GGG should probably address the player retention rate

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

Months after release and still hitting 14k+ daily users, no including all the old farts like myself who haven't switched over to steam. IIRC someone put up on reddit when POE peaked with 30k users which I think is at the same time GGG said they reached 60k which was record breaking. We still have more people playing now daily than the peaks during OB.

All games will lose people, GGG is doing just fine. There 4 month build whatever is going to work well because they surge with new players, keep 25-50% for longer than a week then 4 months later build it back up. I don't think they expect a high retention, hell I don't think they expected this many people to stick around. It is a game designed for psycho players, very few things cratering to casual players.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

Let me rephrase. You cannot change anything to prevent players from leaving BECAUSE their friends left. If their sole reason for leaving, is that their friends did, they will leave no matter what if their friends do.

I did not mean to say you cannot prevent their friends from leaving.

I hope there is because as much as I want to stay I'm not sure I can enjoy things are they are...



And its more then just that all my friends (and their friends, and those people's friends....) have quit. I've always tried to do what I can to help any new player I meet get used to the game but deep down inside I know that within a week that player will have quit and will never be back. Whenever I play a team game or chat in global with people I do so under the expectations that I will likely never encounter those people ever again. On top of all that I see that this anonymous high turnover environment seems to be creating a general attitude of outright hostility toward each other rather then one that feels beneficial at all since no one has to concern themselves with any form of community and overall it just seems to be getting to me and wearing me out finally I guess and I'm burning out.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Oh, regarding friends quitting: it happens. I actually didn't bother trying to get any more RL friends playing PoE if after a few sentences they weren't interested. Again: niche game. Not for everyone, and I daresay not for many people.

I just make friends here and if they move on, so be it. There are always more for whom this game is right, or at least those who feel the good still outweighs the bad.

I suppose if you can't have a niche game, you can at least have a niche community within it. Thus my guild, thus my friends list. I might be burying my head in the sand, but when the alternative is being just plain unhappy and constantly assaulted by the aforementioned 'wrong' community for the game, I'll gladly choose ignorance if it means still enjoying the game.

Yes, sadly it seems that while I had my fun and have no regrets spending $50 on a pack for my primary account (I only use that one for posting trading requests as I won't risk it getting put on probation btw, and I know I'm hardheaded enough that it was a risk... lol)... it seems that maybe my time here is coming to a close as what I was hoping for when I joined may not even be possible* and that the high turnover rate may be inevitable. At least I had my fun while it lasted though.


* That being a closer-knit community and static groups of friends in a hardcore difficult arpg. It's just always been important for me to find a online game with a community I can enjoy interacting with in addition to challenging skill based gameplay....



edit - It just concerns me because as much as I want to love this game and stick around... I've seen this type of thing in other f2p games in the past that I used to play and those games suffered immensely from it in the long term right up to the point it boiled over and those games went from overpopulated to ghost towns before I even noticed something was happening.

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UnderOmerta wrote:

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anubite wrote:

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This is 100% false.

No, this is 100% false.

In order for my statement to be false, you basically have to acknowledge that the devs can literally do nothing to keep players playing their game.

Now if that's what you're claiming, I have to chuckle.

Your statement was literally just that. No argument or thought behind it. I was trying to point that out to you by mirroring your own tactic.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

...

So your ideal game state would be bunch of devoted supporters, sitting in town while singing "kumbaya". It's obvious that any non-fan will have high expectations, even out of the possibilities of the developer. The point is that this indie/small team/garage/niche/against all card was already flipped so many times, that it's still amazing that someone's still buying it. In the end, if you can't at least deliver in the range of market standards, you're screwed.

From my perspective, I would value the player giving me hard time in feedback same as the "everything is shiny" player throwing money on the screen. After all, they both care about future of the game.

The strategy to any f2p is market penetration. It's natural that we will have a lower player retention rate than your average pay-to-play game.

All that matters is if this game is profitable and sustainable for continued development. If it is, GGG is doing fine and threads like these are pointless discussions.

Things will never go back to how they were in CB and there's no point in wishing they would; the game has to grow in player population, that's just how businesses work. EVE has steady linear growth, for example, despite it being a niche game. It's called the bicycle theory - shit has to keep going up and forward, or the dumb thing falls over. Any business follows this strategy that wants to exist in the long term. It's not that all businesses want to target a wide market or that they are greedy and chasing gold, it's just... a combination of various mechanics. If you start losing players, or only maintaining the status quo, you can have stagnation which chain-reacts into a sudden upheaval into full-blown take-down. It's why continued growth is important, especially for a game like this.

PoE is indeed a game I would never recommend to any of my friends. I work in the modern tech industry, so you'd think the people I'd work with would be technically adept enough to play PoE, but they aren't. Face the facts: most gamers these days, even those of high degree intelligence or maturity, are still into games like World of Warcraft, Minecraft, CoD or Battlefield. Sad as this may seem - it's the absolute truth. One guy I knew played D2 for half a decade, while he was out in Iraq, it was the only game he could play with his squad. He was annihilated by D3's awfulness, but I couldn't even get him interested in the OB for PoE.

It's not that PoE is a bad game or a too-hard game, it's not that PoE doesn't have respecs (it does actually, sheesh why do people say this dumb shit, you get plenty of respec points and if you don't want to reroll at some point you're in the wrong genre), or that PoE doesn't have this or that, it's just that 99.9% of players are super hyper tasteless casuals. You have to be dedicated and you have to be thoroughly burnt out on simplistic run-of-the-mill games to finally give PoE a chance. PoE doesn't have a name to itself, it's not a AAA or simple-to-sit-down-and-show-the-kids-what-you're-playing game like BF4 or Minecraft. It's a hardcore ARPG where you navigate a huge passive tree, have to decipher a large array of diverse mechanics, and make important choices on gear and progression. Some of you may mock PoE for some areas where it is weak in, but PoE is a thousand times more complex than virtual legos or walk down the hallway and point your clicker at the guy behind the chest-high crate.

If you can kill Dominus in normal standard, you're in the 0.5% of so-called "gamers"
If you can kill Dominus in normal HC, you're in the 0.25% of so-called "gamers"
If you can kill Dominus in Merciless Nemesis without any aid from anybody in self-found gear you're in the 0.1% of "gamers"
If you can get to 85+ in HC or standard, level multiple characters on a single account, and spend money on this game, you're in the 0.001%
If you actually want this game to fry your masterboot record on death, demand all the enemies in this game spit instant death corrupting blood lava at you, and can finish a race in the top ten, you're in the 0.00000000001% of "gamers"

GGG has to cast a wide net to catch any of these mythical people. And as a result, a majority of people who pick up this game will never understand it, never make it past level 5, and never care what they missed by giving up or leaving so early. They will be more than content playing Minecraft for the next decade. And guess what? That's fine. We shouldn't try to change the game for them -- and GGG hasn't.

GGG can add what it can with its limited resources, to try and ease these players into the game, but that's it. That's all they need to do. CB made a lot of money for them and if GGG can address this core group of consumers continually (not necessarily the same actual group of people, the idea is to lure these same types of people into playing PoE through the f2p mechanic), I fail to see the issue.

Eventually, the core players will grow tired of buying stash tabs and GGG may realize that perhaps cosmetics aren't the right approach (I think account features are in stronger demand right now), but until then, things seem to be going fine for them.

Yes, we'll see shitty troll threads on the forums like this were Riot Games and we'll have streamers like Kripp come and go and yes other stupid shit will happen because this is a f2p game, but you can't have your cake and eat it too. Walled Gardens just don't work unless you're Blizzard or Apple. Need it be pointed out the comparison between HoN and LoL?

The moment they try to adapt to this "low retention rate" issue is when the game dies. The game will just get streamlined -- you'll see easy respecs, super powerful "legendary" uniques, and other stupid shit like that. A similar death can be seen in the history of SWG.

tl;dr? GGG is making a niche game, they never wanted killer profits. But, to sell a niche game, you still need to market it to a broad audience.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

RMT is a problem in all online arpgs. Don't think I can say much else there.

This is a logical fallacy. Every online game has RMT is there is an online economy. Games like PoE have much larger issues with RMT compared to other games that aren't so grind without reward centric

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deteego wrote:

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SL4Y3R wrote:

RMT is a problem in all online arpgs. Don't think I can say much else there.

This is a logical fallacy. Every online game has RMT is there is an online economy. Games like PoE have much larger issues with RMT compared to other games that aren't so grind without reward centric

How can we know RMT is really a problem with PoE? All evidence we have of it being a big issue is anecdotal.

If it is an issue, GGG would know, they'd have data to suggest it, but without their insight, any accusation of RMT being a problem is likely to be overblown by the fucking fact everyone likes to complain about how they aren't getting Kaom's to drop every night. Or they just can't understand how so-and-so got so rich (hint, he probably played the game more than you).

I've also noticed that a lot of people who complain about RMT being a problem suggest GGG should just make it "legal" via the cash shop. lol, it sounds to me like a lot of these lazy complainers are just guilty of being RMTers and don't want to be banned doing it; anybody with a serious investment in this game would never even suggest such a thing.

Fan boys at their best^^. This game isn't that good TBH, and there are many problems that put people off right at the start. Has nothing to do with today's gaming population.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

People who pay more should logically expect more, demand more. In the Real World, that's how it works, like or not. It's only in this weird reflection of reality that those who pay more for the same product may be more satisfied than those who pay *nothing* for it.

It's a donation, though, not a payment for services. I've actually seen A LOT more supporters complaining as of late, but many have gone so far as to remove/hide their supporter tags.


To address OP - I think there are two kinds of people leaving. Those that never completely fall for the game, and those that do and just eventually get burnt out. I'm starting to get the burnt out feeling myself, and a lot of my friendlist is as well. Many are trying new games. Will they return to this one at a later date? I have no idea, I suppose it will depend on the ability of the new games they try to retain them.

You can invest so much time into this game, and just get dicked over by rng repeatedly, to the point that it just starts feeling like work. It can also go the other way and rng can shine on you. I personally feel like it is too much RNG, but as I've been told time and time again, perhaps it's just not the game for me.