Epic Cards Battle

ECB is the best game on mobile but is having trouble growing....it’s a paradox. Just how important is player retention? Let’s say 10 new players download the game each day. Say on average that 5 people delete it immediately cause they don’t like it, 3 play it for a week, 1 plays it for a month, and 1 plays it for 3 months. What is the most players the game can ever reach based on this fantasy scenario.

Math
After 3 months or 90 days you have 90 players who played it or are playing it for 3 months. You have only 30 players who are playing it for 1 month remaining, you have only 21 players who are playing for just a week, and that is maximum saturation. The max you hit is 141 players.

Now just how important is player retention. What if.....only 4 people deleted it, 3 played for a week, 2 played for a month, and 1 played for 3 months. Then what’s the answer? 90+60 this month+21=171 players.

Ok ok so getting One extra person who downloads the app each day to stick around for a month can increase the player base by 30 players...hmm...wow that is powerful.

Now let’s see what happens if just one extra person per day who downloads the app plays for 3 months. Now let’s say 4 delete it, 2 play a week, 2 play a month, and 2 play 3 months. Now what is the saturation point of people who will be playing the game? It’s now 180 people who downloaded in last 90 days playing for 3 months, it’s 60 who downloaded in last month playing for one month, it’s 14 who downloaded in last week. The total is 284 players.

Ahhh...now that’s a jump in the player base by over 100 players. You already have customers coming in everyday so the power is getting them to stick around for 90 days not 30 or not just 7.

So what can be done to increase retention. Here are some ideas
Get rid of the week package. Reduce month package price to $9.99. Create a 3 month package at $19.99. Offer lifetime package at $39.99 usd. Now players got to play ladder bc without that they are not being retained in the game. How can you get the players to play ladder for 3 months or even longer. Here are some more tips.

Add a daily quest: play 10 ladder games and get 25 diamonds.
Add some achievements for ladder milestones of 100 games, 500, 1000, 2500, 50000, 10,000
Make sure bots are fair to new players. If a player wins 80% they more likely to stick around vs if they win 60%.
Speed up the games, Insert surrender option or speed 6,7.

Take the 4 star reward out to top 20 like in ecb 1. Dangle a bigger carrot out there so more players think they have a shot. Keep fighting for I get player retention. Look over all your data and experiment with your pricing to see what is most effective. If something doesn’t work you can allways I do it. Good luck.

Thank you for your feedback.
Retention always been a pain in ECB. The key to retention is provides an optimized new player guidance. IWe will take note of your suggestions.

To me the win rate would be a big motivator for sticking around and playing longer. Since most bot decks are shadow decks otake from the pool of current players it has become increasingly more and more difficult for a newbie to beat bots over time since the games inception. Keeping in mind that a brand new player in ladder has a tiny grasp on the game perhaps there would be a lot of benefit for developing an easier bot system that these players would interact with so they could get their feet wet a little easier and build confidence. Ladder pro is a think fast game and they don’t get so obers or multiple tries like in the campaign. Here are a few proposals::

1. Since ladder is tiered into six groups from bronze, silver, gold, etc it is most likely a new player will be in the lowest tier , bronze. For this reason bot encounters at the bronze level may be should be considered to be different than bots at the higher tiers. The easiest recommendation would be for bot encounters at bronze tier to be completely random. The likely result of this is that bots will be easy, perhaps too easy. One outcome of this is that new players will fair well winning most of their encounters and this will surely help with retention and building confidence. One initial drawback is veteran players may find the bots too easy but the hope is that with more new players sticking around there would be fewer bots and rising to the silver level would occur more quickly meaning these veteran player would probably reach silver level a few days into ladder rather than a week into ladder like it is currently with the level of players.

2. A second suggestion for what type of bot new players would fair better against is arena bots. I don’t get the impression that current bots pull from arena games but maybe I am wrong. In general arena decks are less coordinated and a little more random than a well conceived quick match deck. All cards are also level 1 which helps make them more manageable. So an arena deck will be a better than a completely random deck in theory but easier than a well conceived quick match deck. plus may not require much programming on your end as you are already pulling decks from a database.

3. Once player reaches silver level the more challenging bot can be faced.