In Progress
Last week, we fixed the underlying issue for the “disappearing items” problem some players were seeing with hero equip items. (That fix should also have taken care of the “unable to change equipment” problem.) We haven't been able to come up with an awesome way to fix all the negative items in one fell swoop, so you may still see residual issues with negative equipment numbers as we work our way through the tickets for that issue.
This week we’re working on some client-side crash issues, along with the “freezing before PvP” problem. The PvP freeze is caused by a popup that’s not showing up correctly, so it’s a pretty simple fix. It looks like we should be sending new client versions to Apple and Google at the end of this week, although as usual the Android one will come out before the iOS one due to reviewing time.
The freeze some of you are seeing in other places in PvP is a different bug and we're working on that one too.
Coming Up
We’re continuing our work on performance and stability, and you’ll probably see a bunch of small updates from us with improvements before any big feature builds arrive.
Our new features are coming along nicely. (Yes, I will tell you what they are one of these days.)
We think we’ve got a handle on the problems with Epic Boss, so we’ll be bringing that event back. We’re still thinking about maybe revamping it, but we won’t be doing that just yet.
We’re also working on a pretty major expansion pack, with larger Vault sizes, PvP rank additions, Guild Bonus additions, more levels, and scratcher updates. (Yes, I am teasing you. No, I’m not going to tell you more right now - patience!)
How’s It Work: How We Look at Events
I mentioned in my dev notes for last week that we don’t see a lot of participation in epic boss events, and people seemed really surprised by that, so I wanted to explain some of the metrics we’re looking at. (These are pretty common metrics in mobile gaming.)
The first thing we look at is Daily Active Users. That’s just “how many people log into/open the game on any given day." We like looking at which events draw people into the game.
We also track a variety of measures of how people progress through the events. While a number of people do progress through epic boss, a large number of people don't appear to go out of their way to go deep into the event.
Like every other gaming company, we do look some at monetization measures, the main ones being average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU) and average revenue per paying user (ARPPU). Different gaming companies focus on these metrics differently and they are frequently used to understand how or why an event does well or poorly from a revenue standpoint.
We also look not only at how much money is being spent, but whether people are spending cash and gold in game on an event.
When we design events, some of them are designed to pull in lots of players and appeal to them all, and some of them are designed mostly for higher-level players, so we don’t expect to see the same kinds of numbers on any given day, but we usually do hope to see a bump in active users around the start and end of an event, and we hope to see a a large number of players making an effort to progress. Epic boss gets quite a bit of participation from people who happen to be around for it, and has some effect on logins, but we don’t see the levels of participation and engagement we do for some other events. That being said, it sounds like there is certainly a group of players that really enjoys this event, and we're looking to bring it back in the future.
Originally Posted by MrFister
