so lost ark was the poe killer

To the OP .. player numbers are only a proxy for "success" for GGG/Tencent.

What really matters is revenue, and while "players numbers" clearly have some link to what GGG/Tencent define as "success" it's not the goal.

i.e. there is no point having 500k players if 475k of them don't spend any money on the game. Would be better to have 100k players with 40k of those spending money.

I can almost guarantee what the "Board" at GGG and Tencent are looking at is revenue, and what percentage of players pay, how much, and how often. They will not be interested in attracting players that play but never pay ... the game etc. will always be driven (now) by attracting the type of player that will (over time) spend a decent amount of cash on the game. The person who plays for 100+ hours and drops $10 on some tabs then never returns won't be their target market ... it'll be players that pay, and will pay again in the future. Recurring/repeating revenue is king for businesses like GGG/Tencent. The only reason they don't do the "subscription" model any more is they figure there are some players that will pay many times more, and in most cases that offsets those who don't pay (but be honest, could you play 100+ hours in PoE without at least /some/ tabs?) or pay a low amount.

It's why I think the "no changes to 3.18" might be the thing that causes them some issues (cash wise). Most people will stick with the skins/skill effects they've already bought (if they bought them, I don't buy those), and so there's little incentive to buy new skill effects? Nerfs mean people try new things, and if they try new skills maybe they buy the effects etc. Maybe.

Anyway ... player numbers are a proxy for success for sure .. but not really what GGG/Tencent will care about (and if they are making money, this game will continue for as long as it does!).

This thread is stupid, and it is equally stupid every single league, which is how often it gets posted.



PoE is absolutely fine, and will continue to be absolutely fine. This league is marginally below average but even if it were to flop entirely, PoE would still be absolutely fine.

Objectively, the numbers don't show any significant and continued downward trend, nor any significant upward trend. There have been leagues that performed significantly better, and leagues that performed significantly worse than average. This league is, so far, performing worse than average, but nowhere near as badly as others have in the past.

Everything beyond that is speculation, and almost certainly biased by personal perception. YOU don't like it, so you attribute its performance to internal, systemic issues rather than temporal ones. Someone else who does like it is far more likely to attribute it to external, unrelated issues.

I don't particularly like the league, but claiming the game is on a downward spiral is objectively stupid. The last league was one of the most popular since the game was launched, and this league is as close to it as any two leagues have ever been. Chances are that the problems with this league are mostly temporal; it is too soon since last league, and very little has changed from a player-agency perspective to refresh most people's motivations. I'm sure the implementation of archnemesis mods has had some impact on player retention but ultimately if that is a major cause of loss of players GGG are likely to roll it back in even larger scale than they already have.

TL:DR;
1. This thread or a facsimile of it is made literally every league, often multiple times a league.
2. This thread and the copies of it previous leagues are literally always wrong, and literally always stupid.
3. Try to assess and account for your own biases before making threads to avoid posting stupid opinions as if they are representative of facts.

And for a bit of context in the previous post; here are TWO examples I replied to from last league, which is unequivocally one of the best-received leagues that I remember in the game's history.

HALF OF PLAYER BASE HAS QUIT IN 1 WEEK Feb 21

Lost Ark is POE Killer Feb 17

Of course, the numbers at that point in that league were 150k down to 90k so... like.. 10% better than this league? Jesus, what an uncontrollable death.

"

Pathological wrote:

And for a bit of context in the previous post; here are TWO examples I replied to from last league, which is unequivocally one of the best-received leagues that I remember in the game's history.

HALF OF PLAYER BASE HAS QUIT IN 1 WEEK Feb 21

Lost Ark is POE Killer Feb 17

Of course, the numbers at that point in that league were 150k down to 90k so... like.. 10% better than this league? Jesus, what an uncontrollable death.

In terms of player retention, last league was easily the absolute worst league in the game's history. The people who stayed loved the league, but there wasn't a whole lot of them since many, many people left for Lost Ark/Elden Ring.

This league being comparable in retention to the previous one, but without having the obvious reason of why people stopped playing, is not a good result.

"

Xyel wrote:

"

Pathological wrote:

And for a bit of context in the previous post; here are TWO examples I replied to from last league, which is unequivocally one of the best-received leagues that I remember in the game's history.

HALF OF PLAYER BASE HAS QUIT IN 1 WEEK Feb 21

Lost Ark is POE Killer Feb 17

Of course, the numbers at that point in that league were 150k down to 90k so... like.. 10% better than this league? Jesus, what an uncontrollable death.

In terms of player retention, last league was easily the absolute worst league in the game's history. The people who stayed loved the league, but there wasn't a whole lot of them since many, many people left for Lost Ark/Elden Ring.

This league being comparable in retention to the previous one, but without having the obvious reason of why people stopped playing, is not a good result.

You're using the kind of emotive language that implies you're trying to evoke a bias. What you say is only true when using a particular skew of the data; it is true in terms of percentage loss, but certainly not true of absolute players. It is true for specific time periods, but not true over other periods.

Ultimately, this harkens back to exactly what I said; data is data, what people say about the data is self-instructed opinion. Trying to claim that last league was unusually bad in terms of player loss requires specific assumptions that are unavoidably biased in their basis. The league had a higher starting point than most leagues, a higher percentage loss of players than most leagues, but also a higher absolute number of retained players at any given time period than most leagues.

What this means requires qualitative data that doesn't exist (at least publicly), but what you can objectively say is not the case is that any given league in the last 3 years or so has had any quantitative reason to believe that the game is "dying" in any way. The game is completely fine. All of this also ignores that we have no idea what is actually "better" for the game either from a financial point of view or subjectively from a "quality" point of view. I'm almost certain, for example, that a more frequent "high point" is much more important financially for GGG than high player retention given my own spending patterns on the game; I can't remember the last time I bought an MTX after the first couple of days of a league. That said; I don't have that data, so that's my own assumption.

"

Pathological wrote:

"

Xyel wrote:

"

Pathological wrote:

And for a bit of context in the previous post; here are TWO examples I replied to from last league, which is unequivocally one of the best-received leagues that I remember in the game's history.

HALF OF PLAYER BASE HAS QUIT IN 1 WEEK Feb 21

Lost Ark is POE Killer Feb 17

Of course, the numbers at that point in that league were 150k down to 90k so... like.. 10% better than this league? Jesus, what an uncontrollable death.

In terms of player retention, last league was easily the absolute worst league in the game's history. The people who stayed loved the league, but there wasn't a whole lot of them since many, many people left for Lost Ark/Elden Ring.

This league being comparable in retention to the previous one, but without having the obvious reason of why people stopped playing, is not a good result.

You're using the kind of emotive language that implies you're trying to evoke a bias. What you say is only true when using a particular skew of the data; it is true in terms of percentage loss, but certainly not true of absolute players. It is true for specific time periods, but not true over other periods.

Ultimately, this harkens back to exactly what I said; data is data, what people say about the data is self-instructed opinion. Trying to claim that last league was unusually bad in terms of player loss requires specific assumptions that are unavoidably biased in their basis. The league had a higher starting point than most leagues, a higher percentage loss of players than most leagues, but also a higher absolute number of retained players at any given time period than most leagues.

What this means requires qualitative data that doesn't exist (at least publicly), but what you can objectively say is not the case is that any given league in the last 3 years or so has had any quantitative reason to believe that the game is "dying" in any way. The game is completely fine. All of this also ignores that we have no idea what is actually "better" for the game either from a financial point of view or subjectively from a "quality" point of view. I'm almost certain, for example, that a more frequent "high point" is much more important financially for GGG than high player retention given my own spending patterns on the game; I can't remember the last time I bought an MTX after the first couple of days of a league. That said; I don't have that data, so that's my own assumption.

Ritual
Day 1 - 157k
Day 30 - 73k
Loss - -53.5 %

Archnemesis
Day 1 - 158k
Day 30 - 49k
Loss - -69 %

The only point where AN matched its predecessor in any players-based metric is the launch, which was 0.6 % better than Ritual's.

Other than that, I challenge you to finding a statistical players interpretation in which AN wasn't severely worse performing than Ritual, the previous major expansion, so the best comparative point.

Nothing emotional about that.

was 130k peak, and that is only about half (about as much still play standalone), unsurprisingly the numbers have not really changed that much for quite a while, generally going upwards but there is still the occasional dip.

As such, no...not killed, said dip could just be the flavour of the month peeps just not even bothering to try the new league because there was no player/skill changes.

ok so the 1 week dropoff wasnt as bad as i thought, we only lost about 40% of the players, so this is around harvest league levels

but its still pretty bad

anyway who else got 12 valtan bones this week lul

"

yamface wrote:

ok so the 1 week dropoff wasnt as bad as i thought, we only lost about 40% of the players, so this is around harvest league levels

but its still pretty bad

anyway who else got 12 valtan bones this week lul

I have been playing LA on RU for quite some time, so Valtan is nothing new, but I am happy that most people seem to be really enjoying it in NA/EU. This is, in my opinion, challenging content done right. The streamers I have seen doing it have been rather positive despite wiping for hours.

And this is, in my opinion, the problem with whatever GGG developers are doing with PoE. People dont mind hard content, when it's appropriately paced and designed. But the recent rare mods lottery, when the mods either do nothing to you or hard counter your build, or interact in such a way as to make the encounter much harder than top bosses (not to mention this happens in acts as well), just frustrates and upsets people. People dont mind losing to a giant demonic minotaur, doing a well-telegraphed attack that you can see yourself avoiding, when the mistake is clear to you. But people get massively upset when a random mob one-taps you on map tier that you were clearing in brain afk mode for the past hours, due to some crazy unlucky mod combo that you couldn't possibly read in time to make a decision.

"

Destructodave wrote:

"

Aynix wrote:

"

Eleqtro wrote:

Diablo Immortal will be the PoE killer.
And its not really a game.

Just as Diablo 3 was PoE killer. Oh wait...

Diablo 3 and Reaper of Souls were massively popular during their time; vastly more popular than PoE.

PoE is a live service game, basically, and it won the race in teh long run, but lets not get all revisionist history and act like D3 wasnt insanely popular for a few years there.

Yes, in 2022 PoE is more popular than D3, but in 2013-2015 it damn sure wasn't.

If D3 could have kept up a content schedule like PoE, I think it would still be really popular, too. But it was not designed like that.

But Diablo Immortal is basically a long-term mobile game, and it will be designed that way. So yea, I do think Diablo Immortal is going to do damage to PoE in a way D3 couldnt.

But I really think people forget just how popular D3 was during vanilla and Reaper of Souls for a few years there. Way, way more than PoE was.

Dude Diablo 3 was so popular for two reasons: it was made by Blizzard (they can release literally hot steaming pile of dogshit and people will still buy it) and it was breaindead easy. Ofc easy game will be way more popular. "Casuals" are 90% of the players. PoE is not casual friendly.