1. Neo4j @ Gamesys
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Toby O’Rourke
March 2013

2. Overview
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About Gamesys
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Our Use Case
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Choosing a Store
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Building the App
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Deployment & Ops
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Cypher & Reporting
•
Thinking in Graphs
March 2013

3. About Gamesys
• Major Cash & Social Gaming operator, primarily in UK & Europe
• World’s first Cash gaming on Facebook
• Social Games include Jackpotjoy Slots & Here Be Monsters
• Bingo, Slots, Casino, Instants
• Handle ~5bn wagers per annum
• 200k unique cash players a month
March 2013

4. Building an Internal Social Network
• Online Bingo is a highly social game, there is chat alongside the game
• Acquiring new players can be very expensive
• Players acquired by referral are cheaper to acquire and higher value
• We want to incentivise members to refer their friends
• We wanted to learn about the social relationships between players
March 2013

5. Building the App
• Separating the persistence from the model is less important than when using
RDBMS.
• In fact, the power of graph traversals is part of the domain
• Used Spring Data Neo4j[1]
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Great Documentation
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Loads of support from Michael Hunger
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Found a few bugs
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Had to drop back to straight up Neo4j APIs a couple of times
[1] http://www.springsource.org/spring-data/neo4j
March 2013

6. Deployment & Ops
• Very stable, no unplanned outages since we’ve been live (~18 months)
• Separate node as part of cluster, not serving live requests for ad-hoc
querying & admin
• Mutating Cypher is great for making on-the-fly tweaks
March 2013

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8. Looking at our Graph
March 2013

9. Aside: Our Referral Offer
• Referee gets a cash bonus straight away
• Constrained by a “play through” requirement
• Referrer gets a cash bonus once the Referee has played a certain amount
March 2013

10. Aside: 1, 2, Profit!!!
• If I create multiple accounts I can collect loads of referral bonuses
• I might get some decent wins playing through the bonus
• In any case I should have most of my original stake available
• Referral Bonuses – Referee Losses >= 0 in most cases
• £££!
March 2013

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13. Modelling a Game Economy
• Here Be Monsters (https://apps.facebook.com/herebemonsters/)
• Complex economy, 1000’s items, monsters, locations and traps
• Really difficult to understand the effect of changing (eg) the scarcity of
any given item
• Graph gives us a way to model that and calculate the value of things
March 2013

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17. Wrapping Up
• Graphs are applicable to several gaming use cases
• Social Networks
• Fraud/Collusion Detection
• Modeling
• Neo4j being used as Production system and for Analytics
• Stable in production
March 2013

18. Find out more
On Facebook
facebook.com/gamesys
on Twitter
@officialgamesys
@tobyorourke
@burningmonk
March 2013

19. Thanks!
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March 2013