a real-time translation engine, a sophisticated communications platform where players can send threaded emails, text chat, make comments, and share their feats on social forums. There really is nothing new or sophisticated with in-game emails. The translator, however, is GoW's unique attribute, what the game is known for. How good and useful is that famous translator?

When typing on the miniature keyboard of their iPhone, people use slang and make spelling mistakes. So the translator has to crowd-source a lot of sentences to players. For example, let's say a French player says "lu, a va bi1?". To translate this for American players, I think the sentence is first automatically-translated into English, leaving non-translatable words untouched: "read, have go bi1?". This gibberish is then given without context to 4 players who are told they'll receive in-game currency if they can fix the sentence. The first player fixes the sentence into "I read you, I have to go", the second suggests "Read (what I wrote above), I have to go and buy one", and so on. A fifth player receives the four tweaked sentences and is awarded some in-game currency for picking the sentence he thinks makes most sense. The player who wrote the chosen sentence receives coins, whereas the other three receive a thank you message with no reward.

This sounds like a good idea, but there's a reason why after all these years Google Translate still sucks, and why translator is still a job. "lu, a va bi1?" in proper French is "Salut, ça va bien?", which Google can translate easily to "Hi, how are you doing?". But most French players can write "hello" by themselves. In Kings of the Realm, a game very similar to GoW, I've seen many American players write to Russian players in Russian. In Hearthstone, the game has 6 emotes (for "hello", "well played", and so on), and needs no translation system whatsoever. Did GoW focus on and boast its (mediocre) chat translator at launch because it was the only thing that differentiated it from The Hobbit?

Cash grab

MachineZone was actually called Addmired when it started. They were developing dating apps. Maybe the name made sense at the time, but even for a dating app, it's a terrible name: are users going to get mired in ads? That no founder flagged the name as inappropriate tells a lot about the company's business model.

GoW reminds players that they can spend money every time they login. The first screen showed when logging in is the one below. The font is inelegant, reminiscent of Asian mobile games like Puzzle and Dragons. The fireworks at the bottom obstruct one of the products offered in the bundle. The bundle name is "Summer MEGA GOLD Sale!!!". And a timer of 30 minutes pretends that the sale will end within 30 minutes. In fact, the player only needs to log back in to get spammed by the sale again...

In Clash of Clans, no upgrade takes longer than 14 days. The game provides 5 builders, so the most intense players have something to upgrade roughly twice a week. In GoW, the longest upgrade times is 23 years. Nobody would wait 23 years for an upgrade to finish! The designers do not expect players to wait 23 years. Everybody understands that year-long waiting times are here only to make players skip them with money. No surprise that some players report having spent $9,000 in the game. A kid in Belgium even spent $46,000.

Sexy advertising

GoW spent $40M to run an ad where model Kate Upton shows her cleavage during the Superbowl. Some people were outraged, but this advertising strategy was already used heavily in 2009 by Evony. Using sex in ads is not new, but that does not excuse it. It's interesting that a company valued at $3 billion has only one product, and the content of and advertising for that product were both 99.9%-copied from another company's product. In contrast, Clash of Clans' core gameplay may not be original but the ad they ran during the Superbowl was funny, silly, and just more elegant.

In fact, GoW's ads could be worse. For example, Evony's advertising strategy was much more questionable than GoW's. Through iEvony, they rewarded players with game coins when they referred a friend or when a friend they referred purchased game coins with real money. In order to bootstrap the pyramid scheme, iEvony was invite-only. Evony also used any search-engine optimization trick they could, stole ad photos and game art, and showed soft-porn images that have nothing to do with the game. So GoW still has some way to go!

Why do GoW (and CoC) use ads? After all, they have so many players already that word-of-mouth should bring them more. In practice, only a small percentage of new players will keep playing the game past the one-week mark. An even smaller number will spend money. Thus these games aim at attracting as many players as possible, so as to increase the number of spenders. But there will come a time when there will be no more new players to draw to the game. But since 2013, the cost for attracting new players outweighs the average amount spent by players ($2.73 vs $1.96). Since players get tired of games eventually, these greedy business models are unsustainable.

Conclusion

GoW is an over-the-top cash grab using sex [ads] to fuel a game where sex really isn’t a factor. The game has a terrible UI plagiarized from another game, and a horrible gameplay also plagiarized from others. This is the kind of game that gives a bad name to free-to-play mobile gaming. I'm disappointed that millions of players follow the ads and don't see that it is so crappy.

Improving the end-game of social strategy games

Improving the end-game of social strategy games

I removed Clash of Clans (CoC) from my iPad on August 20, 2014. The game had just reached two years old, and I had been playing it since February 2013. I played very actively (2-3 hours per day on average) until December 2013, then considerably slowed down (1 hour per week).

No new content

I think I slowed down, and eventually stopped playing mostly because no significantly new content was introduced. New content mattered a lot to me because I had reached Town Hall 10, the very end of the game, for many months. So far, the game has received four updates in 2014.

Month	Description
January	Introduced Hero abilities, which are not really a new gameplay feature, but rather a design fix to encourage players to use and upgrade their heroes. Great, and perhaps even necessary, but no impact on battle strategy or base design.
April	Introduced Clan Wars, a feature asked by players since the game came out. My clan was very excited, but we stopped Clan Wars after a couple weeks. We realized that the match-making algorithm alternated pairing our clan against once a much stronger clan, once a moderately weaker clan. Clan Wars require a lot of time and in-game resources, so we kept asking for enemy clans, but only attacked when we were sure to win. After a few weeks, we realized the Clan Wars rewards were not worth the frustration, so we stopped match-making.
May	Mostly usability tweaks.
July	Improved Hero abilities. Once again, this was more a design fix to encourage the use and upgrading of Heroes than a new feature.

Moreover, in these four updates, the Hog Rider received three nerfs, but my base still got trampled by mass-hog armies. (Yes, anti-hog base designs exist, but these designs are very vulnerable to air attacks). The Valkyrie was buffed twice, but it still was not enough to make her useful for her cost. To sum up the last 8 months, no new mechanic, be it a unit or a tower, was introduced, and I did not find the balance tweaks adequate.

Lessons for social strategy games

Troop synergies

The game was released with 10 basic units that make sense when used together. For example, the Giants are slow and target defenses so that the Healer can follow them without being hit. These synergies are expected: the team had time to iterate and polish before launch. But introducing new troops after launch is tricky: the new troops must 1) have an interesting gameplay element, 2) complement existing troops, and 3) keep existing troops useful.

The Minion is a perfect example: it is cheap and flying. This makes it a great complement for farming with Barbarians and Archers (called the BAM strategy). It is also great for high-level PvP when paired with Balloons (Balloonion strategy). And since it costs dark elixir and has low HP, it can't be used by itself.

The pricey Golem is another great example: it synergizes well with Wizards and Pekkas (GoWiWi strategy), which are necessary troops in high-level PvP. The Golem's production stats are perfect: 45 minutes to make, and a cost of 2.5 hours-worth of dark elixir, which is the same as Pekka. The Golem was clearly designed to be trained in parallel of Pekka. Plus Supercell must have made a lot of money from players gemming it!

On the other hand, the moderately expensive wall-jumping Hog Rider does not complement any other troop. Neither does the Valkyrie. Interesting ideas, but no synergy! Supercell keeps trying to fix them, so they may have realized that. Or maybe Supercell abandoned them completely, and has been working on more troops, such as the Spider, Centaur, or Yeti, which have not been released yet, but were leaked in July 2014.

More things to do in the end game

As the Town Hall levels go by, so does the average duration of building upgrades. For example, upgrades take 3-10 hours at TH3, 1-3 days at TH6, and 7-14 days at TH10. By TH10, the player should have 5 Builders, so the average time between two building upgrades is still 2-3 days. During these 2-3 days, players come back to the game only because their troops are ready for battle, not because they have something to do with their base. But by TH10, players have spent months being progressively conditioned to come back for their troops and not their base. So they still come back, but more and more reluctantly, since the rewards are less and less frequent. At some point, they unlearn the habit of coming back to play: what's the point when nothing seems to be happening? They eventually stop playing.

Possible solutions involve shortening upgrade times or providing more builders, but both may seem like Supercell would lose money. The game should at least give players things to do with their buildings (beyond collecting resources twice a day). The Bomb very short upgrade times have been a step in that direction. A crafting system like in Monster Legacy, or Angry Birds Epic, but applied to strengthening buildings, or increasing towers' rate of fire, may increase the game's lifespan even more.

Vivox in SL: timeline, business and reception

Timeline

This article follows the one about Vivox integration.

As an introduction, a timeline and some figures:

• 2006: the Vivox-SL collaboration started (Joe Miller said in March 2007 that The program has been in development for over a year).
• 2007: voice chat is integrated into the SL Viewer in August.
• 2008: SLim is launched in September. It is a lightweight client that enables SL residents to interact with their Second Life friends without having to go inworld with the Second Life Viewer and the ability to leave voice mails for offline friends.
• 2009: AvaLine (beta) is launched in May. To encourage all residents to use Avaline when the beta ended in August, LL offered free communications to AvaLine subscribers the first month and free voice-mail for the rest of 2009. And a Hula Bear.

According to Linden Lab's blog and press release, Over 15 Billion Minutes of Voice Have Been Delivered in Second Life. In the entire year 2009, the number of voice minutes used by SL residents has remained around 3 billion per quarter and more than 60% of Second Life Residents are using voice at any given time. Vivox reported in July 2008 a daily average of 600,000 minutes of peer-to-peer calls, Over 1 billion minutes of voice communications per month, Group events as large as 400 Residents. As a comparison, Skype had 6 billion minutes per month at that time (according to Gigaom). The numbers extracted from the May 2009 press release (700,000 unique users consuming more than a billion minutes a month) mean the average resident using voice-chat spends 17h per month speaking or listening (and not 357).

Out-of-game messaging and calls

AvaLine is the name of the current virtual telephony system powered by Vivox. A timeline in the May 2009 press release indicates that sending SMS from inside SL to out-of-game mobile phones should become possible in 2010. AvaLine's extension will let residents call or send SMS to real-world phones. Since March 2007 (before the launch of the voice-chat in SL), SL residents were told they would have to pay to use out-of-game telephony features: Eventually, Linden plans to charge Linden Dollars for the service to be activated on privately owned land. People who own land can pay to have VoIP activated for all users on their property. For a single user, AvaLine costs L$14,400/year, ie US$70/year. Residents pay only for monthly flat-rate AvaLine service, regardless of how many calls are received or minutes are used. And

Before AvaLine was launched, other organizations had started to think and actually implemented out-of-game calls and SMS. For instance, in September 2007, NEC opened an island in SL. They offered the possibility for residents to make calls to another person in the real world and send text oriented messages such as SMS, email and IP Messaging [...] to the real world. Other organizations such as Swisscom (through Starfruit) sponsored 100,000 SMS that residents could send from virtual phone booth to out-of-game phones. Another system called SLFONE enables residents to send 120SMS to 240 countries and 700 networks for 8500L$/year (ie US$40).

Reception and adoption by the residents

Three major announcements were made by LL to their residents about voice integration in SL. The earliest news was a FAQ justifying the introduction of voice to SL. It was published by Joe Linden and received half a thousand comments. The second news was published in May 2009. It introduced the AvaLine beta and showed a lot of unsatisfied users as well. Third, the end of AvaLine beta in August 2009 and its introduction to all residents as one of the new bells and whistles brought a lot of concern as well. The residents' comments showed they cared more about stability than new features. Many of them wondered why they would pay to use a semi-working functionnality while they are currently doing fine with other voice-chat systems.

• When voice was first introduced the same arguments were made - LL said we all loved it, most people said they never/couldn't use it and some people said it was vital for them.
• This new shiny toy is just something to try to distract people from the real issues.
• We want stability before the introduction of new features.
• Utterly pointless and I bet you were told so in all those ridiculous surveys. And your call quality is awful, skype ftw.
• each shiny new toy gets lots of marketing attention, but fixing things that are broken in a product you've already sold isn't as sexy.

Unfortunately, one of the last word given by LL was: join me for Office Hours [...] we will discuss your ideas about what kinds of communications tools would best help you enhance your Second Life experience. A very interesting official Linden reaction to residents' complains was Partnerships, like the one with Vivox that helped bring us AvaLine, also greatly reduce the number of internal staff needed to deliver projects.
LL may have to keep bringing new content to its customers to keep some of them attracted. That is a perfectly normal marketing strategy in any MMOG. However LL is not an MMOG, and the average SL residents may differ quite much from the average MMO gamer. The obvious difference is: some of the residents work or earn money thanks to SL. So I think it might be more efficient to base a communication strategy on debugging or maintenance rather than on new features.

Finally, I am puzzled by the strange (or lack of?) community management style followed by LL. Joe Linden published "Over 15 Billion Voice Minutes Served", but he was not in charge of answering the comments although he wrote I look forward to hearing what you think. Instead, it was Jeska Linden (an actual community manager with 20 times more news posted than Joe) who stepped up to the plate. Is "what is rare is important" the point in Joe announcing new features to the community?

[Conf] Software best practices: the Magic Gig?

Talk given by Kevin Kreitman on Friday, February 19. [My comments in brackets]

Only companies get CMMI, not people. [Interestingly, products don't get CMMI either. People get the "senior" or "lead" mention to distinguish them from the "junior" newbie, but that does not mean they are more skilled.]

Kreitman's conjecture: you can not control process and outcome at the same time. That is to say, the more you control the process, the more open you have to be about the outcome. [Open source projects are interesting examples to check this conjecture. Open source projects seem to be, a priori, controlled by no one in particular: the community decides which features should be implemented. But looking closer, it becomes obvious that committing into /trunk should only be allowed to experimented and familiar developers: novice or random developers unfamiliar with the project must not commit whatever lines they found interesting to add. So the control here actually prevents the project to collapse, narrowing the outcome. Does the conjecture apply to open source projects?]

A process solves a particular problem in a particular context thanks to particular resources. Hence a process that works somewhere may not work for your company. Imposing a process does not work. While in the middle of a project, do not change radically the process that has been followed for months. Instead, it can sometimes be useful to try, during 1h per week for instance, a new particular "process concept". For instance, a project was stuck because no one knew who to talk to or where to go. This visibility problem was solved when it was decided to try a "total transparency" hour every Friday morning. All possible information was available, and everyone could know which bugs had been detected when, which had been solved when, what were the next project deadlines, what were the current budget and resources, etc. [Game companies usually follow agile development processes with very short iteration cycles, so that the game can be tested, debugged and its mechanics adjusted as soon as possible. I wonder how efficient short breaks could be when applied to the kind of agile process followed in traditional game companies. Moreover, I feel like publishers, willing to control costs, may require more expensive projects to follow a kind of spiral life-cycle. Could a "spiral-break" be interesting/useful in game development agile processes?]

The iPhone IDE is an easy-to-use tool which lets the developer see what his/her app looks like quickly. The IDE contains many API and bundles, and it is really hard not to use it to develop an iPhone app. The reason is the Apple designers do not want their nicely designed product to be spoiled by poorly designed third-party apps, and Apple also wants to make money through the appstore. So they force the app developer to use their API to ensure third-party apps stay relatively user-friendly. At the same time, this API forcing also means the iPhone may contain functionalities that are not visible to third-party app developers. [Someone added "yeah it's kinda the same with Xbox Live Arcade"] [Giving a limited API to third-party developers sounds like developing add-ons for MMOG. Giving enough while not giving too much can get really tricky. The less you provide, the duller the UGC, but the more you provide, the easier for hacking or exploiting.]

[Literature] Playability heuristics for mobile multi-player games

by Korhonen et al.in 2007

The authors separate multi-player games in 2 categories:

• online games
• proximity games

The authors define a persistent multi-player game as a game maintaining the game state from a game session to another. My summary of this paper focuses mainly on MMOG, that is to say multi-player games belonging to the "online" and persistent categories defined by the authors. Some games mentioned in the paper are for mobile devices such as smart phones or portable consoles. I feel like these games actually fit into the MMOG category, even though MMOG on these platforms/hardwares does not seem to mean the same thing as MMOG on PC or home consoles. But I can imagine a future where portable consoles embed wireless communication and computational technologies powerful enough to enable playing MMOG anywhere in a city.

Heuristics

The game heuristics proposed by the authors are quite similar in their purpose to Nielsen's HCI heuristics. Indeed, the authors previously defined a playability heuritics model for mobile games containing 3 modules: game usability, mobility and gameplay. Based on previous research works and the analysis of 3 mobile multi-player games, the authors propose 8 new heuristics for multi-player mobile games. Below is a table of the heuristics and quick examples I have found for these heuristics in MMOG.

the game supports communication	instant textual chat, vocal chat
there are reasons to communicate	activities performed by group of players (raids, group pvp), trade, chitchating
the game supports groups and communities	looking-for-group flag, challenging boss monsters for groups of players, guild headquarters, factions, class-specific forum sections
the game helps the player to find other players and game instances	/who-like functionality, NPC broadcasting players messages
the game provides information about other players	PVP ladder, Control Panel-like functionality
the design overcomes lack of players and enables soloing	Healing NPC, (common) transportation NPC, «trash mobs» and soloable mini-bosses
the design minimizes deviant behavior: cheating, exploiting, hacking, grief/anti-fair-play	filtering rude words
the design hides the effect of the network, the issues are latency, disconnections and pricing of data traffic (if the player has to pay for the data transfered)	lost-packets dead-reckoning