How Metacore Transformed Player Support for Merge Mansion with Theymes

The challenge

Before Theymes, Metacore ran player support on a legacy platform that had served them for years. The cracks had been growing wider. Liveops was a manual and arduous process. In most cases incident management required direct intervention from Metacore. Multilingual support was a challenge and required extensive game and system knowledge to accomplish efficiently. It was difficult to craft a bot experience that worked for Merge Mansion players. Even when the bot could resolve the issue, players often pushed to speak with a support agent instead. It was clear to players that they were dealing with a bot, when they wanted a personalized answer to their question.

The solution

The relationship between Metacore and Theymes started in late 2023, well before any formal switch. Theymes uses AI driven search in place of branching bot workflows. A player asks a question in their own words and gets a direct, well-presented answer, without the need to open a ticket. For a game like Merge Mansion, where the majority of tickets are gameplay guidance questions, this was a natural fit. Getting the Theymes SDK integrated into the Merge Mansion app and going live with player support happened quickly.

"We're really happy that players are content with the answers the AI assistant formulates for them. Our team is still here to help players, but more efficiently and with lower wait and resolution times. It's a win-win!"

Eetu Salin, Player Experience

About Metacore

Metacore Games is the Helsinki based studio behind Merge Mansion, a globally popular merge-puzzle game with millions of active players worldwide. With a large, multilingual player base and a BPO partnership handling frontline support, Metacore's player experience (PX) team works through hundreds of tickets daily across dozens of languages.

What makes Metacore's support operation distinct is the nature of the questions. Merge Mansion isn't a PvP game where support mostly means calming frustrated players. It's a deep, layered puzzle game where players constantly need guidance: where to find items, what steps to take next, how game events work. A lot of the day-to-day support work is hands-on game guidance alongside the usual complaints and issues.

The Problem: Tooling that didn't match the use case

Before Theymes, Metacore ran player support on a legacy platform that had served them for years. The cracks had been growing wider.

Liveops was a manual and arduous process. In most cases incident management required direct intervention from Metacore. In many cases incidents were handled by bulking tickets with a delay, which was not an ideal outcome for players.

Multilingual support was a challenge and required extensive game and system knowledge to accomplish efficiently. Identifying region-specific issues required digging through language-specific queues and manually translating tickets. External translation tools had to be used and even then, the output did not meet our quality standards for player messaging.

It was difficult to craft a bot experience that worked for Merge Mansion players. Many approaches were tried just to go back to the drawing board. Even when the bot could resolve the issue, players often pushed to speak with a support agent instead. It was clear to players that they were dealing with a bot, when they wanted a personalized answer to their question.

"We put in a lot of hard work to improve the support experience but the results were either not received well by the players, or were too iterative and exhaustive to manage" – Eetu Salin

Despite years of optimization, the team felt like they were getting left behind. The tools available weren't keeping up with what they needed to deliver.

Why Theymes

The relationship between Metacore and Theymes started in late 2023, well before any formal switch. Early conversations were exploratory. Metacore shared what their operation looked like, what worked, what didn't, and what they'd want from a new system. Theymes listened and iterated.

The fit came down to how Theymes approaches player help in the first place. Theymes uses AI driven search in place of branching bot workflows. A player asks a question in their own words and gets a direct, well-presented answer, without the need to open a ticket.

For a game like Merge Mansion, where the majority of tickets are gameplay guidance questions, this was a natural fit. Players could get step-by-step help without being pulled away from the game for hours or days waiting for a human reply.

One of the standout aspects of the switch was speed. Getting the Theymes SDK integrated into the Merge Mansion app and going live with player support happened quickly. The team noted it could have been even faster if they'd been under time pressure.

Results

Ticket volume down, response times faster

Daily ticket volumes have dropped meaningfully on normal, non-spike days since the switch. The reduction comes from AI-powered answers resolving common gameplay questions before they ever become tickets. Players ask how to find an item or complete a step, and they get an immediate answer without needing to contact support. In total ticket volumes are down over 30% and the first response time is 50% faster than previously.

There's room for further improvement. By refining knowledge base articles to better align with the natural language players use when asking questions, Metacore hopes to improve the support experience by providing players with precise, instant answers and lowering the ticket volumes for the support team.

"Over the past six months, we achieved a 15% reduction in support headcount through natural attrition, without impacting operational continuity or requiring backfills." – Sertzio Koli

Smart routing

Metacore has replaced manual queue management with routing rules. Tickets are being handled as they arrive according to Metacore's prioritization rules, without the need to manually change things up during high volume scenarios.

Faster filtering and multilingual visibility

Ticket filtering is quick, intuitive, and simple. Finding anything from specific tickets to quick insights is easy to accomplish. Auto-translate and ticket summaries make geo-specific issues easy to spot

"We can provide the Merge Mansion team with off the cuff insights and information, and also use filtering to make operational decisions rapidly and without second guessing, irrespective of ticket language." – Sertzio Koli

Insights reaching beyond support

One of the most impactful changes has been how player support data now connects to the rest of the organization.

Metacore is building a data pipeline from Theymes into their internal analytics dashboards. Using AI-powered tagging, tickets are automatically classified by game area, event, gameplay topic, and more. This means teams outside of support, such as game design and live ops, can filter dashboards to see what players are saying about a specific feature, event, or area of the game.

For example, a game designer who launched a new event last week can pull up a filtered view and get a summary of related player tickets, without ever opening the support tool. The team has already set up an initial batch of AI tags with detailed prompts, with plans to add more in the future. The work requires prompt tuning to avoid false positives, but the payoff is a level of cross-team visibility into player sentiment that wasn't possible before.

Operational notifications made easy

Setting up Slack alerts and notifications for ticket activity was quick. Formatting, configuration, and going live with automated updates to internal channels was straightforward, giving the team real-time awareness without constant manual checking.

"We're really happy that players are content with the answers the AI assistant formulates for them. Our team is still here to help players, but more efficiently and with lower wait and resolution times. It's a win-win!" – Eetu Salin

Looking Ahead

Metacore sees Theymes as a platform they can grow with. Scalability. Higher deflection rates and adoption of Theymes' in-built solutions mean the team can handle growth without scaling support costs linearly. Resources can be reallocated to higher-value work rather than just adding headcount to keep up with volume.

Knowledge base consolidation. The team is migrating internal knowledge from other systems into Theymes' knowledge base, which will serve as the foundation for internal agent support tools and give the support team more context and structure.

Deeper cross-team insights. The goal is to have every relevant game area, event type, and gameplay mechanic tagged and flowing into internal dashboards, so that player feedback becomes a living data source for the entire organization.

The Metacore team is focused on operational excellence for live issues and incident management with Theymes' toolkit. Lessons learned can be quickly adapted on the spot.

What Metacore Tells Other Gaming Companies

When asked what they'd say to another gaming company considering the switch, Metacore's answer is straightforward:

• Great service and responsive day-to-day interaction
• Easy and fast implementation
• Deflection metrics are accurate and true to real-world results
• Incident management capabilities are solid
• The relationship feels collaborative and grounded in actual partnership