‍ Technical glitches and player returns after

Scheduled maintenance on a product is a common story that causes no stress for teams and minimal stress for players. Usually, the team knows which hours on the product are peak hours in terms of game activity and which are not, and, accordingly, maintenance can be scheduled in a way that minimizes player frustration.

If the product's performance is affected by external factors (for example, the Cloudflare failure last week), it is important to be able to quickly adapt to the situation. On our products, this boils down globally to two tasks: following the regulations and returning players after the problem has disappeared.

By regulations in this context, we mean a set of decisions that operational teams must make in their areas of responsibility. For example: stopping traffic (if the site doesn't load, the budget goes nowhere), postponing releases, stopping campaigns, informing the support team, etc. It should be understood that there is no universal regulation for all cases, but it is important to avoid chaos and minimize losses.

One of the important points of our regulations is to collect players who tried to interact with the site during technical problems. Such information is not always available, but in the last case with Cloudflare specifically our site loaded (albeit for a very long time) and we were able to catch players who tried to make deposits, play games, etc. Our job is to offer these players a gift from the project in order to get them back in the game and increase their loyalty.

Below we will share information about what approaches product managers in our company used on their products and what results they achieved. Note that we handed VIP players over to personal managers - they did not participate in these campaigns.

1. Deposit bonus
   Players were sent an email with a promo code for 10% towards their next deposit (1x wager). This idea was used by three projects at once.
   Conversion to bonus activation: 39% (average of three projects).
2. Free spin on the wheel of fortune
   Immediately two of our projects “apologized” to players using the wheel of fortune.
   Project 1: sent an email with a promo code for a free spin in the wheel.
   Conversion to activation: 41%.
   Project 2: gathered players into a separate group and right at the front of the site (after login) showed a pop-up with a promo code.
   Conversion to activation: 64%.
   The minus of the approach: some of the players were already logged in and couldn't see the pop-up until they unlogged.
3. Free coins in the store
   The idea is as simple as possible: give players free coins that they can spend in the store, exchanging them for bonuses. The number of coins was enough to buy the cheapest bonus at once or to go play and “finish” more coins.
   Conversion to buying a cheap bonus: 39%. Another 21% opened the email, went to the website and went to play.
4. Sorry tournament
   On one of the products launched a special tournament. For the first 5 places they gave FS with a wager of 1x. To participate, players had to click the “Take part” button.
   Conversion: 1 player in 24.
   The idea didn't catch on - logically, because it didn't involve an instant reward, but rather: deposit → bets → possible prize.

This case was a good lesson for the product manager. On the other hand, on this project Cloudflare affected only 24 players (no VIPs), so the cost of the lesson was small.

Separately, it should be noted that for each case (except for the last one) the lists of affected players were transferred to the support team. If a player contacted the support and at the same time did not take the bonus from the letter, the manager offered him to use the promo code.

Conclusion
Unplanned technical failures are unpredictable, but it is in the direct interest of the operator to be able to respond to them. Minimizing losses through timely solutions will always be justified.

And working with players who have been affected by the outages (if they can be identified) will help build a loyal base and get players back active on the product.