3.14 Retention Rates

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Nubatron wrote:

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Draegnarrr wrote:

What I wanna know is why you guys are using all time datasets, like 2014 has any relevance just put it at 1 year and you can see the slightly faster decay in Ultimatum lol

doesn't help that there are far more data points for the most recent two months, looks like weekly from the end of march onwards and monthly prior which is skewing the arc of the line on closer timeframes.

I used the all time because that's the original post by the guy who might have doctored it. Apples to apples.

I'm not disputing the dropoff. Just the extreme difference in the bottom (which his image clearly shows a dramatic difference). Like I said earlier, apples and oranges between last league and this league. A league with a new end game will always hold on to people longer.

A better comparison might be next league; we'll see what that is.

Help us put it to bed and post a screenshot. I'm half tempted to do a quick video which is significantly harder to doctor quickly.

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Marinxar wrote:

Your own screenshot show you doctored your graph. Your current line ends higher on the graph than last leagues low point, yet we are 2k lower now than last league low point. So you busted yourself.

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Marinxar wrote:

Yet, the graph from Nubatron show current line end higher than previous league all time low. Clearly we found the truth now.

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Marinxar wrote:

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Nubatron wrote:

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Marinxar wrote:

I would call this significant....Especially considering we still a month away from where leagues usually hit their lowest points.

Not even the influx of players due to the events, could make this look normal. Hopefully the overlords will get rid of those that thought it was a good idea to nerf the game in to the ground.

You definitely doctored it. Here is the actual picture:



Your argument is bad if you need to cook the books.

No you clearly edited the dates on that. Mine is straight up screenshot. Here is the link.

https://steamcharts.com/app/238960#All

Now everyone can see you for the fraud you are.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

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Marinxar wrote:

Yet, the graph from Nubatron show current line end higher than previous league all time low. Clearly we found the truth now.

I think we found out that you guys are looking at the same dataset but the autoscale chart is making the display different but instead of changing the timeframe to increase accuracy your shouting at each other about an unscaled line...

Is how it looks to me :p could be wrong lol

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Draegnarrr wrote:

I just want them to be like Ultimatum wasn't as good as it could be lets do the next one better *shrugs*

especially performance/bugs wise I don't really care about the charts at all other than what I hope it encourages them to do, if the numbers are worse its more likely they will act if they aren't it'll be another holding pattern on our way to PoE2.

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Deadandlivin wrote:

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 accessibility 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.

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CAKE wrote:

What this thread OP does is to take REAL numbers we REALLY have avaible to us and draws conclusions from them. Which is like infinitely better than talking about numbers we do not have. Or numbers that are not even relevant to the discussion. That it is steam only is non issue for it would still show the same thing, retention being worse, for it would be still fair steam to steam comparison with big sample size.