State of the Game - August 2014

It's been roughly 5 months since the dawn of LINE Rangers and the game has changed drastically since its infancy days. I wanted to take some time to just step back and look at our journey. At its core, LINE Rangers is a straightforward game with a simple goal: destroy the enemy tower and advance to the next stage in our quest to rescue Sally. It has a truly addictive nature about it and has captured the hearts as well as the wallets of many people. For players who have joined at various points in time, here's what the game looked like back then.

We've come a long way to save Sally

The game initially released on February 27, 2014 with 60 stages and 75 rangers:

• 11 5-star rangers + Honey (100 friend invitation gift)
• 12 4-star rangers + Frog Brown (50 friend invitation gift) 
• 18 3-star rangers + Elf Cony (30 friend invitation gift) 
• 15 2-star rangers
• 16 1-star rangers

5 cycles of new rangers were released on a monthly basis:

• March 2014 + 4 rangers: Sorcerer Cony, Opera James, General Brown, Macho Moon
• April 2014 + 6 rangers: KSM, Dancer King Boss, Bernard, Hip Hop Brown, Songster Cony, Red Brown
• May 2014 + 6 rangers:  Ola Brown, Lightning Jessica, Dwight, Dumpy, Abdula
• June 2014 + 7 rangers: Susu, Luis, Prince James, Best Couple Brown and Cony, Hitman, Cherina and Shu 
• July 2014 + 6 rangers: Rider Edward, Mully, Chichi, Summer Brown and Cony, Elle

The game today has 132 stages and 104 rangers. That's a 120% expansion of single player game content and almost 40% more playable rangers than the original game.

Let's let that sink in for a moment: The game has more than doubled in available content. For any game at all, if a game maker is doubling its content in less than half a year, it means the game is hugely successful and the pressure to keep the content fresh is very high. When content is in high demand for a mobile game with such a simple concept, the landscape of the game has to change in order to keep its customers coming back. 

Stages to Plow Through

Today when a new player joins the rescue effort to save Sally, they are given 30 rubies just for starting. There are plenty of players who just started the game and rolled Ola Brown, Cherina, Dumpy or some other similarly powerful 5-star ranger with their first 20 ruby Gacha. And for those players, stages 1-108 are pretty much a breeze, limited only by the number of feathers they can get their hands on. For players who didn't happen to win some super overpowered rangers, their experience is... well, not very different up until around stage 84. I know this because I've personally replayed the game 3 times over. It's all still basically enjoyable but you really don't hit a wall until you reach Temple of Ice or Altar of Flame if you are schlepping through with free rangers.

The most prohibitive factor is actually your player level and the amount of coins you have available to make your upgrades. Especially when playing with the experience boost item, your player level will mostly likely be higher than the level your pocket can support in upgrades. In any case, with some fairly diligent playing, one could realistically arrive at the front gate of Maze of Illusion within 2-3 days with the aid of a powerful premium ranger, or about a week or two with free rangers. If brand new players can blow through 90% of your content in a matter of days, you've got a real problem. 

New Battle Modes and Why We Needed Them

June 19: Enter Team Battle Mode, Friend Battle Mode and Endless Mode. Endless Mode is a really nice addition to the game because it will continually offer players more to do as more areas are released in the future. The challenge continues to mount over time. I wish that they were a bit more clever with EM's stage environment, but nevertheless, it gives people something to wrestle with when they are done with the end-stage of a new area. Friend Battle Mode is a neat little way to duke it out with your friends and earn as many Friendship Points as you like in a day, limited only by the length of your friend list. They were both welcome additions to the game. 

Team Battle Mode became the problem and the solution to the content problems between releases. The player versus player aspect of the game has shaped a competitive edge to the players of the game that didn't exist before. It solved the issue of people going days and even weeks with "nothing to do" because in Team Battle Mode (PvP), there's always someone different to face off against. Day or night, there was another team to fight, another point to gain on the ladder. 

The funny thing about this ladder mode is the fact that players can purchase more feathers to continue to battle, and the rapid rate of climbing up in score is a complaint that a lot of people have with PvP. Half  hour into the weekly ladder contest, there are plenty of people who have already burned dozens of rubies for more chances to battle and gain points. That's likely a bigger investment into PvP than many players are willing to put in. But consider the flip side. If players were not allowed to buy special feathers and everyone could only play Team Battle Mode once every 30 minutes, then we'd run into the problem of the top ranked players being zombies as they would not sleep more than 149 minutes at a time for 7 days straight. Everyone else could only hope to play as many feathers as they can in their waking hours. Furthermore, players are at the mercy of the random matchmaker because the points you gain/lose factor in the ranking of your opponent. Suppose the top 2 players in the ladder both play all 336 feathers for the week, but one of the players got unlucky and got matched against an opponent who was ranked much lower. The loss of even 1 point could mean defeat for the entire week. Where is the fairness in that? 

So instead, the system we have is one where players who wish to participate in the top tiers of competition can buy as many feathers as they wish. Each week since the release of PvP mode, the score of rank #1 has increased. Yes, indeed LINE continues to make a killing as players grow more and more cutthroat. It's a contest of who can play the most number of winning matches in the span of 168 hours. PvP was never intended for be a level playing field for all.

Thank you, nongmetoo

This picture by nongmetoo is a very nice summary of what happened last week (PvP which ended August 4 06:00 JST), and a pretty good setup for the coming week. She did a picture like this a week or two ago, unfortunately I lost it. The trend that I got from the two was that the player behavior at the top 20000 ranks has changed dramatically, and likely will continue to shift for a while. People have been increasingly buying additional feathers to push up in ranks. Six weeks ago, rank 301-1000 could be achieved at approximately 2500 points. Today? You need over 6000 points to secure the 150 rubies. A month ago, to win 100 rubies you could skate by and land in the 2001-5000 rank without buying any additional feathers and profit the whole 100 rubies. Today you simply cannot do it. You will land in the 5001-10000 rank by not buying feathers and playing very solid matches throughout your waking hours. 

It's not at all rosy up in the top tiers. If you want to get up in the 2001-5000, you need to spend some rubies, but the reward gain is only 20 more rubies than the next tier down. So can you jump from 5001-10000 rank to 2001-5000 buying just 20 feathers? It's very unlikely, unless you time your wins very carefully. In the top 101-300 rank, players are rewarded 300 rubies, but they spent over 100 to get there, netting under 200 rubies. In the top 3 ranks it is even worse, players spend well over 1300 rubies for the week to get to 15000 points. They only win 1000 rubies from the competition, so they are in fact netting -300 rubies just to walk away with the glory of being ranked 1, 2 and 3 in the world for the week. 

So what am I saying? Line created a competition that profits off of people who want to reap the greatest rewards? Well... yeah, they did, but you could say that exact statement about tons of other games. If you want a chance to win, you have to put down some cash. Does it create a situation where small cash players get pushed out of the competition? Indeed it does. It's almost like a game of poker. If you want a shot at the pot, you have to buy in. The more fierce the game gets, the more money is involved. At a certain point people will duck out of the race because it's just too rich. But at least in the Rangers weekly ladder, everyone walks away with a minimum 20 rubies back in their pockets. Armed with this information, you can judge for yourself whether you want to step into the fire. These days, I find it easiest to target a tier I want to sit comfortably in, and just do enough to stay there. Trying to climb past rank 5000 requires quite a lot of effort that even I am not prepared to put in, but there are many others who enjoy it very much.

Gross Revenue

Please bear with me a little because these are all relative comparisons and with limitations based upon the data available. According to the website AppAnnie, which indexes app information and sales, LINE Corp has been 4th or 5th place in worldwide revenue for games in both the iOS and Android (Google Play) market from April through June. This includes all of the game titles in the LINE library. So yes, they make a ton of money. 

Now I'm going to use an example and take the Indonesia market because Indonesians are consistently the heaviest traffic viewers on this blog. Based on the information on AppAnnie, LINE Rangers started to surge up in sales almost immediately after release. It steadily climbed up in the ranks of the top grossing app charts in both iOS and Google Play markets in March and April and has been hanging steadily in the top 100 ever since. The in-app sales trend goes as you would expect: Line Rangers dips a bit in sales when there is no event and nothing special going on, then rushes up whenever a big event like new stages and new rangers are released (not coincidentally with double 5-star chance events happening simultaneously). This sales rate for the game is mirrored in similar markets like Thailand and Taiwan. 

So clearly, the gripes we as a playing community have with certain aspects of the game are overshadowed by the huge popularity of the game in the last half year. Yes, the odds of the Gacha are becoming increasingly unfavorable. Yes, the new rangers are increasingly mind-boggling in strength. Yes, the new area is much more challenging than all the previous ones. But despite all that (which are debatable whether they are good/bad) the game continues to be a success. The feedback that LINE gets from each new release of content and rangers is that people get excited. They love it and they are willing to part with their money for the latest stuff. For better or for worse, this is what the revenue stream reflects. 

Versus Other LINE Games

Other competitive game titles for LINE include Pokopang, Cookie Run, Let's Get Rich and Tsum Tsum. I don't play Pokopang and Cookie Run at all but the revenue that those two games draw in are astonishingly steady. Especially Cookie Run, which is almost always found in the top 20 grossing games in the relevant markets. I wish I could tell you why that is, but since I am not an avid player, I don't really know what impacts their sales or whether players would find it compelling to make in-game purchases very often or at a specific time/event. I will say this, because I played it a couple of times and looked up some details: Cookie Run is not an in-house developed game from LINE. The maker is Devsisters, a Korean company. Cookie Run was hugely popular in South Korea for years before it made its debut as part of the LINE family to the rest of the world. So maybe this developer company has created something inherently unique from the rest of the LINE games that affects its sales pattern. Maybe it has just existed long enough that the game is coasting on a winning formula. But in any case, LINE Rangers as a homegrown game has earned a place in LINE's eyes as one of its most popular and surely one of its most profitable. [Also for those of you not aware, LINE Rangers' concept is not original. It's pretty much a copy of the game Battle Cats with prettier graphics and more lovable troops. LINE definitely did a good job making a simple game more appealing.]

One more sort of interesting thing I've noticed is, typically if sales suddenly rockets for one game or the other (like the launch of Disney Tsum Tsum is a very good example), the grossing sales of other LINE games like Pokopang and Cookie Run tend to fall a bit. This indicates to me that there's a really good chance the players of LINE games are roughly the same pool of people and that they probably play multiple LINE games. The time that they can spend on any given game is finite, and so if their interests turn to one game or another, the rest of them may not get much attention. So perhaps they have some kind of event cycle such that the games each get some promotional events which do not overlap. That way, the games don't cannibalize each other. Or if they don't coordinate this way already, they probably should think about it to maximize sales.

Concluding Remarks

I bet a lot of the info here is not news to many readers. Why am I writing all this? This post is meant to be a stake in the ground, just marking where we stand right now. Perhaps the game will take a left turn somewhere in the future and we'll look back on this current state of the game as the "good old days," who knows? 

Events are fun and exciting. And we get stuff which makes us happy

For me, it very much feels like the game is blossoming and we may be at the beginning of a stabilizing time. The last 5 months have given the developers a good idea of what works:

• Challenging content can be cleared with a reasonable amount of effort 
• We really like events. Giving us rewards sprinkled in the day-to-day like the boss stage events or ranger bonus events enable us to achieve what we want to achieve a bit easier. Some events gave us some rubies or chance at something powerful and useful to fuel our desire to keep playing (like the Clara event and Stage 100 SoCo event) 
• Tweaks to free rangers to make them competitive for current areas, as well as the addition of the 80% stat bonus for combining rangers 
• Dangling "limited edition" rangers in front of players to create the "need" to Gacha and promote trendy excitement

And it has given them a good idea of what doesn't work:

• Stage rewards which are not conducive to the current challenge. This triggered the shuffling of all the obtainable 4 and 5 star rangers in the early and mid-level stages a couple months ago. I have a strong feeling that LINE learned from their previous slip up and as a result, there was a good amount of thought put into the decision to include Alice, Opera James and Sorcerer Cony in the recent stages. 
• Giving select regions significant amounts of bonuses while other regional players do not get to participate. This is the age of social media. Everybody finds out about everything, and players feel bitter when they're excluded from promotional events when they are all playing the same game.
• Doing things "behind the scenes" and not giving us any notice of it happening. It really makes players crazy.

I know many people will have differing opinions about the current state of the game and what its biggest issues and successes are. And that's ok. Not everyone plays with the same goals and mindset. But it's nice to have this game that we all feel pretty good about so that there is this feeling of community. Line Rangers & Friends has been on the internet for just over 4 months and I have accumulated over 500,000 hits in a pretty short amount of time. The blog has evolved as well over the course of these few months. I feel good about that. Thanks for playing and reading and contributing to the game, everyone. One of these days, we'll save Sally!