It still means that people don’t want to go further on that curve and want a fresh start instead.
It just means that they’re not willing to put in the effort to make their character progress further.
This happens naturally and is a different limit for everyone.
It depends on engagement with the game, on available time and more.
Someone who has 4 hours a week to play likely won’t put the effort in to grind for 50 hours… very understandable as it would mean playing 12,5 weeks to get an upgrade, that’s a looong looong time.
Someone playing 8 hours a day will do that more likely though.
So personal situation is a big factor.
Also it heavily depends on how progress is achieved. People generally are more willing to work towards a goal gradually, not so much when that goal has no distinct ‘end-line’ to be achieved.
This is the RNG factor mostly. Gamba is nice… until it’s not nice.
If you’ll get an upgrade likely in the next 20 hours but it could also be 500 it means the investment into making that happen is simply less. Sure, it could also drop in 5 minutes, but who knows? That’s why progress bars are a powerful tool in games, like the lovely XP bar slowly filling up, as long as it actually does visibly fill up in a specific timeframe. If you play 5 hours and it seems like nothing has moved that deprives the brain of the feeling of ‘progress’, hence fails to do their job properly. If it fills up repeatedly and fast then that’s also bad since it tends to loose meaning, that’s something companies often struggle with, the proper pacing for their specific audience.
It’s also something EHG struggles with in LE. Overall the game has a good setup, but the devil’s in the details, always. It makes the difference between a ‘good’ game and a ‘masterpiece’ after all.
Also:
This doesn’t uphold.
People don’t inherently ‘want to do stuff again’. That only upholds when a sufficient amount of time has passed (and hence novely returns to a degree) or respectively enough new experiences are possible to be had.
A prime example of how it’s set up purely with the resets are extraction games like ‘Escape from Tarkov’ as examples.
They can’t sustain without it because a good player will gradually get more and more gear there, hence their stash becomes full and they can’t ‘gather’ more value. So the reset as well as changing quests and adding some extra content does change this. A new start, the feeling of being undergeared has been long gone and hence is ‘fresh’ again while also the progression being different enough to warrant a replay for several people.
But… on the counter-side it also pushes people away, especially players which are in the ‘middle’ field. They still have that experience fresh in their mind, haven’t finished content yet and the time is simply up… so restarting is a chore, not a gain for them often.
Over long periods of time this burns people out from the game and they stop playing completely, hence it’s either very good players competing against each other (without anyone to ‘stomp’ on) or campaigns to pull in new fresh players which haven’t gone through that cycle yet. Because if only good players are left then those are suddenly the ones being ‘stomped on’ since their competition is as good as they are likely… and that makes it less fun since the win/loss ratio becomes skewed, making them feel as if they got worse rather then better.
It’s a problem with permanent reset games overall that garnering a solid staying base of players is hard. The same happens to a lesser degree in ARPGs like PoE or LE.
The difference is that there’s a permanent area available though, and commonly also options to improve a character further for a long long time (which is another issue as the ‘end-goal’ is unachievable in LE, but another topic) while sustaining the ‘value’ they’ve acquired by then.
Which makes it kinda important to ensure that value stays and isn’t invalidated, as it ‘catches’ those people which would otherwise leave. That’s what this area is for after all, otherwise you could just remove Legacy and it would be the same.
But… since there’s people - and a non-neglecible amount too - which don’t like progress to be removed having the permanent area is important to raise engagement long-term.
You can do it without… much like you could’ve only permanence… but both don’t do as well as a ‘mixed’ system which caters to a wider variety of players without sacrificing a massive amount. It’s worthwhile.
You just repeated “people don’t want to go further” using much more words
ok, “and want a fresh start in a slightly different environment” to be more accurate. There is still no reason to believe that most players want to continue progression of their character from the previous season instead. Because, as I said earlier, if they would want to progress him further, they would do it instead of waiting for the next league. What doesn’t uphold is that new league makes most of players to want to progress their previous character further instead of starting new one. But I already said all of it earlier, and you didn’t say anything to counter it, just said a lot of words about random things from similar topics, so I guess you have no arguments against it.
Maybe your logic is “I said so many words, hopefully there is something in some of them!” 
Not necessarily. Mostly what it mens is that they look at the time until the season ends and the time they’d have to grind and realize they don’t want to bother anymore with it.
But when a new season starts, if they had the choice, they would still start with that character, because now they have 4 more months into it and because the new mechanic, in theory at least, will help them progress as well.
It’s not that they don’t want to progress the character anymore, but that the limited time available until the end of the season isn’t enough incentive for them to keep grinding, or feels like too much pressure.
Otherwise, according to your logic, they wouldn’t stop playing anyway and would simply make a new character and keep playing and progressing that one up to the point of the first.
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There’s a difference between ‘wanting’ and ‘going along with it’.
If given the choice how would the spread be then?
That’s kinda hard to argue for or against when the situation doesn’t apply, does it not?
Luckily in LE we have a prime example for a showcase given that Legacy and Cycle have the same content currently.
Unluckily… there are no statistics presented which showcase how many actually play Legacy and how many do Cycle.
So I can only speak from the position of someone who’s at least been active at the start of 1.1 and kept a close eye on the MG market in Legacy, seeing a boatload of new listings there which didn’t happen in such a magnitude before, and also are uncommon in PoE’s Standard in comparison.
So I imagine that the number of Legacy players ins LE is substantially higher in percentile then the number of Standard players in PoE.
And given that in PoE you ‘miss out on content’ while that’s not the case in LE I can’t see any other major reason available for that difference in spread.
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It makes some sense and could be true. However, doesn’t look like it’s the case. It looks more like they don’t want to do anything with their old characters after they “finish” them, whatever it means for them. Also true that they don’t want fresh start without new content, but that’s a different topic. My point is that progressing their character further doesn’t excite them anymore, so most of them still would choose a fresh start if they had a choice.
Another counter-argument to it is that if one of even two months wouldn’t be enough to start getting fun from their progression, then that progression is just not fun for them overall. Like, suffering few months only to get some achievement can’t worth it. And if it’s not suffering but enjoyment during those months, then wouldn’t be a problem to do it anyway.
Would be much harder to argue if we already knew the answer though
Thanks for getting back to the topic instead of writing another essay You might be right, if Legacy league is quite active in LE, maybe there are a lot of players who want to progress their character forever. But it might be related to some specifics of LE situation, for example some people could be not sure if they want to play another league and wanted just briefly check new content with old character. Dynamic of the playnumbers that leauge slightly supports such version because there wasn’t sudden increase in playerbase, it slowly increased during couple of weeks as if people weren’t sure if they want to play.
I don’t know if the point is even to progress the character forever. It’s quite likely that they still make new characters. Most likely, they just don’t want to loose their previous progress, meaning accumulated currency, gear in the stash, etc.
Still, we don’t really have data to tell one way or another. We have people like ExSea which are definitely on one side of the issue and we know there are others which are definitely on the other (for example, Ziz has said that a new start is a big part of the fun, regarding PoE2 doing the same LE is doing, and even Aaron starts seasonal characters in LE, even though he later switches to legacy). This is all anecdotal evidence though.
It would help if LE would give us the spread in the playerbase, but until then all we have are “gut feelings” based on our experiences, which are always biased.
Either way, I’m sure EHG (and GGG) have that data on both the spread and what each side spends, and they analyze it to figure out what would be best for their game and income in the long run.
GGG seems to have come to the conclusion that seasonal players are the bulk of their income and thus cater to them. Intuitively this seems to make sense. But only with numbers from the other model (LE’s) can we actually come to a conclusion.
EDIT: Also, as has been discussed in this thread, it doesn’t have to be either/or. There are probably solutions that will appease both sides. And EHG tends to be good at finding those.
Actually yes, probably a lot of players would prefer to keep their currencies. It just would be less appealing for new players to join the game, knowing that they will be behind everyone by years, which could hurt game in the long run. But I agree that a lot of current players probably wouldn’t want economic reset if they had a choice. Almost all new players would want it. And SSF/offline players probably will prefer to play Legacy forever.
So I would say, seasonal resets benefits in getting more players who wants to play in trade league, otherwise legacy works better. And since people can create new characters in any league, everything we discussed about progressing character doesn’t even matter much. It is mostly about economy reset. And restricting players from keeping their currency and playing new content at the same time is a tool to force them give away their advantage before newcomers.