What's something the Devs could do to help with Player Retention?

I suppose I'll chime in on this topic since I have been playing since 2013. This league is a perfect example of what makes people stop playing and it is not what many of the commenters have said. This is a very powerful league with the easy gear and the amazing Grafts. and although the ground drops are not as good as before you can still make a ton of loot by playing the Atlas Passive game - an absolute ton. It is just not much fun to interact with. That's it. It is not much fun and those darn hive walls are annoying and ugly.

The Temple system in 0.4 feels fundamentally broken due to an ongoing bug.

When a core league mechanic cannot be trusted, players stop engaging — and many are already leaving the league because of this.

This urgently needs acknowledgement and a fix.

Retention is self-contradictory.

The more player plays a league, the more theyre bored of the game, the less tendency for them to comeback for the next league.

That's why PoE have been working as a hype-cycle business model for the last 10 years or so.

Hype and novelty brings people back, they play for a bit, then wait until the next hype and novelty of the next league.

GGG would not want "retention" as a player plays 2000 hours a league then burnt out for the next 2 years.

Game is based on this things:

1. Build character.

2. Get loot.

3. Clear content.

Loot and content is not endless. Even things like Delve is just repeating itself. People need something fresh to play again and again.

And here come's builds. But making builds in this game sucks. You need to know tree, need to know items, mods, gems, yada yada. You need to use like 3 sites at minimum and 3d party tool for planning.

You see the problem? People just need more available tools in game to plan and execute their builds. After that more people would try their own builds and rely less on streamers.

What you're wanting is probably hard to sharpshoot as a developer. They want people in temporary leagues rather than permanent -- that's at least my read considering how they treat temporary leagues versus the permanent league. So assuming that as true, now you want to make a game that is fun for short bursts so that the temporary league is the focus. Now you want to make it so that 2-4 months is the goal, but not much longer because then ending the league might create tension and push people away or into the permanent league.

Now add that there is a new kid on the block that they want people to play that comes out halfway through the league (POE2) and it appears that will be the cycle moving forward. Now their incentive is to get people playing POE1 for no more than 2 months and then have them switch to POE2.

I think there are people that enjoy how hot the economy burns for the first few weeks and once that inevitably cools, they leave. That triggers a chain reaction of people seeing less people, less action in the economy, and less friends to play with causing a feedback loop of people leaving.

Because of the nature of economics and supply and demand, there isn't a great way to avoid the initial hot burn followed by cooling to a simmer. So that particular loop seems unavoidable.

If there was a way to keep people engaged fully for 3-4 months, I think GGG would have found it since they have the longest tenure in this genre of actively developing a very successful specific game (POE1).

I should also caveat that I think it's a necessity to have leagues that reset to have high return of players; otherwise people just get everything they could ever want and then just move on to new games.

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nagisanzeninzz#2697 wrote:

Retention is self-contradictory.

The more player plays a league, the more theyre bored of the game, the less tendency for them to comeback for the next league.

That's why PoE have been working as a hype-cycle business model for the last 10 years or so.

Hype and novelty brings people back, they play for a bit, then wait until the next hype and novelty of the next league.

GGG would not want "retention" as a player plays 2000 hours a league then burnt out for the next 2 years.

You don't understand the concept of live service games. The reason people keep coming back is because they got bored of old content but new content is being released, and they get a chance to start over with a full economy reset.

If retention is too low, players don't spend enough time playing the game and finding things they want to purchase. If people don't play new builds, when will they look for MTX to change their skill effects? If people don't amass items when will they run into storage problems and look for more stash tabs?

You have it completely backwards on that argument. They need retention to monetize the game.

PoE1 and 2 have deliberately - and this is something that the devs have stated themselves on several occasions - focused on and encouraged a strong cyclical pattern of activity. The whole point is that they maximize the amount of players who return at a league start to play the game on a fresh economy.

Their goal hasn't been maximizing player retention during a league. In one interview, one of the main fellas stated, paraphrasing, "we don't care if players stop mid league and go play something else; if anything, that's good"

Far as I can tell, this strategy has been insanely successful as it has helped rocket PoE to the spot of the 2nd or 1st most played isometric ARPG there is, with a large playerbase that comes back every 4, 8, 12 months. Diablo 4 might or might not be ahead, tho D4 also had more visual artists alone working on D4 than GGG has employees in total.

Personally, I think the only real problem is the trade dying down and it would be nice if they did a minor balance pass like 3 weeks into the league, and dropped some tiny content additions 5-6 weeks in. Just to carry over to the next league a bit better. I could definitely see myself playing a league 2 months instead of 1 month if even a couple of builds were buffed from barely viable to mediocre and if even some small improvements or content additions dropped in.

But I don't think it would be a good idea to aim for the league having say, 50% of its players at 2 month mark. That would almost certainly mean fewer players starting afresh in the next league and creating the content and the updates to keep that many players invested through the league is away from developing for the next league.

It is okay for people to go play another game and then come back. A lot of mainstay stable games have thrived off that model. It is hard to dominate people's attention 24/7!

make playing the game rewarding. the nerf of most atlas strategies made 3.27 a complete snooze fest. the league mechanic was boring af as well. if the game is rewarding, i will play until i have a giga character and not just quit after the first few days.