3.14 Retention Rates

Just wanted to post it here in case anyone missed it.

Original Reddit Post


The graph illustrates how Ultimatum was unable to retain even less players than Synthesis. (This is counted through proportions, not absolute numbers)
This clearly displays a monumental failing on GGGs part.

Synthesis was considered one of their worst performing leagues due to how extremely complicated the Synthesis mechanics were which caused people to quit that league early in droves. Apparently, ultimatum is even worse.

Now the question is, why did this happen? And what can GGG do to increase the longevity of leagues?

Crafting:
It should come as no surprise but alot of players, especially higher end players, predicted this would happen after the harvest manifesto and the patchnotes which utterly annihilated the end-game.

The accessability of end-game crafting was pretty much removed from non-powergaming players. Think what you want about crafting, non-crafting players simply don't enjoy spamming Einjar frogs and harvest reforges on an upgrade for hundreds of exalted orbs to try and gamble forth strong items.
I'm not suggesting we should go back to the old method of harvest, as it was clearly broken. But the current itteration is a joke and crafting needs to become more accessible to the average player again.

Having the only way to get upgrades for normal players is to farm up currency and buy stuff of trade is a major turn off to alot of players.

Endgame Nerfs:
The second reason was the complete obliteration of the endgame, especially to mapping. The problem lies in the supply of mapping consumeables I believe.
Due to, essentially removing 100% Delirium farming from the game, GGG managed to absolutely destroy the scarab supply this league. This caused scarabs to reach ridiculous prices due to how inaccessible they were.

This made it so running scarabs "casually" became a complete currency loss.
The only way to use scarabs was to be extremely selective with them and only use the correct scarab in the correct zone with the correct watchstones. Due to their scarcity, if you weren't running the right league bonuses accompanied with a scarab you were losing money.

This meant that juicing in general, became much more restrictive and harder to do. This hurt the casual players the most. To alot of players who reach the endgame, the more casual ones simply stopped at using chisels and vaal orbs.
In the past there was a health intermediate step to juicing which involved just incoorporating scarabs you liked into your mapping. This just causes you to lose money now.

It wasn't just top endgame farming methods that got hit with the nerfs (100% Deli, Delve et.c.) These nerfs to the end-game trickled down and hurt the intermediate and casual players aswell.

The end result has been a league that's less acessible to all types of players which just feels less rewarding overall. Things being less rewarding coupled with prices of item upgrades skyrocketing due to the flacid state of crafting simply resulted in less incentives for normal players to keep playing the game and upgrade their characters.

Ultimatum:
Lastly, we have the issue with the Ultimatum league mechanic.
I personally believe Ultimatum actually was a very good league mechanic. But it had some problems. The number one issue was that the mechanic was far to monotonous. There was very little variation and not much happened while you were playing it. It was very fun in the start, but one can only run around in enough circles until they get bored of the mechanic.
The mechanic was also very time consuming and the boss spawn rate was far too low.

The mechanic needed to have more Depth to it and feel more engaging. It was profitable which was good. But that's not enough, it needed to be more fun aswell. Alot of things could have been added to Ultimatums to make the league mechanic as a whole more fun and deep. I'm not even going to touch on Inscribed Ultimatums which were the weakest excuse for endgame content I've ever seen.

Conclusion:
All in all, I believe it's pretty safe to say that this league was a complete failure. Which is fine, leagues are going to be hit or misses.
The important thing is being able to identify the problems and try to fix them. And hopefully GGG are able to do that and adress everything that went wrong this league.

I didn't quit this league because of any of the mechanics, personally, I quit because the game was broken and unplayable at launch, and remained broken and unplayable for the next two weeks.

To my knowledge, the game is still broken and unplayable, but who knows, maybe they actually fixed it in 4 months.

What your graph shows is that it really doesn't matter what the league is... the drop-off is remarkably consistent. You're talking a few percent between the highest and lowest.

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ZZZappy wrote:

I didn't quit this league because of any of the mechanics, personally, I quit because the game was broken and unplayable at launch, and remained broken and unplayable for the next two weeks.

To my knowledge, the game is still broken and unplayable, but who knows, maybe they actually fixed it in 4 months.

Alot of people had massive performance issues this league. Fortunately for me, I didn't. Actually this league played better for me personally than previous leagues because I never had to farm delirium which absolutely wrecked my FPS.

I do think they fixed most performance issues but it varies from computer to computer in the end.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

What your graph shows is that it really doesn't matter what the league is... the drop-off is remarkably consistent. You're talking a few percent between the highest and lowest.

The difference between 17% of the playerbase still playing the game and 35% of the playerbase still playing is a massive difference. (Comparing Ultimatum to Metamorph)

That's close to double the retention rate. Meaning twice as many people who started playing metamorph, relatively, kept playing the game at the 50 day mark.

If you've played PoE during the end of leagues you can certainly feel what a wasteland the game is right now compared to Ritual and Heist as examples.
No one's even typing anything in global820 any longer.

You see what you want to see, I'll see what I want to see. I don't see all that big of a difference between the two... ~10% of the initial population.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

What your graph shows is that it really doesn't matter what the league is... the drop-off is remarkably consistent. You're talking a few percent between the highest and lowest.

Hm, when you compare the "weekend-summits" it seems to be quite a difference.

Also steamcharts numbers are as bad as in 2017 iirc.

So this is clearly the least successful league so far.

personally i dont think that the ultimatum event itself made any people quit, its spawn monsters in a circle and kill, as so many leagues before

what made me quit is the overengineered Atlas

its just to complicated, theres to much going, nobody cares about these stupid maven counters and watchstones just remove them from the game again for gods sake

I'm not denying it's the least... just that it's not the apocalypse.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

You see what you want to see, I'll see what I want to see. I don't see all that big of a difference between the two... ~10% of the initial population.

Just put in numbers for reference.

Lets assume both league starts had 100 000 players starting of initially. (Madeup numbers)

50 days later, Metamorph has ~35k players still playing the game while ultimatum has ~17k players still playing the game.

You don't see any difference there? In this specific case, using 100k players as the initial league start number one league has double the playerbase at the 50 day mark.