Monthly Archives: February 2014

Codemon 3.1: Dark Codeboxes and more

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It has been a while since the Arcanes were released. Today we have an update that includes a brand new item: The Dark Codeboxes.

Dark Codeboxes

Many players were not motivated to open battles. You open them not knowing your opponent and once an player knows the strengths and weaknesses, they can always accept it with a Codemon that has a high chance of winning. And losing most of the battles is demotivating.

But opening battles is key to the game, se we wanted to motivate this players again. The Dark Codeboxes are the first step towards that.

A Dark Codebox hides the Codemon, that simple. This levels the field since you open it blindly, but they are also accepting it blindly. Dark Codeboxes can only be used with Codemons of level 6 or more, which is where efficiency starts to be very relevant.

A Dark Codebox is obtained by applying Dark tinture to a Codebox. You do not get an extra Codebox, but you “Darken” one.

darken_codebox_complete_framed

Darken the first Dark Codebox is free for all the players once they raise a Codemon to level 6.

We will continue to encourage players to open battles in other ways in the future.

Second currency: Codebucks

Dark Codebokes are a premium item, and for that we included a second currency: Codebucks.

You can get Codebucks by linking Codemon on Facebook, as a daily reward and completing free offers. Achievements and (some) Quests will -in the future- give Codebucks.

Of course you can get them as an In-App purchase.

The slots on the market and the extra Codeboxes have changed the price and now cost Codebucks instead of Credits.

When summoning an Arcane you just spend Codebucks or Credits to get an A-Summon or a B-Summon performed on the spot. Prices are the same, just made it simpler.

Event ticker

We do run events every now and then, and when we do so, we send an in-game message to all the players that have been active, and we also publish it on Facebook.

Still, I know that many players miss them. So, from this version on, whenever an Event is running you’ll see a ticker under Quests, where you can see the details of the Event.

event_tick_framed

Improved Codemon filtering for battles

Until now, every time you went to open a battle, the search terms were cleared and all your Codemons were shown. That was a bit unconvenient when you were trying to open a few battles with the same type of Codemon, for example, Epics.

From now on, Codemon will remember your last search for as long as you are opening battles.

Transfer account

Because Codemon associates the account to the phone, we have many requests of people that want to migrate their account to their new phone.

We have added the option under settings, so you can transfer everything to another account.

Final words

This update has taken a lot longer than I expected to be ready, but I hope all of you enjoy it. There are still many ideas on how to extend Codemon, and I hope I’ll have the time to implement them.

Until then, happy scanning and battling!

Get Codemon on Google Play

The importance of a “Rate Us” dialog

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Paid apps always had a better ratio of users leaving feedback than free ones, but in the case of MTG Tracker it was too much.

MTG Tracker used to have a very good ratio of users that leave comments. This was reduced when Google Play required G+ sign in to leave a comment, and that was specially bad for the free version, which was released after that change was made.

Things looked like this:

Screen Shot 2014-01-31 at 13.07.04

Both had good average rating, but while almost a 6% of the users leave a rating on the paid version, for the free one that number it is under 0.6%. Yes, 10 times less.

So, I decided to add a “Rate Us” dialog to improve that, knowing that the users of the app use it a lot and just may never thought of rating it.

mtg_rate_us_framed

I did not add it before because for a while I only had the paid app, which has a good amount of reviews. After one week, I went to check the results of the dialog. The stats looked like this:

Please note that the free version has much more installs per day.

Screen Shot 2014-02-06 at 12.09.30

So, almost 100 new ratings on the paid version and 35 more for the free. The conversion rate grow for both apps. Still the paid version got even more ratings.

I decided to let a few more days pass and checked again.

Screen Shot 2014-02-17 at 14.48.11

Another 80 ratings for the paid version and 40 for the free one. Also, average ratings for the paid app keep getting higher, but the ones for the free seem to oscillate.

As it turns out, the percentage of users leaving a rating on the paid app is almost the same as before the dialog was introduced, but the ratio of reviews for the free version has grown up to 0.7%, may not seem much, but the free app has 30% more ratings than before.

Conclusions

After this experiment, it is very clear to me that you must always add a “Rate Us” dialog, even if your current amount of ratings is good. Most users are lazy and will not rate your app unless you ask them to do it.

Some final notes:

  • Don’t be intrusive, if the user does not want to rate you, so be it. Always have a “No, thanks” option
  • Trigger the pop-up after a satisfying user experience, users will be more likely to give you positive reviews if they are in good mood.