Players have a very large amount of low-rarity characters, combat meta is stale and as a result, players are not engaging in PvP
Objectives
Provide a new way for players to progress characters
Increase roster investment
Improve combat gameplay and strategy
Role
Work side by side with Game Design to definethe best solution
Work side by side with UI Design and Art toensure consistency and deliver high quality graphics
Work closely with stakeholders to ensure theproduct vision and business needs
Solution
Develop a new feature that allows players to use low rarity characters to increase the power and abilities of high rarity characters
A new 6-star rarity character with new persona
The new character rarity willhave new skills and higher base stats
Approach
Analytics Data
Large amount of users have a full roster, theystruggle with managing roster capacity
Large amount of users don’t find low-level characters useful
Free-to-play users cannot stay competitivein the game
User Stories
As an elder player, I have many low-levelcharacters that are not useful
As a free to play player, I would like a way toobtain high rarity characters to staycompetitive in the game
As a competitive player, I wand to diversify myroster to find different combat strategies
Survey Results
Players reported they were not engaging in PvP because combat meta is staleand rewards are not good
Players were using low rarity characters as fodder for levelling up. However, once high rarity characters are maxed out, players have no use for low rarity characters
Competitive Analysis
Fire Emblem
The good
UI is strait-forward, I know exactly what to do: select 2 characters and merge them
I know how many characters to choose, which one is the character that is going to be enhancedand which one I will loose
Good sorting/filter options help me find what I am looking for
The bad
Don’t know why I can’t merge certain characters
Don’t know what I am getting when I do enhance characters
Lots of trial and error to figure out that I can only merge a lower-tier character into ahigher-tier character
Takeaways:
The top part of the screen is great: I know what to do and how to do it
The “help” button (?) has all the information you need, but only the first part is explained ina nice infographic, after you get plain text that is boring and easily skipped
One Piece Treasure Cruise
The good
Easy to tell which characters are available for Evolving
I know what fodders are needed to evolve a character as well as the cost
I know the result of the evolution
The bad
It’s not clear why I can’t evolve certain characters
When I am missing fodder, I don’t know how/where to get them
The base stats seem lower than the evolved stats, not sure why I would want to evolve
Takeaways:
Having more real estate on screen to scroll through all my characters is nice, and selecting the character I wish to enhance first makes sense
It’s not clear how exactly this works or what I get from it since the UI is very cluttered
User Journey
Ideation: Wireframes
User Flows
Conclusion
Challenges
Clearly communicating that merging characters produces a random result in low-rarities (4-starsand 5-stars) but not with 6-stars
Testing with a click through was complicated because of all the possible combinations and outcomes
New character skills required an overhaul to the character description screen, as well as new UIfor combat
Making the UI better but still familiar so existing players won’t feel lost
Learnings
Testing early on was key to creating a flow that made sense to users
Surveying players helped the team validate assumptions
After launching, a second survey determined that players look forward to creating newcharacters and looked forward to having new skillsto strategize and and improve combatexperience
