Harvest had 50% more players at same point, Ritual had 90% more

Not logged in for a week.
I might finally be free from this visionary curse.

Yea I want to thank Blizzard and the release of WOTLK for getting rid of my gambling issue that is the game POE.

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trixxar wrote:

If you dont care about retention, thats fine by me.

But lets just stop the lie that player power reduces retention or people get done with the league earlier. If thats not your concern, then cool.


(To answer your question, neither you or I know the impact retention has on profit vs league start. I agree starting period is probably when people buy. But if everyone quit by day 2, you would agree they dont plan on returning next league start, so at some point it starts to matter. We could argue details but neither of us have the data to express exactly how important it is.)

Can we please stop asserting assumptions as fact? You have quite literally zero idea if players who quit early don't return.

This is my own experience here so take that with a grain of salt.

I quit pretty early in the league, but I'm back now and despite not engaging much with this leagues specific content I am really enjoying the state of the game, the state of the atlas is much more enjoyable and customizable than ever before and I'm all for it. there's so much content that's not the league that it's enjoyable for me. I'll admit that at the beginning of the league things were... to put it mildly.. rough.

Now to make some point personal points about what I've been doing in the meantime. I have been having a blast playing multiplayer match of Immortal Empires in Warhammer Total War 3 with a bunch of friends, I still doing them on a regular base. I've also had the competitive fun of playing Age of Empires 4 on the ladder. none of these options were available to me during Ritual, a League I actually felt did not match my playstyle very well. from memory the gaming landscape during Ritual League was actually pretty dry and that was around the same time league of legends became to overbearing for me to play as well. I think that the gaming landscape is a lot more diversified which overall I feel is a lot better despite what it might do an individual games steam statistics, and GGG have admitted that they lower numbers have been resulted of this more diversified landscape, which is captured perfectly by the release of Elden Ring and the purposeful delay of league start dates due to the expectations around the release of Cyberpunk - (what a cluster*uck that was).

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Can we please stop asserting assumptions as fact? You have quite literally zero idea if players who quit early don't return.

- So TLDR: Atleast one player has :)

We're still crying about 3.13??? My god get over it people...

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Moridin79 wrote:

We're still crying about 3.13??? My god get over it people...

Before 3.19 and CW's... well what do we say here, "interesting" follow up posts on what they were working on for the Lake, the 3.13 Harvest Manifesto was by far the largest trafficked Reddit post in their history.

While I agree with the basic premise of your post, that Harvest is viewed by GGG far different than the community at large, and that nothing is going to change, at least not significantly.

I don't think the Devs respond well to some of the things written, and said lately, but I dont know how they reconcile that with the participation performance subsequently from players that are not directly involving themselves in the feedback here, or on Reddit. They just left. Do they really, fully, understand why players are not enjoying the PoE experience currently, and why they are leaving at a record pace?

I'm not so sure, unless this truly is the hill they want to die on. Gambling vs Determinism. It seems to me layered rng, gamba, and lottery wins isnt a great long-term solution, but I guess time will tell. At least some of these "disgruntled" players will have gaming options here shortly.

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Bleu42 wrote:

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trixxar wrote:

If you dont care about retention, thats fine by me.

But lets just stop the lie that player power reduces retention or people get done with the league earlier. If thats not your concern, then cool.


(To answer your question, neither you or I know the impact retention has on profit vs league start. I agree starting period is probably when people buy. But if everyone quit by day 2, you would agree they dont plan on returning next league start, so at some point it starts to matter. We could argue details but neither of us have the data to express exactly how important it is.)

Can we please stop asserting assumptions as fact? You have quite literally zero idea if players who quit early don't return.

Simple math, we are down from Sentinel (and I think Ritual and Archnemesis?) so we can confirm mathematically that not everyone did return.

That is a simple fact, no?

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Phrazz wrote:

My opinion has nothing to do with longevity or retention. I want to acquire small upgrades WAY more often than we currently do, rather than working on ONE item I will keep for weeks. I think that is a better direction. Drops beyond 'crafting bases' should matter; Harvest removes every bit of that idea.

Yea Harvest was a bandaid fix to item drops, much like how loot filters were a bandaid fix to item bloat.

The main problem is that PoE's itemization system makes it nearly to find an incremental upgrade on the ground. Pretty much every item requires some amount of work to make it useable and realistically the orb cost of that work is probably significantly higher than what you need to just buy something good enough to do red maps with.

PoE 2 is going to have a fix for one of those problems by changing how sockets work. Still having resistance be the way it is is a huge strain on the problem.

The thing harvest did was it allowed you to easily fix the items that were almost there making incremental progress actually reasonable for the first time in the game's history. It's problem is that like everything else it was usually better to not spend it on incremental progress and jump straight to the end. That and the power of the incremental progress was at it's lowest when the game needs it most. When finding items is at it's worst, acts 5 through yellow maps, harvest decided to kinda just not drop any of the fixer mods very much and instead be chaos orbs with extra steps. Then you can go back to targeting your post post end game gear once you're farming red maps and progression doesn't matter because content has stopped a long time ago.

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j33bus wrote:

Yea Harvest was a bandaid fix to item drops, much like how loot filters were a bandaid fix to item bloat.

The main problem is that PoE's itemization system makes it nearly (impossible?) to find an incremental upgrade on the ground.

That's why I want to see a "looter's sextant", with mods like:
- Magic and rare items in area have +/- 1 to affix tiers
- Magic and rare items in area have at least 2 T1 mods
- Magic and rare items in area have X% increased chance to roll attack modifiers
- Magic and rare items in area have X% increased chance to roll physical modifiers

...And so on.

Some of these mods would actually make me WANT to pick up rares in my maps - and we would have a semi-deterministic, player-controlles approach to actually farming rare items.

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TheFazzos wrote:

How is player retention meaningful at all? Leaguestart player number is the metric that counts and Kalandra is the fourth most successful league ever.

most nonsensical thing I've heard in a very long time.

league start player number is like the last metric you could use to measure success, because obviously people will jump in when they don't know whether a league is good or not. no man's sky had a huge hype, huge launch numbers, what happened? same with cyberpunk, same with new world. league start numbers are completely meaningless.