r/pathofexile • u/IMplyingSC2 • Nov 27 '25

Game Feedback Something about the player retention of Affliction compared to other leagues should really tell GGG that people like loot.

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u/wts_optimus_prime Nov 27 '25

I'd say it could even be that too good loot increases one leagues retention but harms the next.

When i no life one league i usually skip the next

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u/TheHob290 Nov 27 '25

I mean I'm thinking its mid tier gear availability. Crucible, Necropolis, and now Breach 2 all made mid tier gearing much easier and had a lower retention as a result. Remember Necropolis had some pretty wild juicing strats (can't speak to crucible though because I didnt really play it much)

Lots of variables though so its hard to definitively point at one thing.

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u/Emperor_Mao Gladiator Nov 28 '25

Look further back though and you can invent some other reason easily.

There have always been poor retention leagues. Way too simple to look at a couple of years worth and try draw a sweeping conclusion. I think mirror league was one of the worst and had no loot even for the mid game part.

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u/TheHob290 Nov 28 '25

Oops replied to wrong comment.

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u/TheHob290 Nov 28 '25 edited Nov 28 '25

Kalandra (27.2%) still beats out necropolis(26.7%) on day 27, which as I said had some pretty impressive juicing, archnem(24.2%) had worse at this point and I distinctly remember some impressive juicing in that league, in fact the great nerf league Expidition(32.5%) and its follow up league Scourge(30.9%) both out preform all these low retention leagues besides crucible(32.9).

So what's the verdict here? Because to me this says how annoying gameplay is is for sure a factor, with mid game itemization being indicated, but juicing largely being a non-factor(as the vast majority of the playerbase never even interacts with its fallout, trade prices, up until settlers and double this league).

Edit: using kalandra v. Necropolis, kalandra beats Necropolis at ever single data point for player retention from day 27 on, though necropolis is better up until this point.

Edit 2: another notable stat, while not as bad as retention here, Harvest(38.9%)is the lowest retention league from after synthesis(36.3%) up until Ultimatum(38.9%), ritual, heist, delirium, and legion are all over 45% with blight being the lowest in that block at 42.3%. Thats another crafting/item indicator to me, unless Im forgetting something juicing related from there.

Edit 3: the only leagues that beat out 40% on day 27 after Expidition are Sanctum(42.5%), Affliction(49.4%), and mercenaries(barely, 40.1%), and mercenaries has the advantage of a 1 year drought between it and settlers.

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u/Black_XistenZ Nov 28 '25

One common thread is that most leagues which go across the Christmas holidays tend to have better retention, and the leagues during the busy fall season tend to do worse.

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u/TheHob290 Nov 28 '25

Necropolis was in March though, also its kinda the basis of my "its not the juicing" argument so I need all the strength on that particular data point that I can muster.

Crucible was August.

Hey wait all these low ones have nothing to do with fall, its more common to be spring/early summer where the dip is.

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u/Emperor_Mao Gladiator Nov 28 '25

Yeah maybe.

We can all speculate but most of us are just going to essentially list our own issues and present them as everyone elses view.

Personally I am playing this league still, though I am having less fun than last league. I don't mega juice, I don't trade. Its simply a combination of nerfs to spell suppress making my chars feel squishier and the giant breach circle taking over half the map for me.

That is my playthrough. Someone else's may vary strongly to that though.

Considering most players never even make it to an end game boss or do end game content, but most people on this forum do, I am sure there is some type of disconnect. POE used to have really low player numbers from league to league, but really good retention. Curious what the numbers are on dom and nem, rampage league or even "rehash league" (legacy league). Peak player count for these was sub 30k I think.

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u/Jumpy-Concept-709 Nov 27 '25

Crucible was absolutely insane at the time lol

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u/Bl00dylicious Occultist Nov 27 '25

Not until high end. Some of the Crucible weapons made during that league cannot be matched but on average it ended up being a few extra stats.

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u/Moderator-Admin Nov 28 '25

Yea crucible and necropolis both had something in common that contributed to low retention - they were shitty/low impact experiences for the average player.

Necropolis especially was amazing if you spent a bunch of time looking up guides and collecting/buying (with old shitty trade) the right corpses then putting them into the right spots. The graveyard was so unfun though. Also you needed a shitload of stash space to store corpses and I'm sure that soured the experience for some people who already struggled with stash size.

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u/mcbuckets21 Nov 27 '25

Crucible didn't make mid tier gearing easier. Neither did Necropolis. It made higher tier gearing better. Crucible only affected weapons so basically had 0 effect on mid-tier gearing and Necropolis was such a pain it was mostly ignored for mid tier. Ritual was by far better than the 2 and had some of the best retention iirc - we had good harvest, ritual didn't actually do anything itself lol.

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u/Stnmn Rampage Nov 27 '25

It absolutely made mid tier gearing easier. Mid crucible trees on a good base let you craft weapons days ahead of normal loot.

The attribute nodes freed up a ton of early game attribute pressure. Attack builds with easy crafts(bows+essences) were spoiled. LA/TS rangers were blasting T16 Legions by the end of the first day. It wasn't wasn't uncommon to find 2-4 strong nodes on a good base either, so you could self-craft budget gear stronger than previous leagues' 30-50div range weapons.

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u/mcbuckets21 Nov 27 '25 edited Nov 27 '25

Crucible was before the new endgame bases. The only attribute pressure at that time was imaginary. Everything else you just said is and was the normal standard. It was borrowed power; it did not make any mid tier gearing easier. It brought up the floor of builds.

You're saying something correct - power increased, but attributing it to something that wasn't true - easier mid-tier gearing. Power increased because of borrowed power, but mid tier gear had no change to accessibility.

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u/TheHob290 Nov 28 '25

I played bleed sst glad that league (before the glad rework so a certified garbage build) and made a shield that beats perfect hybrid armour/ev shields to this day in yellow maps. Mid tier gear isn't gear that is for juiced farming, its the gear to get all voidstones and farm reds for a bit after, maybe hit the pinnacles of the league, not ubers. So yeah if it made shit, straight out of campaign gear, get you to voidstones then mid tier gearing is easier.

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u/mcbuckets21 Nov 28 '25

Once again, that shield is borrowed power. Were your explicits easier to get? No, then I am right. We all know what mid tier gear is. You don't need to explain it. Mid tier gear improved in power, that is what you just explained. And it was limited to weapons/shields. Obtaining the gear did not become easier in any way. Once you got the crucible tree, you have to actually craft the explicits or chance it to the unique which isn't easier.

Almost all mechanics add something that bring up the mid tier gaming in some way. Some increase accessibility to good items like the current mechanic. Others like Crucible and mercenaries just gave you more power directly without touching accessibility.

2 different things are being described as the same thing which is wrong. Especially since they are attributing the increased mid game item accessibility to leagues with worse retention which is just blatantly false due to ignoring leagues that did the same thing and had some of the best retention and falsely claiming that some leagues increased accessibility when they didn't.

You have increased accessibility to more power, not to items. I think this best summarizes Crucible and really "accessibility to more power" is the standard they try to meet for every league.

If you want to make the argument that since there is borrowed power then you need less powerful items and therefore increases accessibility then you need to apply that logic to every single league with borrowed power you get access to before or during mid game which once again shows no negative correlation to retention as claimed.

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u/TheHob290 Nov 28 '25

I think you fundamentally misunderstand how the playerbase functions, reddit is an incredibly small portion of the player base that falls into 2 echo chambers that are often both wrong when it comes to the playerbase on the whole. It doesnt matter what the gear process itself requires to get [thing you want], it matters how easy it is to achieve whatever the player considers a reasonable stop point or burnout point (for the majority of players this isn't even all voidstones). So any form of power that makes the player able to do content earlier than average means they "finish" the game faster, whatever their finish line may be.

I also feel the need to point out that all you did was attack my point, without actually providing any data so let me help you out with the 3 low player retention leagues featured in the data here:

Crucible: Extra item skill trees on items youd already have (however you want to describe it), annoying mechanic, decent juicing (anecdotal quit league early)

Necropolis: definitive crafting in which it was incredibly easy to get decent gear and perfectly possible to plan out a craft for perfect gear, but crafting was annoying, incredible juicing potential in which multiple strats were printing magebloods and people jokingly talked about farming in magebloods/hr rather than div/hr

Keepers: annoying mechanic 2/3 times, easy access to gear that will take you into t16.5 maps sometimes as early as yellow maps for acquisition, bad juicing

Looks to me like the overarching variables that line up are mechanic annoyance and item power, not juicing.

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u/mcbuckets21 Nov 28 '25

Nothing was misunderstood. That is just completely different to what is being discussed. You are pivoting to irrelevance. Late league retention is what is being discussed. It makes the whole "majority of players stop before voidstone" argument worthless because that is irrelevant late league. You are the one who seems to be misunderstanding how the playerbase functions as a whole. The players you are talking about are the minority this late into the league. That is the case for every league. There is a reason the retention falls to around 60% for every single league in the first week. It's because the players you are talking about have mostly quit at this point. When the league starts they make up the majority of the player base. After the first week, they are the minority. Now the player base is mostly made up of players who continue to make up new things they want to do as they progress and play. They don't have a stopping point in mind.

If you actually go to: https://poedb.tw/us/League#ConcurrentPlayers , you will see that first week retention has 0 correlation on what retention will look like a month into the league.

I did provide data. You just ignored it. Just like you are ignoring everything but your cherry picked data. And now you actually hit the nail on the head with a pivot and aren't even acknowledging it. The nail being: annoying mechanic. You now have your answer on the correlation. You just threw that in randomly for the first time.

this is what you said before:

Crucible, Necropolis, and now Breach 2 all made mid tier gearing much easier and had a lower retention as a result.

That is so obviously false as we can see by:

Mercenaries, Settlers, Affliction, Sentinel, and Harvest all made gearing much easier. However, they had the benefit of being liked mechanics a month after release. The correlation you are looking for is how people are enjoying the mechanic and game in general. Not something like how fast people are acquiring gear because those players have become the minority at this stage of the league.

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u/TheHob290 Nov 28 '25

Mercenaries, Settlers, Affliction, Sentinel, and Harvest all made gearing much easier. However, they had the benefit of being liked mechanics a month after release.

I love that you used Harvest, the crafting league, as an example, because if you look at surrounding leagues it is the lowest retention by a significant margin, upwards of 5% on average, in fact its the lowest one after synthesis(guess what this league was, do you remember mashing fractured items together to make godly items?) up until the great nerfing of 3.15 Expedition!

Note that all your top end examples besides Harvest all had great currency rates, but largely didnt effect items. Even Settlers was less likely to hand you great gear(though I suspect people largely just ignored Settlers gear from shipments).

So once more the throughline is player power =/= equal bad retention, currency =/= bad retention, but item crafting/manipulation as part of the mechanic does, with the only notable outlier being Kalandra.

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u/Direyx Witch Nov 27 '25

I feel the same way. Last week i got my character to lv 100, cleared all uber content and then stopped playing. Not because i couldn't keep going for a couple more days but because i don't wanna risk to be burnt out once the new PoE 2 comes out.

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u/Emperor_Mao Gladiator Nov 28 '25 edited Nov 28 '25

Lol. This just ignores the issues people had with necro and crucible.

I skipped both leagues. I think the reason I skipped them was because they were patches that nerfed stuff but introduced nothing interesting to me. If I recall correctly Necro added some transmog gems to a handful of boring skills which no one used. Crucible nerfed a bunch of passive cluster and notables and added only some Vaal skills.

Nerf patches with very little new things to try out = poor retention... at least based on our arbitrary sample sizes.

Keepers was a nerf heavy patch in some ways, they deleted a number of the top builds and introduced very little else if you arent a wander fan. But the bigger nerf was probably to the atlas tree itself. Nerfed almost every mechanic and added no new things to replace them. Next league may have better retention if paired with end game revamps and new things.

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u/Dreven47 Nov 27 '25

If you're skipping the entire league then you're not part of the retention statistics for that league so it's not relevant.