Side by side graph showing player retention on Steam for the last 3 leagues

Yes, it's a terrible visualization, but for now it's the only one someone's made. This post is probably a response to an earlier thread on Reddit that had claimed that Legion had the highest one-month player retention of any league, which got heavily disputed (and even spawned separate threads just to highlight the claim as wrong). Anyway neither of them actually provided any data. On this one, personally I'd say it's worth noting that Betrayal came with the return of multiple other leagues.

If someone posts a better visualization, or one that covers more than just the last 3 leagues, I'll post a thread with that. Though if this thread takes off, I might just update it instead.

But anyway, keep in mind that the the topic is what kind of leagues improve player retention, NOT whether in your opinion Legion is the 'best' or 'worst' league. And, if you like, whether player retention is even the right metric to care about (preferably while trying to take the PoV of the developer i.e. GGG). So...discuss?

Edit:- Better guide, with numbers! Thanks to RPGlitch.



Credit:- https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/cewqz8/side_by_side_chart_showing_player_retention_on/

The data showed by Gaardean was a lot clearer.

He took the steam data, found here.

Either way, the take away message was that Legion had the 3rd worst retention.

Only Synthesis and Incursion were worst.

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RPGlitch wrote:

The data showed by Gaardean was a lot clearer.

He took the steam data, found here.

Either way, the take away message was that Legion had the 3rd worst retention.

Only Synthesis and Incursion were worst.

this is interesting if actually true, considering I've seen the servers always busy and every single town with always people, 820's very active and globals well always global.

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RPGlitch wrote:

The data showed by Gaardean was a lot clearer.

He took the steam data, found here.

Either way, the take away message was that Legion had the 3rd worst retention.

Only Synthesis and Incursion were worst.

Nice find, thanks. Added. :)

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RPGlitch wrote:

Either way, the take away message was that Legion had the 3rd worst retention.

I'm not really surprised.

1. The core league mechanic strongly favours a very narrow subset of builds so the motivation to make several is most likely way lower than in other leagues.
A friend of mine played a non-cyclone melee build and mid-league he didn't even have one complete emblem while I (ED/Cont. Trickster) had 12 including one Maraketh. I do play a bit more than he does but the difference is still huge. He then reskilled and switched to Cyclone.

2. The endgame content is even worse because unless you got a HH, the emblem encounters are rather unrewarding in comparison. I mean, yeah, you can still do them without but it's really not something to look forward to.
The encounter itself is boring and the loot you can get there is more than an order of magnitude less than what you collect from the regular legion encounters you need to do to get the emblems in the first place.

3. Timeless jewels are an interesting idea but their usefulness is highly RNG dependent. You can have 10 of them drop but none of them are useful for your build(s) and selling them probably isn't really profitable either. Who's paying a lot of chaos or even exalts for an item you probably can't even use?
So I guess not many players are motivated to farm those.

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C4Guy wrote:

The encounter itself is boring and the loot you can get there is more than an order of magnitude less than what you collect from the regular legion encounters you need to do to get the emblems in the first place.

Tbf, Betrayal has this problem too (Mastermind versus regular Safehouses). In fact, probably even more so. Come to think of it, so does Incursion (Omnitect versus Temple rooms), and Bestiary (First Ones versus beastcrafting), and Delve (regular Delving versus Delve bosses)...and even Synthesis (reward nodes versus boss memories), albeit Synthesis boss rewards got much better later in the league (plus the league itself rewarded high level play in general).

GGG seems to pretty often make endgame encounters questionable in worth (though partly this is also an effect of the games' market and how it values the stuff from them). They seem mostly content so long as players are playing in maps (so not Quarry or Harbor Bridge farming).

That said, I think that's at least partly because they expect players to value the intrinsic experience of fighting an endgame challenge more, while most posts about the worth of said encounter tend to narrowly focus on just the pure loot aspect. Even in that vein though, Legion is especially bad - the endgame fight is a time trial that isn't designed to be enjoyed as a mechanical challenge whatsoever (contrast it with, for instance, Delve's endgame bosses).

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Exile009 wrote:

Tbf, Betrayal has this problem too (Mastermind versus regular Safehouses). In fact, probably even more so. Come to think of it, so does Incursion (Omnitect versus Temple rooms), and Bestiary (First Ones versus beastcrafting), and Delve (regular Delving versus Delve bosses)...and even Synthesis (reward nodes versus boss memories), albeit Synthesis boss rewards got much better later in the league (plus the league itself rewarded high level play in general).

I haven't played until Betrayal halftime , but yeah, that ssems to be true.

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Exile009 wrote:

That said, I think that's at least partly because they expect players to value the intrinsic experience of fighting an endgame challenge more, while most posts about the worth of said encounter tend to narrowly focus on just the pure loot aspect.

If that's really their motivation they need to get a lot better in designing boss fights, because so far most of them certainly aren't good enough. Besides that, good loot and good fun aren't mutually exclusive and I'd even say that once a player beat the boss once, proper loot is the only motivation to come back if the obstacles to get to this boss are higher than just "popping in a map".

For example: I'm currently struggling to get my 2nd red tier Elder to spawn because it always gets cut up by the Shaper at chokepoints. It's very tedious and altough I really enjoy the fight and the Elder sometimes drops good stuff, I lost all my motivation to pursue this endeavor any further because I'm fed up running low tier reds trying to get that c*nt to spread far enough.

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Exile009 wrote:

Even in that vein though, Legion is especially bad - the endgame fight is a time trial that isn't designed to be enjoyed as a mechanical challenge whatsoever (contrast it with, for instance, Delve's endgame bosses).

100% agree, although it is at least possible to get to those fights in a reasonable amount of time. The mechanics to get the Cortex or Delve bosses to spawn are/were retarded in comparison.

Time of year might be a factor as well. It's summer. Would be interesting to compare it to other summer leagues.

My theory is simple though: You don't have much sense of progress in the league. You collect shards to open battles. Once you've done that, there's not much else to do except do it faster. That's not a criticism. You're using the wrong metric to evaluate the league. The only metric that has any meaning to GGG is financial support. With the influx of new players from Korea, this is probably going down in the books as a success.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

My theory is simple though: You don't have much sense of progress in the league. You collect shards to open battles. Once you've done that, there's not much else to do except do it faster. That's not a criticism. You're using the wrong metric to evaluate the league. The only metric that has any meaning to GGG is financial support. With the influx of new players from Korea, this is probably going down in the books as a success.

Yeah, but even a bad analyst would tell you that that's not comparing apples with apples then give you a like for like analysis with past leagues (including those at the same time of year as you say). Releasing in Korea will presumably have been a commercial success, but that's an entirely different kettle of fish compared to whether Legion (in not-Korea) was a success.

So why do we need those graphs?

Just to predict death to poe once again or what?