Social analytics are a key component of development for companies like Zynga. However, Lightbox CEO Dylan Jobe indicates that the AAA developer used similar data to keep Starhawk multiplayer balanced.
“One of the other big changes that we did, to help make more informed design decisions about balance, was putting in place a really massively robust backend system for game analytics,” said Jobe. “We’re able to track far more statistics than we ever could.”
“Analytics is king. With it, you can make some really amazing business decisions, and also really smart, well-informed design decisions,” he added. “We invested a lot of time putting in place a great telemetry system in Starhawk. We track every single event for every player in every game on the planet every single day. We know what skill you activated, when, how long you had that skill activated, when you switched. Down to very specific game design and tuning parameters, like, for every missile that is fired at another aircraft, we know how their controller was configured. So that we can make sure that the different control schemes have balance and are not providing advantages one way or another.”
Jobe attended sessions with Zynga and Nexon at the GDC Online event, to learn how companies handled backend analytics. “Many of them kept referring to a piece of software called Tableau, which is a really great data visualizer,” said Jobe. “And I really didn’t know anything about it at the time, but I knew that this was something that I needed to know more about, that we needed to integrate with Starhawk,” he said.
“I remember coming back to the studio, sitting down with our systems designer and saying, ‘You know what This software looks like something we need to use. It’s going to be a great way for us to visualize all kinds of design stuff,” he added. “Get on it.’ Of course we use a very involved custom Sony backend, but Tableau software is a really great visualizer, and I would highly recommend that for any game studio. And we did exactly what you said regarding the learnings that we’ve all gotten from social games.”
Jobe thinks that the data helped separate good feedback from the bad. “We did that, literally on a daily basis, during our international Starhawk beta,” said Jobe. “We would look at the data, see what was happening, we would look at the forums and Twitter and Facebook. Of course, you have the passionate internet fans. They may have had just one bad game, so they immediately think that whatever weapon they were using at the time was underpowered. But you compare the passion of their response with the cold clarity of the objective data to steer the design decisions and the tuning of the game.”
“Math is the universal language, right While we have a ton of players in North America who we communicate with quite frequently and clearly in English, we have players everywhere. So we were able to get essentially playtest data from all nations, whether or not we spoke their language, whether or not we could read their forum posts. It was really interesting stuff that came out of that data. Stuff that was surprising to us. I made a presentation about this at SXSW this year. It blew my mind to see that Russians playing the Starhawk beta accounted for the most proximity mine kills. That was a group of people on earth that love to plant proximity mines the most, and they accounted for the most proximity mine kills. Some of the best players on the planet, in fact the biggest percentage of great players, even though it was relatively small, but they were so good, were from Greece,” he noted.
Source: GamesBeat
