Designing a live-ops alliance tournament that won back 930 churned players

What is Hitwicket?

Hitwicket Superstars is a multiplayer cricket strategy game on mobile with 15M+ players. You build a squad, play matches against other players ball by ball, and climb leagues together with your alliance.

The problem

Our most engaged players had nowhere to prove they were the best.

Hitwicket's late-game alliances were the heart of the community, friendships, rivalries, identity all lived inside them. But there was no recurring stage where alliances could compete as alliances. Engagement among the most dedicated players was plateauing, and there was no compelling reason to keep showing up day after day.

What's the goal?

Player goal

A real stage where alliances compete as alliances, and glory worth showing off when you win.

Business goal

A monthly recurring live-ops event that deepens retention, fuels alliance identity, and meaningfully increases ARPPU for our most engaged users.

The core loop

What I owned

I designed for the social fabric of the game, not just the gameplay loop.

End-to-end ownership: tournament design, social mechanics, monetization systems, and glorification. The questions I kept coming back to:

"How do you make 60 alliances feel like rivals fighting for a real cup?"

"How do you make the strongest players need their weakest teammates?"

"How do you take a leaderboard and turn it into a sports league?"

Three pillars

Every system in the championship had to serve one of these.

• 1. Identity

  Alliances are a source of pride. Tap into that.

• 2. Strategy

  Make it deeper than just "who has the strongest team."

• 3. Glory

  Make winning feel monumental, not just rewarding.

Key design decisions

With those pillars in mind, I designed the championship around 4 key systems.

• 01 Identifying the elite (the Qualifier)

  A week-long open Qualifier where every alliance competes for one of 60 spots, measured by cumulative PvP wins across all members. The catch: a 30-win cap per user. No more carrying. The whole alliance has to show up, or you don't make it in. This single rule turned individual grinding into a coordinated team effort and turned the qualifier itself into a community-wide event.

  

• 02 Tournament Structure

  Modeled after real sports leagues: Qualifiers → Group Stage → Knockout 1 → Knockout 2 → Finals. The 60 alliances are seeded into 10 groups (1 top-tier + 1 mid + 4 lower per group), strong alliances don't meet too early. Inside each match, alliances are split into power-tiered sets of 5, so a Set 1 player faces a Set 1 opponent. Each user gets 3 matches per day, so the alliance has to coordinate which 5 members hit which 5 opponents. The points table itself wasn't a spreadsheet, it was a row of buses racing each other down the road. Position = your spot on the table. It made every win feel visceral.

  

  

• 03 Forcing real teamwork (the Donation Pool)

  A tournament structure isn't enough, the gameplay itself had to demand teamwork. Every alliance member donates 2 players to a shared alliance pool. When picking your 11-player squad for a match, 2 of those 11 must come from someone else's donation. Suddenly, the strongest players in the alliance are propping up the weaker ones, and the alliance is mixing and matching its pool every day based on who they're facing. It rewired alliance chat. Instead of "good luck today," it became "who needs my keeper?"

  

  

• 04 Strategic depth & a level playing field

  Pitches, Modifiers, and Power Caps — making the strongest alliances think hardest. Pitches & Modifiers: Each match, the alliance chooses 1 of 4 Pitches (which buff/nerf bowler types) and 1 of 4 Modifiers (which buff/nerf batsman abilities). The alliance has to communicate, look at the opponent's likely lineup, and converge on a strategy together. Power Caps by stage: Group Stage caps Team OVR at 60. Knockouts at 75 and 90. Finals at 100. The strongest alliances can't just steamroll the early stages with raw power, they have to play strategically, and every stage demands player development. The competition stays close all the way through.

  

Monetization

Designing spend that feels earned, not extracted.

• The business goal was straightforward, lift ARPPU among our top spenders. The harder goal was making that lift feel like a natural extension of the competition, not a paywall. I designed two systems that worked together:

• System 1 — Exclusive Player Scout

  Every championship comes with a flagship player available only through a special scout. Players can spin using either Tickets (earned by winning matches) or Hard Currency. The exclusive is guaranteed at 80 opens, and you can earn ~20 opens worth of free tickets. The remaining 60 are the conversion zone, but every spin still feels rewarded by the championship itself.

  

• System 2 — War Chests & Keys

  Winning matches drops War Chests, but chests need Keys to open. Each stage awards a number of Keys based on your alliance's standing, calibrated so you usually earn ~3 Keys for every ~5 Chests. You're not buying a random reward; you're buying access to rewards you already earned. A guaranteed-rewards counter at 8 opens kept players coming back. The principle: never sell what someone hasn't fought for. Sell the finishing piece.

  

What did I learn?

This was the moment I felt like a game designer.

The numbers were strong, but the story I remember best is what we did after the final whistle. We shipped a physical trophy to the winning alliance leader's doorstep.

And we put a championship banner on their team huddles on the dashboard, visible to every other player in the game, every time they logged in.

Designing for social behavior is as important as designing for gameplay. Real-world sports translate beautifully into live-game systems if you respect what makes them emotional. Monetization can feel meaningful when it's tied to effort and reward.

The design docs

• Live-ops eventAlliance Championship