Player Retention!

According to steamcharts, PoE 2 has lost 1/3 of its players since its EA launch. Some loss is, of course, inevitable, but is this par for the course or is this indicative of a glaring set of problems?

Basically in line with just about every other game released recently when you look at the numbers after a couple of weeks.

Maybe the exiles complaining that it's not PoE 1/missing what made PoE 1 so great, etc....went back to playing PoE 1? I wouldn't say it indicates that.

I think it's a mix of both. Game is currently way too punishing for people who have limited time.

Today, I quit after failing the 3rd ascendancy (sekhemas) way overleveled at level 76 after almost 2 hours doing it slowly. Right before the 3rd (final) boss I misclicked an affliction instead of honor restoring and lost 2 hours+ of my limited weekend. Boss was 5% HP when I died. Funnily enough, the first 2 bosses died pretty much as they spawned from Spark. So this still has the same issue as PoE1 where the difficulty spikes are completely random and something is either extremely easy, or extremely difficult at the same level.

Don't get me wrong, I think the game is great, I love a challenge, but in between that and losing maps, it becomes unbearable unless you have a lot of free time.

After spending 2 hours and gaining absolutely nothing I realized I was forcing myself to play rather than wanting to play. Started playing another unrelated game (not an arpg) and it was way more fun, as I was no longer thinking about how much time I have left in my weekend and what progress I can make.

I'll try again next patch, sad that it is in this state for the holidays though.

TL:DR; I don't mind a challenge, but I don't like wasting my time and gaining absolutely nothing when failing a challenge. If this was 20 years ago and I was 13, I would enjoy it for sure.

Doom threads gettin old... It's the hollidays, people are busy with friends and family.
I personally am visiting my parents.

This is Early access and still has better retention than 75% of AAA games released. Once the game is complete and gets officially released then we can start worrying about retention problems if there are any.

I hit a wall and needed to trade, thus I quit. Trade needs to go, or players will go.

They also have a lot of issues they've not even bothered to look at yet, like duo's with someone who has minions lags out the game severely.

Its still got 420k on steam and is early access. If you think its going to maintain 500k+ you've got rocks in your head. Its doing just fine.

It's utterly useless to talk about player retention at this point in an ARPG. Nearly meaningless. It's living on hype and holidays at a bare minimum, screwing with reportable numbers.

We'd be better served talking about problems with the game than making false claims to majorities that simply aren't possible to evidence.

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Pathological#1188 wrote:

It's utterly useless to talk about player retention at this point in an ARPG. Nearly meaningless. It's living on hype and holidays at a bare minimum, screwing with reportable numbers.

We'd be better served talking about problems with the game than making false claims to majorities that simply aren't possible to evidence.

thing is those artificially boosted numbers are feeding the "this is fine" crowd that thinks a live service F2P game can afford to start losing players basically since the first week and comparing the bleed either to single player one and done games or PoE1 leagues with 3-4 months cycle of "here you have one new mechanic that takes about 10 minutes to get old and tiring have fun for month or two"

they dont realize that for MMO-lite game releasing just before holidays the expected curve is a constant GROWTH especially when it still appears in Steams top sellers ... which for some reason they think is good when in reality being "top selling" while at the same time LOSING concurrents is very VERY bad sign ...