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Data Analytics In The Virtual Battlefield

Oracle

In the battle for the North Atlantic during World War II, Germany’s U-boats wreaked havoc on supply ships headed for Britain. Bombing the island nation by air and starving it by sea, Hitler’s forces stood to conquer England—until a team of code breakers, led by mathematician Alan Turing, developed technology that enabled allies to unravel encrypted German military orders and turn the tide.

Today, gamers worldwide are waging online replicas of naval battles from that era in a beta test of World of Warships, the newest creation of Wargaming.net. Onscreen, players see stunning realism, down to the faithful attention to detail on the World War II ships and armory.

Behind the scenes, every move made by every player leaves a trail of data—data that Wargaming uses to quickly analyze and improve the user experience and win the most important video game battle of all: ongoing customer engagement.

Wargaming is known for its WWII-era massively multiplayer online games. The company’s first two MMO offerings, World of Tanks and World of Warplanes, have huge fan bases worldwide. In fact, World of Tanks has more than 110 million players on its PC version alone.

It’s also one of the top games on Twitch.tv, where an average of 100 million people tune in each month to watch others play video games (small wonder Twitch was bought by Amazon.com in September 2014).

One of Wargaming’s largest player demographics is retired military, a testament to the design team’s focus on authenticity, down to how the tanks, planes, and ships interact with one another and how shots are deflected.

Each of its MMO games is free to play, though players can choose to pay for an upgrade to their tank or armory or to make other alterations. However, those upgrades provide no unfair advantage in the game, as players are matched up in similarly equipped tiers for each battle.

Still, once you get into the challenge, and the longer you play, those upgrades are tempting—and fun. They’re also Wargaming’s bread and butter.

But keeping players coming back for more requires the company to present new challenges and throw in some surprises along the way. And that’s one area where Wargaming’s use of advanced data analytics is proving invaluable.

Staggering Stores of Data

“We receive about 300 billion telemetry events a day into our data warehouse just from the PC version of World of Tanks,” says Craig Fryar, Wargaming’s head of business intelligence. Add that to the data collected through the company’s other games and platforms, and the scale of information the company collects and analyzes each day is staggering.

For the first 15 years of the company’s existence, the growing Wargaming staff fed that player data into Excel spreadsheets and worked to make sense of it all. Needless to say, there were no fast answers.

Fryar came on board two years ago to build a business analytics team. The first step was to move beyond the spreadsheets to technology that helped them process and decipher all the data much more quickly and efficiently.

“We thought deeply about whether to build or buy,” he says. “I spoke with other data warehouse architects who have built Hadoop architectures, and they’ve had to hire additional staff just to keep up with the updates.”

Instead, Wargaming wanted to keep maintenance simple and focus its resources on areas that would help the business grow. When Fryar saw a demo of the Oracle Big Data Appliance during a Gartner BI Summit, he realized that the level of integration it offered would enable his team to ramp up fast.

“With the Oracle Big Data Appliance, we get a patch that flows down through all the components and all the subsystems of the Hadoop ecosystem every few months, and that makes life a lot simpler for us,” he says.

“And the Oracle Database Appliance allows us to take information from the Big Data Appliance and present it very quickly to our analysts so they can visually analyze it, create solutions, and present those to our design, development, and marketing teams.”

Today, Fryar and his team have left spreadsheets behind and amassed a strong track record of helping resolve issues in game design, improving player outreach, automating reports for executives, and upping sales.

One of their first projects was to analyze the World of Tanks: Xbox 360 Edition new-player tutorial. During its beta test, the BI team found that if a player completed all five components of the tutorial, there was a 75% chance he or she would actually become a paying customer and engage with the game long term. If the player completed only two of the tutorial components, that conversion rate dropped to around 33%.

In the past, the designers and developers used tables and spreadsheets to try to figure out whether the tutorial was working as planned. The BI team collected a large data set from Hadoop, created a visual analysis using a heat map of the tutorial, and within a couple of hours could see some inefficiencies in how the tutorial play was progressing—including some unexpected player behaviors.

“The design team fixed those issues and the increase in the tutorial completion rate went way up,” Fryar says.

The new analytics technology proved its worth early on, when the team was developing a series of predictive algorithms to determine the point at which a new World of Tanks player would likely become a paying customer.

Using a high-powered desktop configuration, the team was left with no answers after six hours of churning on just one algorithm. So it shifted gears and converted the algorithms into R using the drag-and-drop interface of Oracle R Enterprise and the Oracle Big Data Appliance. Within three minutes, the team had its answers on not one, but four predictive algorithm models.

The team has also piloted the advanced analytics capabilities to hone its marketing segmentation, refining messaging to players based on play style, how engaged they are in the game, and the messaging they’re likely to respond to.

In one geographic region, those customized messages helped increase retention, resulting in an associated revenue increase of 62%, Fryar says.

The company plans to continue its focus on military games and may expand onto mobile and social platforms. And soon, Wargaming may offer its big data expertise and infrastructure to outside developers and partner companies.

“I can say fairly confidently that Wargaming now has the leading-edge solution in terms of data warehousing, data engineering, and analytics solutions of any other gaming company in the world,” he says.

The game is most definitely on.

Craig Fryar, Wargaming’s head of business intelligence.