idk. I’m just really skeptical of using play time/retention as a metric. It really doesn’t say anything about how fun the game is. Or perhaps more specifically, it doesn’t say how many of those hours are the fun parts. There are two main reasons: 1) There are all sorts of attention hacking things companies can do to keep people’s attention even when they aren’t really enjoying the experience. 2) Sometimes there are bits of a game that are fun enough that you put up with the bad parts. If endgame is the only or at least significantly more fun part, it might be enough for you to stomach spending some time doing the stuff you don’t like for it. That doesn’t mean I’d be less happy if I got to cut out those hours and just play what I like until I’m satisfied.
I mean, it would always be better if things were better or had more content or whatever. But just suggesting they make more stuff isn’t super helpful. It takes work hours to make stuff and for a given team size, that means choosing to make some stuff instead of others. Even if they make enough money to hire more devs, hiring takes time to find the right people, train them, and get them integrated into the team.
I think we’ve already seen that content production is one of the big things holding the game back. Since months before release, we’ve gotten relatively little new content. Basically just the harbingers, which consisted of a grand total of 3 bosses and one new arena, and some touch ups to the early campaign.
I still think it’s a travesty that the game released in this state at all, but where we’re at now is that there’s an expectation of a new release every few months. So they do have to prioritize what they work on. I think for exactly for the new player experience, getting the campaign right is useful, but for recurring players even if campaign were good, it represents such a relatively small part of the experience that I’m not sure it’s worth prioritizing over endgame content if you have to make that choice.
Systems changes are relatively quicker though. It doesn’t take much new art to make a button that lets you swap your mastery.