When I joined the Fractals team on Guild Wars 2 the game mode was over 3 years old. While Fractals were popular when they were first released, they had not received significant updates for a long time and player engagement was very low. Our newly-established team was tasked with addressing player concerns, eliminating technical debt, and adding new content to increase interest.

As part of this work I did a systemic analysis of the current state of Fractals. This included reviewing discussions of Fractals on social media, discussion forums, and in-game chat. I also worked with GW2's analytics team to write SQL scripts and build a Tableau dashboard to provide the team with daily updates on all of the telemetry we were collecting from the live game including player counts, playtime, currency and item rewards, and success/fail rates. I took this data to our team and we discussed how we would approach breathing new life into the stagnant game mode.

Our endeavors on this project were successful, increasing our concurrent player by 300% and significantly increasing engagement with the game mode on social media and discussion forums.