Team Live Ops

Argument check: If no season name or event description is provided, output:

"Usage: /team-live-ops [season name or event description] [--review full|lean|solo] — Provide the name or description of the season or live event to plan." Then stop immediately without spawning any subagents or reading any files.

When this skill is invoked with a valid argument, orchestrate the live-ops team through a structured planning pipeline.

Decision Points: At each phase transition, use AskUserQuestion to present the user with the subagent's proposals as selectable options. Write the agent's full analysis in conversation, then capture the decision with concise labels. In collaborative mode, the user must approve before moving to the next phase. In guided mode the pipeline advances automatically unless a phase is BLOCKED; in autonomous mode it runs end to end, recording each phase outcome via log_decision. Decisions in automation_always_ask categories (is_always_ask_category helper) always prompt regardless of mode. See .claude/docs/automation-modes.md.

Phase 0: Resolve Config

!bash "${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/../../hooks/yaml-helper.sh" resolve_config --keys review_mode,automation,team.size

Resolved above — use as-is; --review overrides review_mode. No block → defaults in .claude/docs/config-resolution.md.

review_mode sets director-gate depth, and this pipeline has no director gate: no phase below spawns CD-, TD-, PR- or AD-PHASE-GATE, at any review_mode. Its phase gates are the pipeline's own decision points (defined under team.size below), and the agents that work at them are team members, not director gates.

automation drives the Decision Points note above. See the Decision Points note above and .claude/docs/automation-modes.md for how each mode changes pipeline behavior.

team.size: which agents are active (orthogonal to review_mode gate-depth and workflow docs).

• individual (default): live-ops-designer + economy-designer. Other agents consulted via these two, not spawned separately.
• small: + analytics-engineer + community-manager.
• studio: + writer + narrative-director (the full pipeline as documented). A non-core agent needed at individual routes through the nearest active core agent with an informational note. "Phase gate" means any phase that ends in an AskUserQuestion decision point this pipeline itself lists — a transition under Decision Points above, or a Gate step written into the pipeline below — whatever the automation mode. guided and autonomous change how a gate is passed (it auto-advances, or is recorded with log_decision), not whether it is one, so bounded-exception condition (3) below holds at it in every mode. An agent restricted to "phase gates only" is spawned at those points and no others. This active-set scoping applies throughout the pipeline below: any phase that names an agent outside the active set routes through the nearest core agent rather than spawning it.

Announce the active set before Phase 1 — never let the collapse be silent. Before spawning anything, state in one line which agents this run will actually spawn, and which the pipeline below names but will not spawn at the resolved team.size. For example:

Active set (team.size: <resolved>): <the agents listed for that size above>. Not spawned this run: <every other agent this pipeline names> — consulted through <nearest active core agent>. Raise team.size (or modes.rigor) to widen.

Fill it from the team.size list directly above and the agents this file's own pipeline names — not from an example. Both sets differ per orchestrator.

The pipeline below reads as a multi-agent fan-out and at the shipped default it is one or two agents — team-release names ten and runs one, team-narrative names six across five phases and runs writer alone. The collapse is correct: team.size is rigor-fronted and the narrow default is the token lever. Without saying so, a reader cannot distinguish a correctly-collapsed run from a broken pipeline, and the per-agent "routes through the nearest core agent with an informational note" rule above fires at routing time and never states the shape of the run as a whole.

This is the same rule as the skipped-check reporting elsewhere in this file: a constraint that is enforced but never surfaced is indistinguishable, to the person reading the output, from one that was never enforced.

Team Composition

• live-ops-designer — Season structure, event cadence, retention mechanics, battle pass
• economy-designer — Live economy balance, store rotation contents and prices (live-ops-designer sets its cadence), currency pricing, pity timers
• analytics-engineer — Success metrics, A/B test design, event tracking, dashboard specs
• community-manager — Player-facing announcements, event descriptions, seasonal messaging
• narrative-director — Seasonal narrative theme, story arc, world event framing
• writer — Event descriptions, reward item names, seasonal flavor text, announcement copy

How to Delegate

Use the Agent tool to spawn each team member as a subagent:

• subagent_type: live-ops-designer — Season/event structure and retention mechanics
• subagent_type: economy-designer — Live economy balance and reward pricing
• subagent_type: analytics-engineer — Success metrics, A/B tests, event instrumentation
• subagent_type: community-manager — Player-facing communication and messaging
• subagent_type: narrative-director — Seasonal theme and narrative framing
• subagent_type: writer — All player-facing text: event descriptions, item names, copy

Brief each agent — do not dump context. Read the shared inputs once and pass a distilled brief inline: the lines each agent actually needs, never a file path for a document you have already read (an agent handed a path re-reads the whole file). Pass a path only for a document you have not read and only that agent needs.

End every agent prompt with a return contract: "Write your full output to [path] — that named path is your write authorisation under the bounded exception below, so write it without a separate approval prompt. Return only (1) the path written, (2) a ≤5-bullet summary of decisions, (3) any BLOCKED/CONCERNS items, one line each. Do not restate the documents you read." Without it, an agent returns everything it read back into this session.

Substitute a real path for [path]. Working artifacts go under production/live-ops/[season-slug]/, where [season-slug] is the argument as a slug — lowercase, spaces → hyphens. One file per agent, so the parallel phases never share one:

These are working drafts; the final documents under design/live-ops/seasons/ are compiled from them (Output Documents).

Why this does not violate the Collaboration Protocol. CLAUDE.md requires an agent to ask "May I write this to [filepath]?" before Write/Edit. A subagent spawned here writes without asking, and that is a deliberate, bounded exception rather than an oversight — the same call already made for consistency-check appending to active.md. The exception holds only when all three are true: (1) the path is one you named in the prompt, so the user approved the destination when they approved the phase; (2) it is a new artifact under production/, docs/ or tests/, never an edit to existing source or config; (3) the phase that produced it is itself gated by an AskUserQuestion before the pipeline advances. Outside those three, the agent must ask. Do not "fix" this by asking per subagent — a prompt per agent per phase makes an orchestrator unusable, which is why the exception exists.

Launch independent agents in parallel where the pipeline allows it (Phases 3 and 4 can run simultaneously).

Pipeline

Phase 1: Season/Event Scoping

Delegate to live-ops-designer:

• Define the season or event: type (seasonal, limited-time event, challenge), duration, theme direction
• Outline the content list: what's new (modes, items, challenges, story beats)
• Define the retention hook: what brings players back daily/weekly during this season
• Identify resource budget: how much new content needs to be created vs. reused
• Output: season brief with scope, content list, and retention mechanic overview

Phase 2: Narrative Theme

Delegate to narrative-director:

• Read the season brief from Phase 1
• Design the seasonal narrative theme: how does this event connect to the game world?
• Define the central story hook players will discover during the event
• Identify which existing lore threads this season can advance
• Output: narrative framing document (theme, story hook, lore connections)

Phase 3: Economy Design (parallel with Phase 4)

Delegate to economy-designer:

• Read the season brief and existing economy rules from design/live-ops/economy-rules.md
• Design the reward track: free tier progression, premium tier value proposition
• Plan the in-season economy: seasonal currency, store rotation contents, pricing
• Define pity timer mechanics and bad-luck protection for any random elements
• Verify no pay-to-win items in premium track
• Output: economy design doc with reward tables, pricing, and currency flow