My Ownership

• Owned long-term PvP and PvE combat balance strategy across live environments, tuning for engagement, fairness, and monetization sustainability.

• Designed and shipped seasonal LiveOps events and systemic features supporting content cadence and revenue beats.

• Built and maintained multi-resource economy and progression models to forecast currency flow, inflation risk, and monetization outcomes.

• Partnered with product and analytics to evaluate D1/D7/D30 retention, ARPDAU, payer conversion, and churn drivers — translating data insights into balance adjustments and feature iteration.

• Modeled resource sinks/sources and progression pacing to optimize long-term player lifecycle engagement and LTV.

• Conducted post-launch performance reviews, identifying feature-level revenue and engagement impact.

• Mentored designers in balancing methodology, systems documentation, and implementation practices.

• Collaborated cross-functionally with engineering, product, monetization, and art teams to deliver features under aggressive live-service timelines.

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Key Systems Breakdown

Combat Balance Distribution

Problem:

Combat balance had become uneven across key contributing systems—including heroes, troops, and bonus-granting features. The relative impact of these elements did not align with their cost or intended design value, resulting in inefficient spend, distorted power curves, and an increasingly unstable meta.

Design Goals:

• Introduce incremental balance adjustments tied to new content and feature releases, avoiding hard nerfs that would devalue player investment.

• Preserve overall meta stability, preventing disruptive shifts in established strategies.

• Maintain a competitive ecosystem where both spenders and free-to-play players can meaningfully engage.

• Improve alignment between spend value and combat impact, reinforcing player trust in progression systems.

Solution:

• Shifted power growth into new content releases, targeting underperforming systems and features to gradually rebalance overall combat impact.

• Increased release cadence of targeted features, enabling faster iteration and more controlled adjustments without large, disruptive changes.

• Introduced highly specialized bonuses to isolate power gains and improve tuning precision, including:

• Attack-only vs. defense-only modifiers

• Mode-specific bonuses (e.g., Stronghold events, Grand Throne events)

• Implemented seasonal bonus structures, offering time-bound power tied to event participation and spend, allowing temporary shifts in the meta without permanent inflation.

Tradeoffs:

• Balance improvements occurred gradually over time, delaying immediate player-visible results.

• Avoiding nerfs preserved player investment but required players to operate within existing imbalances in the short term.

• Free-to-play and low-spend players experienced continued friction until systems reached healthier equilibrium.

Learning:

• Combat systems require a consistent value framework, where spend directly correlates with impact—unless intentionally offset by specialization.

• Granular, controlled tuning levers (e.g., scoped bonuses, seasonal modifiers) are critical for maintaining balance in live environments.

• Long-term system health is best achieved through iterative, forward-looking adjustments, rather than reactive, large-scale corrections.