Giving players a trading marketplace that boosted credit sales by 30%

Warface is a free-to-play shooter that makes its money with micro-transactions. Players buy credits with real money and spend them on loot boxes, basically a slot machine. Credits can also be earned with playtime, but it's much slower and takes grinding.

The frustration starts when you've opened a thousand boxes and still don't have the item you want, while everyone shooting at you is running around with it. And there was no way to trade weapons or skins. Past a point you're not buying credits anymore, you're buying luck, and that feels like burning money. That frustration ends two ways: people quit, or they stop buying credits.

Important note: Warface had no pay-to-win items. All weapons and skins were aesthetic upgrades with the same stats: seasonal editions, gold skins and other rarities.

Just letting players trade brings its own risks. Once you can actually “take” items from someone, their account becomes a much more attractive target. Real money is at stake. And box sales, with the excitement around them, could die if players could just buy whatever they want. So we were dealing with a very delicate balance in the game's economy.

I designed the auction house, from research and flows to mockups for every step, and handed them to the front-end devs in two phases. First I made the user flows and wireframes, so they could start laying the foundation and wire up the backend API that another team built in Kyiv.

In the second round I made the detailed UI designs, then jumped in to help with the small details, coding them by hand and handing them over.

This way the work could flow continuously: the devs could build while I was wrestling with marketing over branding and waiting for item assets from the game dev team.

• Auctions. They're about as old as trade itself, so nobody needs a tutorial. They're exciting, and thanks to the time factor, safer than a simple 1-on-1 trade.
• In the web hub, not the game client. Money and manpower were limited, and the hub team was more agile. The hub was already where players bought credits, so the decision was made to build it on the web.
• Research first. World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike, Diablo, and obviously eBay, which got the most notes. I also pulled a few active players into informal interviews. That handful became my beta testers.
• Flows before screens, so development could start before the final UI design.
• A soft launch: a closed beta with the beta group, then a 1–2 week unannounced public run before marketing jumped in.

The auction house became a huge hit in the Warface community, and a regularly used feature. Credit sales went up 30%+ within the first month.

The reason is simple. Players already bought credits for loot boxes, but a box is a gamble. With bidding, the item they wanted was guaranteed, so they bought more credits to get it.

It was also very popular with purely free players, who grind to open boxes: when they got lucky, they could exchange their loot for credits, which kept the economy healthy and moving.

On top of that, it became a useful tool for the marketing team: they could create “Auction Exclusive” items and keep control over how rare they stayed. Some of the most popular ones were skins from Crysis, Crytek's most famous game.

The community had more ideas than we could fit in the scope, so after launch, in my free time, I built two bookmarklets that turned the page into a more compact UI for the power users. A few screencaps survived on CodePen, so here they are.