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November 2013

Graph Infection @ Gamesys

Toby O’Rourke

November 2013

Overview • About Gamesys

• First exposure

• A quick game of spot the difference

• The infection spreads

• It’s an epidemic!

November 2013

About Gamesys• Major Cash & Social Gaming operator, primarily in UK & Europe

• World’s first Cash gaming on Facebook

• Social Games include Jackpotjoy Slots & Here Be Monsters

• Bingo, Slots, Casino, Instants

• Handle ~5bn wagers per annum

• 200k unique cash players a month

November 2013

First Exposure“This is all about connected data, what can we find to help with that?”

- Toby O’Rourke, Technical Architect, Gamesys

November 2013

Building an Internal Social Network• Online Bingo is a highly social game, there is chat alongside the game

• Acquiring new players can be very expensive

• Players acquired by referral are cheaper to acquire and higher value

• We want to incentivise members to refer their friends

• We wanted to learn about the social relationships between players

November 2013

Neo4j in 2011• Cypher was brand new and experimental

• Read only

• Gremlin was the preferred query language

• Spring Data Neo4j was at 1.x

• Heavy use of AspectJ

• Difficult to use in IDEs

• HA used Zookeeper

November 2013

What we did

• Embedded database in the app

• spring-data-neo4j as API to db

• Domain Objects have SDN annotations

• That’s more than OK, it’s good. Connectedness is part of the

domain

• Had to drop back to straight Java API using Neo4jTemplate in a few

places

November 2013

November 2013

Looking at our Graph

November 2013

Aside: Refer a Friend in Cash Gaming• Referee gets a cash bonus straight away

• Constrained by a “play through” requirement

• Referrer gets a cash bonus once the Referee has played a certain amount

• Typically, the cash bonus for the referrer is greater than the minimum deposit

requirement for the referee

November 2013

A Quick Game of Spot the Difference

November 2013

November 2013

November 2013

The Infection Spreads“Hey, Who is the Neo4j expert in the building? Our guys want to use it”

- Tom Newton, Director of Social Gaming, Gamesys

November 2013

Challenges making a MMORPG playable• Here Be Monsters (https://apps.facebook.com/herebemonsters/)

• Complex economy, 1000’s items, monsters, locations and traps

• What if the items needed for an early quest are opposite ends of the world?

• What if a basic game commodity is too scarce?

• How do we test this beast?

November 2013

Enter Neo4j2012

April

• Put every item, location, monster, trap and quest in to the graph

November 2013

November 2013

Enter Neo4j2012

April

• Put every item, location, monster, trap and quest in to the graph

• Brew some secret sauce to define “poor gaming experience”

• Analyse graph to match poor experiences

• Focus play testing effort on potentially problematic areas

• More certainty over behaviour of a complex universe

• Fun!

November 2013

November 2013

November 2013

Results2012

April

• Completed a major refactor of the game economy

• KPIs are up

• More players, more activity

• Time to market was reduced

• Repeatable process

November 2013

It’s an Epidemic!“I hear you have already been doing this so would be keen to start getting to grips with Cypher and exploring the data”

- Guy Dawson, BI Analyst, Gamesys

November 2013

on LinkedIn

linkedin.com/company/

gamesys

on Twitter

@officialgamesys

@tobyorourke

@theburningmonk

Find out more

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November 2013

Thanks!