In this article, you'll learn about Player XP's:
- Sentiment system
- Category Classification system
- Dynamic Report feature
- Topic Finder feature
- Interaction Explorer feature
So whilst the other articles in this section of the helpdesk may delve into detail on how to use the dashboard with guides on specific features, we wanted to take some time to give you a simple explanation of some of our key features and how we believe they may be of value to you.
Sentiment
As you may have noticed, sentiment underpins everything we do at Player XP. It's our way of introducing a quantifiable metric to determine how happy your player base is about various elements within your game. For every interaction (a comment, review, tweet etc...), our AI system looks to try and identify sentiment within the text content, if it can find sentiment it then tries to determine how positive/negative the content is.
We then look to aggregate this based on various breakdowns across the dashboard to give you something easy to understand and trackable over time to see how your changes are taking effect.
Whilst most sentiment systems work on a -1 to 1 scale (-1 being the most negative, 1 being the most positive), we have expanded this to a -99 to 99 scale to make understanding the differences along the way a lot easier.
Categories
Building upon the sentiment system, another system we introduced to make life easier digesting such large amounts of data is the Player XP Categorisation System. Built on the back of millions of player comments, the Player XP team have identified 20 consistent categories that are the most discussed subject areas when players talk about games online ranging from a game's performance to feedback on a game's UI.
Through the dashboard, you can track the sentiment and community activity across each category and we believe that the categories are one of the best ways to diagnose exactly why sentiment has increased or decreased.
For a breakdown of the exact categories, please visit our category definition page.
Dynamic Report
When using the dashboard, we have three core features that you'll use to delve through your data for a specific game. The first of those is our Dynamic Report. For those clients familiar with our static reports, you'll see a lot of similarities with this feature.
For those new to Player XP's unique visualisation style, our aims with the Dynamic Report are:
- To give you the ability to view the data at an overview level easily (allowing for sharing of KPIs with others) whilst also allowing you to dig through the data to identify core drivers to change in your game's performance.
- To signpost problem areas quickly without you having to click through to specific pages to find out what is changing in your games community's response.
We've built the Dynamic Report to allow you to quickly view sentiment and community activity for the following skews...
- Your Entire Community
- Per Channel (Based on the type of communication taking place)
- Per Source
- Per Category
- Per Topic
The Topic Finder / Topic System
Whilst our category system is pre-built by our team for the industry system, throughout the dashboard you'll see Topics which are completely dynamic and unique to your game. These will be automatically updated and will include your latest changes, in-game events and content packs as and when they are introduced to your game. By having such a unique set of data for your game, we believe that the Topic system gives you an extremely easy and powerful way to identify valuable feedback towards your game.
On top of this, through our Topic Finder, we provide you with a search engine for all of your community data. You can customise this to look for specific feedback in a certain category or look at the recently trending terms to discover what's being discussed the most.
One other note about our topic system, the technology behind the system is not the same as you would find in your typical word cloud, this system provides dynamic grouping (grouping similar terms together) and looks to identify terms that are considered significant - i.e they stand out when compared to a larger set of data so will be truly unique to your game.
Interaction Explorer
The final feature to cover in this article is The Interaction Explorer. We've always seen our Interaction Explorer as a system that is a cross of a Social Media feed and an Amazon Search Results page. We allow you to set how you would like to sort the content but at its core, it's a feed of all of your content within Player XP which not only allows you to explore individual threads and jump straight to them in the source but also apply filters to the data to see the content you need to see, be that a specific category's comments or the most negative threads from last week.
Our aim with this feature and the Topic Finder is to give you the flexibility to search through the data in any way you want whilst the Dynamic Report is a guided tour through your data.
Now that we've covered our core set of features, we hope you'll be able to start to use the dashboard in any way you need to. If you would like to learn more or be guided through how to use any of the above features in more detail, please read our guides on the Dynamic Report, Topic Finder and Interaction Explorer features.