An online game is not based on the number of kids excited about their favorite streamer’s advertising, but rather on the number of people engaged with the game’s content. Settler has less than 28% retention in a month, in fact everything since Ultimatum is either below or very close to 50%. This is ridiculous, if your game doesn’t hold people for 1 month, how can it sell? Unfortunately, just like in PoE, here in LE the devs are much more focused on delivering cheap content to generate momentary hype and less on creating good content capable of entertaining the player and making them come back and repeat the game, with our new characters as a good ARPG should be. Settler had an atypical peak of players on the first day and lost 40% of that in less than 3 days. Of course, this phenomenon is expected nowadays, but the fact is that PoE leagues are getting shorter and more uninteresting. I myself got 36/40 in 4 days and stopped because settler is basically the standard with many nerfs, nerfs that mainly hit the drop to force an uber tentudo, the t17 in poe are today’s GRs are not fun, they are repetitive, you die for nothing but that’s okay because in the end they are easy, only depending on equipment and every drop in the game is confined to them.
Yes, I’m very dishonest. Using the tool that you yourself mentioned, you can see that the current league is way more successful than Ultimatum and that the previous one is just slightly behind.
You could also have seen the same thing just looking at steam charts, but this is just so you don’t deflect.
Because I’m the dishonest one.
Well, to be fair, that depends on how you choose to measure success. Going by absolute numbers, yes. But if we take retention then I definitely wouldn’t call it “way more”, rather “as successful as” (Ultimatum having retained approximately 32.2% of players & Settlers 32.3%, but I can’t really tell how many Ultimatum had due to the rounding, so I’ll go with 50k / 155k).
Statistics don’t lie but liars use statistics.
Fred is merely using numbers to support his argument, which is fair enough, though he’s willfully ignoring the economic side of things as that does rather disagree with his point of view. But sales isn’t everything.
The retention rate is much smaller because Necropolis had a first day with many more players than Ultimatum but the second day was slightly below and remained that way for most of the league. In fact, if you cut off the day 1 outlier, retention rates are very similar.
That is even ignoring the fact that Affliction, Ancestor and Crucible also all did better than Ultimatum.
As you say, statistics don’t lie, but you can twist them in dishonest ways. And Fred seems like the type of person that wants games he doesn’t like to fail (like LE). And he stopped liking PoE after Ultimatum, so he’s digging for things that justify his point of view.
You know… in a totally completely honest and unbiased way.
I’m confused, what does that have to do with either Ultimatum or Settlers?
People can be like that, yes.
He said that Necropolis was the worst league ever for PoE.
But I never mentioned it & you replied to me?
Yeah, I was just expanding on your point about statistics, while also targetting their points.
@Llama8 @DJSamhein
I think the both of you would appreciate my favorite “joke” about statistics. And that being that the statistic of “you’re far more likely to die in a car accident within 1 mile of your house than anywhere else.” leads many people to think “I should move.”
Always think about that when “twisted statistics” (as I call it) comes up.
This guy covers a handful (including the car accident one) in a really funny way.
My favourite statistics joke has always been:
16% (or whichever number) of road accidents are caused by drunk drivers. Which means that 84% are caused by sober people, so it’s safer to drive drunk.
Minus 16%? So sober people actually cause 116% of driving accidents?
That was actually supposed to simply be a paragraph (?) sign. You know, like:
-This is something being said.
-This is something else.
I didn’t notice it made it look like that.
Ah. In English we use carriage return (aka enter on modern keyboards) for that. It’s much easier than trying to remember the ASCII symbol for that.
We also use carriage return. I don’t think I explained myself well. My intent was to format the paragraph like a list of examples. And that is because I started out thinking of a couple, which I would put in as:
-16%… etc
-another joke about statistics
But in the end I opted to use only one and thus confusion arose.
To be fair, I’m pretty much exhausted these days (almost on vacation, though) so I’m not always thinking straight 
You did, I was just being facetious. And bored.
I would love to elaborate on the thought based on sales but Tensent is the Chinese government and knows how to hide its numbers well and since it took over GGG it is almost impossible to have realistic numbers. But I think we can agree that the more time a player spends in their game the more they tend to spend on it, and that peak games do not generate sustainable revenue, we have seen this a lot.
But I agree with you, numbers aren’t everything, if we look at it coldly the best-selling ARPG officially is Diablo 3 and well, the game is one of the worst ARPGs ever made.
To be fair, you did mention Ultimatum and that was the one that stuck. That was an honest mistake.
That is because retention alone tells you nothing.
If you have a league with 10 players on day 1 and 9 players on the last day and you have a league with 100 players on day 1 and 9 players on the last day, the first one has a retention of 90% and the second one has a retention rate of 9%, but the second one is clearly superior.
Even using Affliction, for the first 30 days the current league was much better. That is when most of the MTX is sold in any league, especially when they make the sales discount after a week.
So even if it’s dropping faster, the first 30 days were still much more profitable for GGG than Affliction was.
I’m not even going to address your need to insult people, as that is beneath me. But I will address the “paid militant” part, because it is obviously ridiculous and just something you use to deflect.
Just because you don’t like a game doesn’t mean others don’t. I have said before that I love LE (and I never hid from that) and that if EHG didn’t change a single thing in the game anymore, I would still play it for years to come.
It’s much more natural for someone that likes a game to be posting on the forums than someone that doesn’t to regularly come here and trash the game, the devs and the people that like it.
As for the “resounding failure”, it’s not different from the myriad of posts in every single game of “game is daed”, including PoE, D4 and even games like CS2. When someone doesn’t like something about a game they start throwing prophecies of the game’s demise, but that’s usually more wishful thinking than reality.
EHG got a solid financial cushion with launch sales and they are now working on adding core stuff to the game. You know, like GGG did the first few years where their peak was around 30k during that time.
I don’t know if LE will ever become more popular than PoE (1 or 2), nor do I really care about that, but you can be certain that LE will be around for a few years still, even when people like you don’t like the game.
Even tentacles of the Chinese government 
need to obey the laws of the jurisdictions that they operate in (& New Zealand is hardly a banana republic where a few Yuan of hard currency buys you your official of choice). GGG has to have their statutory accounts audited (by PWC from memory) & anything stated therein has to be accurate.
And player numbers are much easier to get from steam charts given that most gaming companies only ever release figures when it benefits them, even in the bastion of the decadent west, America, which is so widely known for it’s rigorous reporting standards .
I assume you mean seasonal games, like PoE? If so, you should really check out GGG’s stats, they’ bee raking it in (last I checked a few years ago).
Oh no, they caught you again?
You’re not making your cover right!