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March 2013

Neo4j @ Gamesys

Toby O’Rourke

March 2013

Overview • About Gamesys

• Our Use Case

• Choosing a Store

• Building the App

• Deployment & Ops

• Cypher & Reporting

• Thinking in Graphs

March 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

March 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

March 2013

Building the App• Separating the persistence from the model is less important than when using

RDBMS.

• In fact, the power of graph traversals is part of the domain

• Used Spring Data Neo4j[1]

• Great Documentation

• Loads of support from Michael Hunger

• Found a few bugs

• Had to drop back to straight up Neo4j APIs a couple of times

[1] http://www.springsource.org/spring-data/neo4j

March 2013

Deployment & Ops

• Very stable, no unplanned outages since we’ve been live (~18 months)

• Separate node as part of cluster, not serving live requests for ad-hoc

querying & admin

• Mutating Cypher is great for making on-the-fly tweaks

March 2013

March 2013

Looking at our Graph

March 2013

Aside: Our Referral Offer• 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

March 2013

Aside: 1, 2, Profit!!!• If I create multiple accounts I can collect loads of referral bonuses

• I might get some decent wins playing through the bonus

• In any case I should have most of my original stake available

• Referral Bonuses – Referee Losses >= 0 in most cases

• £££!

March 2013

March 2013

March 2013

Modelling a Game Economy2012

April

• Here Be Monsters (https://apps.facebook.com/herebemonsters/)

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

• Really difficult to understand the effect of changing (eg) the scarcity of

any given item

• Graph gives us a way to model that and calculate the value of things

March 2013

March 2013

March 2013

March 2013

Wrapping Up2012

April

• Graphs are applicable to several gaming use cases

• Social Networks

• Fraud/Collusion Detection

• Modeling

• Neo4j being used as Production system and for Analytics

• Stable in production

March 2013

On Facebook

facebook.com/gamesys

on Twitter

@officialgamesys

@tobyorourke

@burningmonk

Find out more

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March 2013

Thanks!