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Game Company Improves Game Experience with AppStack

Case Studies

Customer

 

Headquartered in California, with more than 20 years of leadership in the industry, this game company holds the most reputable brand for online entertainment; especially massive multiplayer online (MMO) gaming. The company’s international stature is reflected by its continued industry shattering records, including the largest player base of any single game, comprising over 5 million members.

 

Last year, the company reported customers spent as much time online playing their games as viewers spent watching Netflix!

 

The Goal: Keep Players Immersed

 

The company’s top game includes Web and mobile applications that players access from their devices, such as cell phones, tablets, and personal computers (PCs).

 

It is also multi-player, meaning that players from different locations around the globe interact in highly involved coordinated play, investing weeks of their lives building their virtual characters, crafting strategies, and progressing within the game. 

 

For instance, consider a group of players that have spent hours devising a strategy to attack a key endlevel boss. When successful, the team will, together, reap the rewards of unique equipment, experience points to level their characters and gold. But first, they must work together to succeed, each with their role to play in their conquest. 

 

One of the player’s roles is to heal the others; if this player experiences network lag during battle, preventing them from healing others, all the players could die. Even though the player may have done everything right, somewhere among their keyboard, the local Internet service provider (ISP), the Internet, and the game company’s servers, something went wrong, detracting from the experience of all players in that battle, not just one player or team. 

 

Unfortunately for the game company, players were quick to blame the game application as the culprit of any interruption, resulting in a constant stream of support requests.

Reduce Support Call Time and Frequency By Improving MTTR

 

The company has recently received complaints of disconnects and lag in gameplay. However, the tools the operations team have at its disposal are insufficient to determine the issue. The operations team does not have details on the user device, operating system (OS), location, service provider, and other information at hand. Instead, this information must be extracted from each support ticket manually, which negatively impacts players contacting support with excessive call times. Moreover, as networks fluctuate, and by the time data is retrieved, poor performance often dissipates. The company requires a more robust solution that can zero in on problems and determine cause quicker.

 

Product Development Overloaded with Bugs Reports

 

The game company’s product team is constantly performing a balancing act between which critical bugs to fix versus new game functionality. The game software runs on many types of devices and is localized for over 50 different countries, creating additional complications, resulting in a significant number of permutations to support. When a player requests support, it is left up to the support representative to query the user on which device they are playing the game on, which patch level they have, and when they started experiencing problems. There is a team of report analysts on the support team that tabulates the bugs and provides them to the product team on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, duplicate bug reports add congestion to the list, and often, developers are left debugging the same problem over and over again. The result was a slowdown in improved game content, resulting in player frustration and an increase in players who quit the game, taking their subscription dollars with them.

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