Player Retention!

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Ardziv#1837 wrote:

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.

i just did it as a 75 war, have you checked your relics? you need to stack honor resistance like crazy, i thought i was going to fail cuz i had 11 debuffs going into the last boss lol but last boss was super easy compared to the rooms.

Those numbers are for _concurrent_ players.

When players start putting in less time per week after the start, those numbers are going to decline. Of course a bunch of players left - they tried the game and it wasn't for them. The game is still doing incredibly well.

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Asghaad#3967 wrote:

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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 ...

Nothing you say or do at this point is going to change anything about this in the short term. There's no point engaging with that kind of discussion when people can take the "this is fine" line. PoE2 isn't going to be fixed in a day or a week or a month; there's a lot more to fix than that.

To be clear, I agree with you and you're completely correct; it just doesn't matter from a discussion standpoint and leads only to endless moronic threads about poe1 veterans destroying the game and so-such. The game is what it is, nothing big is going to change over christmas/new year, and GGG has the statistics already. It's a shame we couldn't start at a better place, but the game is here, and we didn't, and that's that. Eventually most of these people will simply fall away, the money will slow, and the game will change.

The reality is that GGG is still GGG and still functions the same as they did throughout the development of PoE1, so we already have a roadmap. We know that GGG likes to sell "the vision", but ultimately the vision pays heed to the reality, which is that when people don't like something they shout and they stop paying money. There's very little difference between where PoE1 was and how they were talking and where PoE2 is now. PoE1 didn't get to where it is now by direct application of GGG's vision; it was a constant tug of war between what they wanted to do and what players wanted to play. The same will be true of PoE2, without any shadow of a doubt.

At this specific moment in time, PoE2 is in the honeymoon phase of hype and holiday status. Its numbers are easily misrepresented, and frankly we see threads simultaneously claiming a given league's numbers in PoE1 are the death knell and the second coming for PoE1 even when it's stable, so they simply aren't a good representation of anything much even at the best of times.

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Pathological#1188 wrote:

The reality is that GGG is still GGG and still functions the same as they did throughout the development of PoE1, so we already have a roadmap. We know that GGG likes to sell "the vision", but ultimately the vision pays heed to the reality, which is that when people don't like something they shout and they stop paying money. There's very little difference between where PoE1 was and how they were talking and where PoE2 is now. PoE1 didn't get to where it is now by direct application of GGG's vision; it was a constant tug of war between what they wanted to do and what players wanted to play. The same will be true of PoE2, without any shadow of a doubt.

I think it'll happen a lot faster than it did for PoE. Tencent now fully owns GGG. I, for one, would like to see them fully commit to their "vision" to see if there is enough people to play and pay to make it work. They should try it and if it doesn't work which I believe it absolutely won't, we can finally put that discussion behind us.

The game is going to be just like New World and D4, you have all these oddballs saying "ItS eArLy AcCeSs BrO cHiLl OuT".

Almost every game released now has these people with their head in the sand defending glaring issues players have. If the devs responded accordingly to common areas players had problems with, their games wouldn't of tanked their player base. These B2P F2P games need players to buy MTX/expansions, and retention is important.

All those "everything is fine" people never stay around when the games start to fall off, or they do and will keep saying everything is fine until the end. You had people saying D4 was fine until they couldn't get enough people for a world boss at peak times, and then they cried about it. People said New world was fine until they started merging severs because some were barren.

A game releasing around the holidays should have growth, the games that decline or dip are games that have been out for a while, which is to be expected.