So GGG, how's that improved player retention coming along?

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Oblitus wrote:

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Anonymous1749704 wrote:

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Oblitus wrote:

Played Incursion to the last day. This league lost me on day 1.

That's a fast single-day 16 challenges.

16 challenges is hour a day play in relax mode (/played shows 2 hours average but I have a habit of leaving the game launched while doing my business a lot). I had 10 when I've done story. Compared to 8-10 hours I've played in better leagues it is absolutely nothing.

yeah it's not though. I'm close to level 90 and only have 15. challenges are way harder than usual this league

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LMTR14 wrote:

as long as ggg doesn't abolish temp leagues and create a permanent mode that makes you want to log in every day, there will be no player retention

At one hand, ggg is focused on temp leagues and it's not going to change.
Temp leagues feed, so it's understandable.

On the other, if legacy was implemented into the core, it would be a game within the game, and eventually a brand new league mechanic on top of it.
All league mechanics + the newest one is what can make players stay for longer without getting bored, and legacy alone could bypass an eventually dull season mechanic and features, which use to result in drop-offs and lower player retention.

I never managed to get why legacy didn't become core.

I noticed one thing over the years and it never really improved, it seems regarding various discussion that players tend to end bored when they arn't succesful anymore with economy ( talking about SC temp trade leagues i won't talk for others ).
I guess it hurt a bit retention at all, since wealth is basicly a important basis in progression.

Might be just an impression but i wonder what are your toughts on that part ? ( if you play in these leagues, else just ignore this ).
Do you feel the game is less appealing when economy slow down ?

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Heli0nix wrote:

I noticed one thing over the years and it never really improved, it seems regarding various discussion that players tend to end bored when they arn't succesful anymore with economy ( talking about SC temp trade leagues i won't talk for others ).
I guess it hurt a bit retention at all, since wealth is basicly a important basis in progression.

Might be just an impression but i wonder what are your toughts on that part ? ( if you play in these leagues, else just ignore this ).
Do you feel the game is less appealing when economy slow down ?

You may say im rich or at least successful in trade league
and about 30 ex in currency but i still feel bored.
I tried playing in ssf and i do like it but only to a certain point. Sooner or later you will find yourself very limited when it comes to content you can access. I made a thread like one week ago complaining that after killing something between 200-300 harbingers i found only 5 harbinger shards, not enough even for a full orb. This way in ssf ignoring Zana grind i would need to spend whole league farming harbingers and playing chaos recipe tetris before i would even have a chance entering beachhead map for few minutes.


Meanwhile playing in trade league let me access all this content however ruins everything else. It's far too easy to gear your character and it gets boring very fast. There is always this feeling that i must do what gives me best possible profit. Im not going to use exalt because it's 99% chance i will waste currency on trash mod and even if i get something good i would get something much better from poe.trade for price of exalt.
Im not going to run putrid cloister or whatever map because it's much better to sell it for 1ex. Im not going to run uber atziri because once again it makes more sens to sell fragments, same goes for shaper and everything else.
I can't just enjoy mapping because getting enough maps of same tier with alch and go would ruin poe economy.

Everything is balanced this way i feel forced to run tier 15 maps with all sextants, chisels, fragments, zana mods just to get enough maps dropped.

I buy currency so i can run map i want (or at least map i feel i want to run).
Then i sell other maps so i can buy even more map currency.
It's neverending buy and sell in a game that offers worst trading system i have ever dealt with.

In the end i spend time running one specific map from a very limited pool only to not lose access to high tier maps. Your only options are to run tier 15 over and over again and never suffer from not having currency or playing random, empty maps not having currency for anything.

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Heli0nix wrote:

I noticed one thing over the years and it never really improved, it seems regarding various discussion that players tend to end bored when they arn't succesful anymore with economy ( talking about SC temp trade leagues i won't talk for others ).
I guess it hurt a bit retention at all, since wealth is basicly a important basis in progression.

Might be just an impression but i wonder what are your toughts on that part ? ( if you play in these leagues, else just ignore this ).
Do you feel the game is less appealing when economy slow down ?

personally, anyway, its completely opposite. i get bored once i have everything.
if the economy is too good then i can get perfect items much quicker then i no longer have something to work towards and get bored of playing just to play.

its when currency comes slow that the goal stays longer and thus keeps me playing to grind it out.

of course it can't be too barren, i guess, or else the goal seems unobtainable and you just give up. i can see how that would happen.


i think a lot of "poor" people just really don't see where currency comes from. you'd be surprised how many exalts you have in your stash already if you just liquidate it. right now i only have 2 pure exalts, but i have 2 more in chisels, 2 more in fusings, 2 more in chaos, and 3 worth in t16 maps if i sold those, etc.

i think its dumb to quit because you don't have enough currency. thats what drives you to keep going IMO. currency comes quite easy in the current poe we play now anyway

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鬼殺し wrote:

My arguments were demolished and I have nothing more to add, so I'll try to save a little face and flee from the thread. :)

Okay, bye!

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Heli0nix wrote:

I noticed one thing over the years and it never really improved, it seems regarding various discussion that players tend to end bored when they arn't succesful anymore with economy ( talking about SC temp trade leagues i won't talk for others ).
I guess it hurt a bit retention at all, since wealth is basicly a important basis in progression.

Might be just an impression but i wonder what are your toughts on that part ? ( if you play in these leagues, else just ignore this ).
Do you feel the game is less appealing when economy slow down ?

The effects of PoE's economy on retention is a giant can of worms, but the long and short of it is that it's just bad at every level.

The rich get richer, quickly amass everything they could want, then get bored and quit. The poor stay poor, get frustrated and quit. GGG could find ways to combat this, but for some reason they don't think that it's important for a trade-based game to have a fair economy.

And on a side note, the very fact that people get bored and quit playing once they have enough loot is a huge fucking indictment of the core gameplay experience.

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xMustard wrote:

i think its dumb to quit because you don't have enough currency. thats what drives you to keep going IMO. currency comes quite easy in the current poe we play now anyway

You may have heard the story of WoW rest XP. For those who haven't, here's the short version:



The moral of that story is that the amount of fun people have with a game depends just as much on the presentation of its mechanics as it does on the mechanics themselves.

It may be true that just about everyone can get enough currency to buy everything they need. But the existence of people who print more currency in an hour than you do in a week ruins the presentation. Even if we were to accept that those people have no tangible effect on others (which is hard to argue when trade snipers are everywhere), the constant comparison makes it very easy to feel like you're being left behind.

Want to keep me interested in the game? Enable all the past content and leagues that are no longer active and let me choose what content I want to play. It just does not make sense to limit content for things that have already been coded and played through for months just to force me to play just the new stuff.

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suszterpatt wrote:

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xMustard wrote:

i think its dumb to quit because you don't have enough currency. thats what drives you to keep going IMO. currency comes quite easy in the current poe we play now anyway

You may have heard the story of WoW rest XP. For those who haven't, here's the short version:

Spoiler

In early tests, the design was that you start off gaining normal XP, then incur a "fatigue" penalty if you play for too long. Players were very unhappy with this, so Blizzard switched it around: you'd go from having a bonus for being rested, back to normal XP after some time. This tested a lot better with players.

The twist is that the actual numbers remained exactly the same. The only thing that had changed was the presentation of those numbers, and yet people liked the new system a lot more.

The moral of that story is that the amount of fun people have with a game depends just as much on the presentation of its mechanics as it does on the mechanics themselves.

What the developers learned was a basic principle: People are happy when they think you have given them something and are unhappy if they think you have taken something away from them. This always holds true, even if the net result is the same.

A note on comparisons: What one player has does not meant that all players must also have it. Unless, of course, you're selling that and want to advertise the fact...

But, if a player works a trade system very rigorously and deftly, they can acquire a good bit of in-game wealth no matter the game. They have, in effect, put in their time and effort and have been subsequently rewarded. This is "their game."

But, if a player pushes through content and achieves "The Thing" then they, too, have achieved and acquired something that they desired.

The problem is that in PoE, the player that works the trade system and puts in the time and effort to master it can, in effect, "buy the win over The Thing." The have doubled the returns of their efforts by being able to purchase items that enable builds that wtfroflstomp the end-game content, if they choose. Players who do not do this but prefer, instead, to "play The Game in order to achieve The Thing" get understandably upset about this.

What's the solution?

Well, one solution is very easy, but it's like hitting the problem with a hammer: Bind on Equip gear. You can't get "The Gear" or "The Key" to achieve "The Thing" unless you actually do "The Stuff" that everyone, no matter how rich they are, must do in order to eventually be able to do "The Thing."

Rich players still buy their way into groups/raids/runs to get "The Gear" or "The Key" but that's still rarer than it would be otherwise, with rich players simply buying everything including "Victory."

That's one solution. It's one that I don't think GGG wants. IMO, it'd be a decent solution to certain issues if there were enough players who were upset about the way the game is "played" and how much value their time spent playing "the game" is versus playing the somewhat unintended "meta-game" of Trade Mastery.

For those who are vehemently opposed to BoE things you must understand that the mechanism is an attempt to correct an issue and reward certain gameplay behaviors. That's all it is. (It also makes people feel "special" when they achieve something, since it's usually a visible mark of achievement rather than a sign of a deep pocketbook.) It's a common thing to require players to "do something" other than spend in-game currency in order for them to "achieve something" in game, other than being rich. PoE breaks that mold to pieces with Hideout Warriors manipulating the market and achieving in-game what the very diligent "Workers" have achieved after arduous hours of gameplay.

All that being said, we have to remember that not every build is equally capable or easily equippable so it can do "all content." Some builds will just not be able to reach the true end-game and some broken and ridiculous builds can barely make it out of the campaign without a continuous die-fest. In that regard, it's very rare than any two players with different builds, or even the same player playing different builds, will have the same experience. That is one very strong vote in favor of PoE's design.

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Morkonan wrote:

All that being said, we have to remember that not every build is equally capable or easily equippable so it can do "all content." Some builds will just not be able to reach the true end-game and some broken and ridiculous builds can barely make it out of the campaign without a continuous die-fest. In that regard, it's very rare than any two players with different builds, or even the same player playing different builds, will have the same experience. That is one very strong vote in favor of PoE's design.

Cool post but not sure what the different experience is now. Sure the power levels of the builds are different but being able to experience the hardest content is nowadays doable even with MF / Autobomber characters. The game has power creeped so far that killing Uber Elder is nothing special and doing all mods / 8 mod Guardians isn't anything exceptional to advertise with. I can do these even on 100% IIQ MF on <10 EX gear VPS which equates to wearing only helmet, weapon and body as your non-MF items.

Neither do I see that killing the enemy from 2 screens away or killing in melee range equates to a different gaming experience.