3.14 Retention Rates

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jack_aubrey wrote:

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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.

I'm cropping a lot from your post, just to make mine a bit more readable. I felt like I'm helping to point you or anyone else in a slightly better direction. Go back to that GDC speech and the lead dev said it himself: despite drop-offs, user retention remains remarkably high throughout the league and can be an accurate predictor for the next league. While they may not give us pathofexile.com website information, you could clearly go analyze PoE Reddit as a substitute. Look at # of posts and # of replies and compare those to past leagues. Is there a drop off? If so, use that to prove nerfs or balance changes were indeed terrible. Just lurk the forums for a good week and you will see yet another thread pointing to steam charts and saying "yep, game's dying [insert personal beef]."

Side note I'm going to go do a little homework on this because I'm curious now. I was very upset with the Harvest nerfs in particular just so you know where I am as a player. Then you pull up that Harvest manifesto thread and there's 9,000+ comments in there. 9,000. I don't think there's ever been a single announcement, patch, expansion, or any other kind of thing in this game's history that ever hit that kind of number. So has the game actually hit some blowback? Has the numbers that GGG cares about (not steam charts & predictable league falloff) gone down? You could guess yes and I could agree.

The numbers are NOT the same as always whatever gymnastics you do, after the same amount of time the league have HALF the players than previous league.

hell yea, gotta love these threads with bs graphs :D

https://steamcharts.com/app/238960

clearly shows that A the drop of is consistent with almost any league and B that ultimatum is the second best league considering just player numbers from start to finish

poe is not dieing or declineing or whatever you blokes call it, its getting more and more popular over time, just facts and official numbers

Dude, you posted a 7 day chart, lol.

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Terspet wrote:

hell yea, gotta love these threads with bs graphs :D

https://steamcharts.com/app/238960

clearly shows that A the drop of is consistent with almost any league and B that ultimatum is the second best league considering just player numbers from start to finish

poe is not dieing or declineing or whatever you blokes call it, its getting more and more popular over time, just facts and official numbers

This would have been accurate, was it not for the small factor you neglect here.... We are still a month away from end of this league, and yes, the numbers already the same as the worst leagues in last 2 years....with a month of degrading still left to go.

EDIT : Actually 2 things neglected here.... There is also the very successful event that just ended, and boosted the actual numbers way higher than it would have been.

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Marinxar wrote:

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Terspet wrote:

hell yea, gotta love these threads with bs graphs :D

https://steamcharts.com/app/238960

clearly shows that A the drop of is consistent with almost any league and B that ultimatum is the second best league considering just player numbers from start to finish

poe is not dieing or declineing or whatever you blokes call it, its getting more and more popular over time, just facts and official numbers

This would have been accurate, was it not for the small factor you neglect here.... We are still a month away from end of this league, and yes, the numbers already the same as the worst leagues in last 2 years....with a month of degrading still left to go.

EDIT : Actually 2 things neglected here.... There is also the very successful event that just ended, and boosted the actual numbers way higher than it would have been.

heist hit us with flashback and endless delve, two softcore events where way more people participated than in the gauntlet, wich was a ssf hardcore hardcore event. endless delve was december 2020.

if 3.15 will be released as it is planned to, we are 3 weeks away from it wich in return basicly means, according ofcourse to the stats in the charts, the players playing now will play till the end and numbers wont change much as most people leave within the first month of a league when they reached theyre goals, got theyre mtx etc. thats the good thing on poe stats as almost everything they do concerining numbers is puplic, you see/know what is normal and inflated etc.

so no i did not neglected anything as you obviously did not even think about past events wich had less players overall.


edit. i just took heist as example because it was the first that came to mind with a total of 3 events if i remember, flashback, endless delve and smth else

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Terspet wrote:

heist hit us with flashback and endless delve, two softcore events where way more people participated than in the gauntlet, wich was a ssf hardcore hardcore event. endless delve was december 2020.

if 3.15 will be released as it is planned to, we are 3 weeks away from it wich in return basicly means, according ofcourse to the stats in the charts, the players playing now will play till the end and numbers wont change much as most people leave within the first month of a league when they reached theyre goals, got theyre mtx etc. thats the good thing on poe stats as almost everything they do concerining numbers is puplic, you see/know what is normal and inflated etc.

so no i did not neglected anything as you obviously did not even think about past events wich had less players overall.


edit. i just took heist as example because it was the first that came to mind with a total of 3 events if i remember, flashback, endless delve and smth else

Additionally, last league had an expansion to end game which always comes with a higher retention rate because players are trying to experience/learn it. The Maven was/is quite a grind to get to for a lot of the player base and takes time.

Comparing retention of last league to this league isn't an apples to apples comparison. Unfortunately last league is the only other league that had a peak like this one so we'll have to wait for a league like this to have a real comparison.

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Terspet wrote:

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Marinxar wrote:

so no i did not neglected anything as you obviously did not even think about past events wich had less players overall.


edit. i just took heist as example because it was the first that came to mind with a total of 3 events if i remember, flashback, endless delve and smth else

Lets math together. Comparing apples with apples. Taking the player count after 2 months ( Give or take couple days, since steam charts wont show data on every specific day for me. So I took the nearest worst count, favoring your argument. ) after launch for each league. Then we don't assume anything. This is according to steam charts. So obviously does not reflect actual data that include players using launcher, but still large enough data set to reflect what is going on actually. The numbers at the end represent PEAK amount of players on that day. Notice yesterday 24th, ultimatum peak player count was already down to 12,614

Ultimatum : April 16 - Jun 16 - 17,219
Ritual :Jan 15 - March 28 2021 - 19,856
Heist : Sept 18 - December 2020 - 36,370
Harvest : Jun 06 - Aug 2020 - 38,067
Delirium : Mar 13 - May 2020 - 39,620
Metamorph : Dec 13 - Feb 2020 - 41,010

2 big reason to explain why i quit this league pretty quickly :



Crafting :

Whatever you are a trade league player or SSF player, being able to have more deterministic craft and some free craft to lower the absurd amount of currency needed to craft something usable is a blessing.

GGG said F.U

League :

Very lazy league idea, too similar to Ritual and as usualy the boss league was way too rare.

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Marinxar wrote:

Ultimatum : April 16 - Jun 16 - 17,219
Ritual :Jan 15 - March 28 2021 - 19,856
Heist : Sept 18 - December 2020 - 36,370
Harvest : Jun 06 - Aug 2020 - 38,067
Delirium : Mar 13 - May 2020 - 39,620
Metamorph : Dec 13 - Feb 2020 - 41,010

Now I wait for someone to ask "What apples ?"

Or say "I have a different opinion on that". :)

My interpretation of the charts:






1) League start concurrent player number: This number reflects the amount of players GGG managed to attract to the new league. It's the consecuence of the work done previous to the start of the league: hype, publicity, etc. It does NOT reflect how well a league performed.

2) Actual league curve: This is the data that matters. Its shape determines if a league did well or not, retention-wise:



a) An "L" shape (1) means the game can't maintain the players interested and they start leaving immediatelly after the league starts. This is the worse-case scenario.

b) The league loses players at a constant pace. (2)

c) The league keeps a high number of players engaged and active for a long time, until they are finally done with it. This is the best-case scenario. (3)

Without analizing the causes for which each can happen, in the case of Ultimatun vs the previous leagues of the past 2 years, you can clearly see this has been one of the worse, if not the worst, performing league retention-wise.



And, finally, I think It's worth mentioning that a higher average number of players and a higher concurrent peak number in the league doesn't mean it performed better retention-wise compared to previous ones. It just means that the game is growing and that it is attracting more and more people as time goes by.