CASE STUDY | WIZARDS OF THE COAST © DECISIVE DATA

Case Study: In-game data analytics platform

SITUATIONWizards of the Coast (WotC) has earned its name through decades of enchanting players with the magic of its games.

Based in Renton, Washington, WotC broke onto the scene in 1993 when it published its fantasy role-playing card game Magic: The Gathering®. The company, which became a subsidiary of Hasbro, went on to publish other award-winning and record-breaking card and tabletop roleplaying games Dungeons & Dragons, through the purchase of TSR, Pokémon Trading Card Game, RoboRally, and online games including Magic Online and Magic Duels.

Fast forward to 2017, WotC was preparing initial release of Magic: The Gathering Arena, an all-new, free-to-play digital collectable card game—and the first creation to emerge from its new in-house Digital Games Studio.

Arena was already in development when Alan Burke joined WotC as Director of Analytics, tasked with harnessing gameplay analytics to enhance the player experience.

“An analytics solution was in the works, but when I reviewed the technical capabilities of that solution, it failed on scale, cost, and perfor-mance,” Burke says. “We needed to find a better analytics solution.”

Wizards of the Coast launches Magic: The Gathering Arena at HASCON with full scale ELT solution and analytics platform powered by Snowflake, Tableau and PlayFab

CASE STUDY | WIZARDS OF THE COAST © DECISIVE DATA

SOLUTIONAfter conducting a rapid and intense review of potential an-alytics solutions, WotC found its answer using a Snowflake cloud data warehouse and Decisive Data’s ELT data pipeline solution.

“We did a four-week review of the marketplace, and in the end Snowflake was the clear choice based on three factors: Scalability, performance and cost.”

Decisive Data was involved early in the project, helping WotC create an integrated solution that also included Play-Fab, upstream, for collecting gameplay data, and Tableau, downstream, for data visualization.

WotC required a powerful—yet simple to use—analytics environment to provide what Burke calls “data democracy.” WotC game designers and other stakeholders wouldn’t have to be data analysts to pull value from the cast treasure of collected data.

A major element of the solution was a powerful ELT data pipeline. And the clock was ticking as HASCON was just six weeks away.

“We had done our due diligence and knew we had made the right decision, but HASCON was looming,” Burke says. “And we had an enormous need for efficient ELT as part of our player analytics demo.”

The team wanted to demonstrate their real analytics solu-tion at HASCON, not a mock-up. As they prepared to demon-strate their near real-time analytics from live gameplay at the event, they wanted to use the go-to-market ELT that would need to scale to handle a billion messages per hour.

ARCHITECTURAL OVERVIEWDecisive Data worked closely with WotC to create a multi-tier solution that included:

• Gameplay Event Harvesting. WotC worked with PlayFab to identify some 200 gaming events for which it wanted to collect data. Events ranged from a player logging on, joining a match, to gameplay elements such as weapons used or time spent on a level.

• Cloud Storage. PlayFab dropped its JSON-format event data into an Amazon Simple Storage Ser-vice (S3) bucket for temporary storage.

• ELT Data Pipeline. Decisive Data created a cus-tom ELT solution that ingested PlayFab’s JSON data from S3 storage directly into the Snowflake data warehouse, retaining the data’s native state. The solution also handles structured data, im-ported from other sources.

• ELT Queueing. As part of its ELT solution, Deci-sive Data created a queueing process to move processed data into archival storage, to prevent duplicate handling, while moving any data with errors to a separate location for human interven-tion.

• Data Lake. Decisive Data’s ELT strategy within Snowflake brings data into a versioned data lake persistent staging area. Data is ingested into a single table where it is organized by event and passed to the event specific persistent staging area.

• Analytics. The WotC analytics solution supports robust and flexible ad hoc reporting through use of database views against the data lake. The same structure can also be used for persistent tables and recurring reporting.

• Data Visualization. Tableau dashboards are used for data visualization, populated by queries to the Snowflake data lake.

“The analytical power Decisive Data helped us create with its ETL and integration with Snowflake and Tableau has been exceptional.”- Alan Burke, Director of Analytics, Wizards of the Coast

CASE STUDY | WIZARDS OF THE COAST © DECISIVE DATA

PROJECT MANAGEMENTBringing together the solution in only six weeks required tight project management from both WotC and Decisive Data. From WotC’s perspective, the team was impressed with the knowledge and planning that Decisive Data brought to the project.

“Decisive Data gave us a specific road map of how they were going to meet our company ob-jectives in the six-week period,” Burke says. “We were impressed by the pedigree of the Decisive Data personnel. Looking at their engagement plan and looking at how they were going to staff this project, we could see we were getting the right resources and had the right direction to actually execute our solution within six weeks.”

Decisive Data was delighted with the WotC team.

“We used an agile development approach to the project because there were so many stages in the pipeline,” says Darren Gardner, Big Data Practice Lead at Decisive Data. “The WotC project manag-er was adept at driving projects with a very deep knowledge of agile project management. He was able to effectively document who needed to do what and by when, and he ensured that folks un-derstood where everybody was in the project.”

WotC appreciated the proactive approach that De-cisive Data took toward designing its ELT pipeline. One step was to perform data quality checks on the initial data flows into S3, identifying potential structural problems, and working with developers to remediate to ensure clean gameplay data. De-cisive Data also created an ELT queueing system to efficiently remove the time-sapping potential for processing the same data files twice, while creat-ing a bypass for any files with errors so they could be scrutinized later without impacting data flow.

Decisive Data took advantage of a unique and powerful Snowflake feature, multi-table insert, to

create a 200-way multiplex for categorizing incom-ing data by event type for later analytics.

The project was completed within the six-week deadline, and the WotC Digital Games Studio intro-duced Magic: The Gathering Arena at HASCON.

Although the WotC analytics solution hasn’t yet been formally named, Burke says that unofficially he and others on his team refer to it as “Volo the Traveler,” the name sake of the great explorer who dives into the worlds of Magic and brings back reports of monsters and strange lands.

WotC’s Volo the Traveler: Collecting data the old-fashioned (and more perilous) way.

CASE STUDY | WIZARDS OF THE COAST © DECISIVE DATA

BENEFITSWizards of the Coast has enjoyed many benefits from the analytics solution that Decisive Data helped create, including enhancing the “fun factor” through greater visibility into gameplay; providing “democrat-ic data;” structured and flexible ELT; ability to create custom data warehouses; and scalable, resilient, and “incredibly lightweight” ELT.

Enhancing the “Fun Factor” through Greater Visibility into Gameplay

Wizards of the Coast was created to bring fun to the world, and the company is using its new analytics capabilities to enhance what it calls the “beat of the play” and to drive its “fun factor” to new heights.

“The analytical power that Decisive Data helped us create with its ELT and integration with Snowflake and Tableau has been exceptional,” Burke says. “We’ve gained a deep view into what players are actually doing in gameplay. This is helping us fine-tune what we call the beat of the play, helping us fine tune everything from match making to how a player progresses. Our dashboards and our tight analytics loop allow us to make a tweak to the game and precisely measure the results. We are using all of this to make a better experience for our play-ers. We are able to continually up the fun factor.”

Providing “Democratic Data”

Burke—much like Volo the Traveler—believes in shar-ing information with all who can benefit from it. And, again, like Volo, Burke encourages exploration.

“A big goal we had for this project was to make the data democratic,” Burke says. “We didn’t want to cre-ate something just for analysts. And we’ve succeeded. Our game developers are able to use this tool in ways we couldn’t have predicted. We expect our Customer Service team will build their own analytic tools for Snowflake. The way Decisive Data helped us build out the views, even novice data users can go exploring.”

Burke adds: “Volo the Traveler is a D&D [Dungeons & Dragons] character who goes exploring. And I kind of think of analytics in the same way. We're the people who are going out and trying to document the un-knowns and explore this very amazing and perplexing universe—that might be a little dangerous, as well.”

ELT that’s Structured and Flexible

While the focus of the project was primarily on semi-structured gameplay data, WotC also needed Decisive Data to provide an ELT process that could impose structure on core, business-relevant instru-mentation.

“Decisive Data created an ELT process that is flexible so when structured data comes in, it gets read and processed in a very defined manner and populates our persistent tables and our Tableau reports,” Burke says. “While at the same time we have our unstructured data coming in, landing, and available for queries by our developers, who might do some ad hoc logging because they're trying to track down a particularly pernicious bug.”

Burke notes this flexibility has enabled WotC develop-ers to design new instrumentation, utilizing Snowflake as a development tool as well as an information tool.

Our dashboards and our tight analytics loop allow us to make a tweak to the game and precisely measure the results. We are using all of this to make a better experience for our players. — Alan Burke

CASE STUDY | WIZARDS OF THE COAST © DECISIVE DATA

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Ability to Create Custom Data Warehouses for Partners

The flexibility of its new analytics platform makes it easy for WotC to share its analysis capabilities with partners.

“We’ve found it’s very easy to set up different S3 buckets for Snowflake with Tableau sitting on top of it to create tools we can share with our partners,” Burke says. “We can support their analytic needs through our operations and let them focus on developing great games for our platform. Using Tableau, they can tap into our analytics platform so they can gauge how their design decisions affect their games.”

Scalable, Resilient, and “Incredibly Lightweight” ELT

Scalability of ELT is mission critical for WotC because it must be able to handle data streams even during peak usage times, such as for new releases.

“We’re building the system to handle up to a billion mes-sages an hour,” Burke says. “We’ve been running stress tests with our Decisive Data ELT, and it has been able to handle everything we’ve thrown at it.”

Part of the scalability is because of what Burke describes as “the incredibly lightweight ELT process that Decisive Data helped us build.”

Burke notes that WotC is still running its ELT on the smallest core that AWS offers.

“Good Partners . . . And Lots of Knowledge Transfer”

WotC was impressed with the experience and vision that Decisive Data brought to the project, as well as with its ability to quickly react to unexpected develop-ments.

“Decisive Data, drawing on all of the experience they’ve had in creating ELT solutions for other companies, brought a wealth of knowledge to the project,” Burke says. “We were able to tap into that expertise as they created a custom vision for us. This saved us from having to go through a lot of trial and error on our side. We were able to get it right the first time. That was another big win.”

Decisive Data also took care to provide plenty of knowledge sharing along the way. “They shared their expertise with our team, and brought us right along with them,” Burke says. “This meant that at the end of the project we didn’t have to sign a multi-year mainte-nance agreement. Instead we were able to talk about what exciting projects we could tackle next.”

Scalable, Resilient, and “Incredibly Lightweight”