From 148k to 66k in two weeks

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Aldora_the_Summoner wrote:

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rekikyo wrote:

Once again.

This is the first league directly competing for players with D2R (Diablo reboot).

It's very likely that no more or less players are offended by Scourge than any other league; It's more likely that the same players who always leave, left, and the players who see PoE and Diablo as interchangeable went with them.

After the Nostalgia wears off, It's likely the D2R base will be at least mostly back for new content or late season.

Diablo 2 Resurrected launched on PC on Sep 23 while Scourge launched 22 Oct, a full month apart.

We've previously gone over the data in this thread demonstrating that the launch numbers were quite good, but the abandonment rate is significantly higher than the typical league in the recent past.

It's quite likely that many people that play PoE have also played D2R so it might be reasonable to suggest that launch numbers were possibly supressed due to competition with D2R retaining customers that might otherwise have played Scourge.

I think it unlikely that a significant volume of players who started Scourge and enjoyed it were suddenly swayed to go back to D2R after only a few days. It does not seem logical that players that perceive the games to be interchangeable would have abandoned Scourge so quickly unless perhaps they found the game to be unrewarding and not engaging.

I get that there's an obvious hard challenge player base that are delighted with the current direction of the game, and that's not just the league mechanic but the general game mechanic changes. But it's also very clear that the more easy going player are massively disengaged by the changes from 3.15 and 3.16. It's not just about the league, it's also about the overall changes to the core game play.

I do agree that D2R probably has a limited lifespan and nostalgia products tend to flare brightly and dim quickly, but I don't think that D2R going away will necessarily enhance PoE's current prospects with the large number of players that have recently not found the gameplay to be enjoyable.

What did you miss about "directly competing?"
D2R never directly competed with Expedition, because Expedition was mature when D2R launched.

In a bubble, POE players who have no other real choices for the kind of play we receive here, go through cyclical interest. However, this is the first league in several years that POE has had a direct competitor for their attention at its onset.

I don't care about the release date. It has no bearing whatsoever on player behaviors. What matters is that like with every league, people came back for their 2-3 day reunion, and then left, like always. However, unlike several recent leagues, they had a choice to go back to if it didn't work out. Of course the drop is going to be steeper.

Stop reading into numbers what you can't actually collaborate. D2R players came from somewhere. They didn't just materialize out of the nongaming community.

Whether someone 'likes' a content has no bearing on their behaviors at this point. They are both addicted to POE and nostalgic over D2R. It has nothing to do with "like." It has to do with comfort. People come back when something comforting or addicting offers new replay. This is why people can easily play D2R for the remainder of Expedition, come back to POE, and then leave immediately after. They're basically choosing which security blanket they want to cover up with.

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ffogell wrote:

D2R is in no way responsible for retention problem or affect it in anyway.

GGG is good enough to put the nail in the coffin by themselve. Even with Chris round table, this league had the same problems and pattern as the other release... nothing changed.

You mean the problem where more and more players come back to try every new league before ultimately abandoning it? That sounds like a good problem to have.

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Tsokushin wrote:

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ffogell wrote:

D2R is in no way responsible for retention problem or affect it in anyway.

GGG is good enough to put the nail in the coffin by themselve. Even with Chris round table, this league had the same problems and pattern as the other release... nothing changed.

Yes, although I disagree that the reason is that nothing changed. I say the reason is that Chris' "vision" either isn't good or isn't popular. Either way, the casual playerbase does not agree with it and are promptly leaving.

As for the elites, most of them will go with the casuals as well if this continues. Simply for 2 reasons:
1) An economy cannot be supported without actual participants. You can look down on the average and lower end player all you want, but they support and facilitate many of the things that allow the upper tier to do what they do.

2) Those that are elite, know they're elite, and want you to also know that they're elite cannot be left alone. Nobody wants to be king of a pile of dirt. To throw Chris' erroneous logic back at him, what does it mean to be elite if you have no casuals? Even GGG in it's heyday understood this with the Izaro line "Pity the emperor who sits alone on the throne".

In any case, it will be an amusing spectacle to see what happens next.

"Chris Vision" has been driving this game for 6 years to a point where it's survived, thrived, increased profits and users cyclically, so I kind of find it funny that when you disagree with it, it's suddenly bad vision.

And no. My pro friend base is very happy with this league. They are all logging in daily trying to make the best gear they can.

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ffogell wrote:

D2R is in no way responsible for retention problem or affect it in anyway.

GGG is good enough to put the nail in the coffin by themselve. Even with Chris round table, this league had the same problems and pattern as the other release... nothing changed.

I think it's actually the other way around - Chris wasn't participating much in PoE, and it grew to its pinnaccle, the 3.13. Then Chris got back behind the wheel and, well, here we are.

His vision was great in 2013, okay in 2017, but a whole lot of people don't find it at all appealing in 2021.

Also, the D2R thought amuses me in the light of Lost Ark... if a dead-on-arrival, twenty years old game like D2R has caused player retention problems to PoE, then Lost Ark is a grim reaper incarnate for PoE's numbers.

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Xyel wrote:

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ffogell wrote:

D2R is in no way responsible for retention problem or affect it in anyway.

GGG is good enough to put the nail in the coffin by themselve. Even with Chris round table, this league had the same problems and pattern as the other release... nothing changed.

I think it's actually the other way around - Chris wasn't participating much in PoE, and it grew to its pinnaccle, the 3.13. Then Chris got back behind the wheel and, well, here we are.

His vision was great in 2013, okay in 2017, but a whole lot of people don't find it at all appealing in 2021.

Also, the D2R thought amuses me in the light of Lost Ark... if a dead-on-arrival, twenty years old game like D2R has caused player retention problems to PoE, then Lost Ark is a grim reaper incarnate for PoE's numbers.

Yeah I think you are into something hehhe, I mean every league after league they increased powercreep and I was like WTF... and all of a sudden boom its like gameover...

Anyway the league is supposed to end in january, It's 1000% garanteed there will be an event during christmas , I mean you can't miss out on the $$$$$.

Also events are super chill and generaly balanced because they use existing content so its like super chill christmas holidays for all GGG staff

In the end its a win win !!!

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rekikyo wrote:

"Chris Vision" has been driving this game for 6 years to a point where it's survived, thrived, increased profits and users cyclically, so I kind of find it funny that when you disagree with it, it's suddenly bad vision.

And no. My pro friend base is very happy with this league. They are all logging in daily trying to make the best gear they can.

Imo the current problem is not the new direction, its actually healthy for the game. For the first time in PoE history beside playing hardcore defenses actually matter. In every other similar modern ARPG defenses are a big part of the build making process. In PoE that didnt really exist in softcore.

The current problem is that for a lot of builds those better defenses arent really easy to access which results in a very small and stale number of good builds. For example most dot builds went down to something like 1,5 mil dps max. Totaly acceptable number but you need to give them better defenses because those fights take longer. What I wanted to say with that example is that the typical balancing in arpg's that give slower builds better defenses doesnt work in PoE, access to all the different desireable things like: clear, dps, speed, tankyness are randomly distributed and not in any way balanced. I hope GGG manages to fix those problems and we are just in a weird transition phase right now.

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rekikyo wrote:

What did you miss about "directly competing?"
D2R never directly competed with Expedition, because Expedition was mature when D2R launched.

In a bubble, POE players who have no other real choices for the kind of play we receive here, go through cyclical interest. However, this is the first league in several years that POE has had a direct competitor for their attention at its onset.

I don't care about the release date. It has no bearing whatsoever on player behaviors. What matters is that like with every league, people came back for their 2-3 day reunion, and then left, like always. However, unlike several recent leagues, they had a choice to go back to if it didn't work out. Of course the drop is going to be steeper.

Stop reading into numbers what you can't actually collaborate. D2R players came from somewhere. They didn't just materialize out of the nongaming community.

Whether someone 'likes' a content has no bearing on their behaviors at this point. They are both addicted to POE and nostalgic over D2R. It has nothing to do with "like." It has to do with comfort. People come back when something comforting or addicting offers new replay. This is why people can easily play D2R for the remainder of Expedition, come back to POE, and then leave immediately after. They're basically choosing which security blanket they want to cover up with.

Could you point out at what point I mentioned Expedition in my response? It wasn't even a factor in what I wrote.

Your contention was that the typical behaviour players tried and left within a few days as they always do, and that a proportion of other players were lured away by D2R, supposedly accounting for the larger than usual abandonment rate. Or do you disagree that the abandonment rate was much steeper than usual?

If that's true though, then what you're saying is that they tried PoE and didn't enjoy it in comparison to a 20 year old game with a new paint job. If so, that's a rather poor indictment on PoE.

"D2R players came from somewhere. They didn't just materialize out of the nongaming community". So when the very first computer game was released, where did players come from? Are you saying the gaming community is a set volume and we can never gather new players, we can only ever move from one game to another?

You might be right that players are addicted to PoE and just had to come back for their next hit, but the fact they didn't stay is a huge indictment, after all, they're addicted and shouldn't be able to escape.

The release date of D2R is quite relevant in this discussion. It indicates that nostalgia players (both those that regularly play PoE and those that don't) had a full month of game play with D2R. What that should mean is that those players were a good target for GGG to potentially lure to PoE and convert them into paying customers.

Based on the increase of league starters in 3.16 vs 3.15 it's reasonable to conclude that some of this did happen. The press from streamers was more favourable so potentially we did see PoE succeed in this element. The data is irrefutable however that players did not stay with the game for long in comparison to previous leagues.

Consumer behaviour is well studied and it's clear that the longer someone engages with your product, the more likely they are to make a purchase. There's always variations to this but it holds true in general. So logically, players abandoning the game quickly is not a good health indicator.

You seem to want to defend the game by using D2R but can't accept the negative aspects of that application. You stated that I should "Stop reading into numbers what you can't actually corroborate" but you seem free to offer theories that are not backed by data. I might offer theories but they are backed by data, logic and reasonable inference.

In closing, I think your biggest error would appear to be the assumption that all players are similar and are influenced by the same factors. My contention is that the player base for PoE has several distinct segments and have clearly stated that one of those segments is delighted by the current version of PoE. My primary assertion is that another quite large segment is not enjoying the current state of the game which explains the high abandonment rate.

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rekikyo wrote:

"Chris Vision" has been driving this game for 6 years to a point where it's survived, thrived, increased profits and users cyclically, so I kind of find it funny that when you disagree with it, it's suddenly bad vision.

And no. My pro friend base is very happy with this league. They are all logging in daily trying to make the best gear they can.

If "Chris' Vision" has been driving this game for 6 years, tell me, why is it the "current vision" is at odds with the changes every patch before this? Slowing down power creep, lessening dps of the players, yet nearly every league prior to this, and including this one, had hard dps timers and promoted clear speed in every way?

You should've been around here long enough to remember every post and every complaint in this game. Chris' vision of rng gated nonsense is not liked, and people played the game despite that. Do you even remember all the threads complaining about 6L RNG? Do you even remember the complaints about RNG boss encounters? Like when Breach dropped and nobody could find chayula?
Or map drop complaints from 2.4 till about 3.10?
Or finding trials of ascendancy in SSF? They only recently fixed that.
Or room RNG in the original incursion league?

No, but the biggest thing is simply the existence of the harvest manifesto and the community backlash. I don't know how you're going to sweep that under the rug of Chris' vision being completely disliked.

It's funny that ever since then, things have been going bad.

Imagine foaming at the mouth over a video game.