Path of Exile Dev Tracker

When we refer to Player Retention here we are actually referring to what you are calling the Player Return Rate.

In fact, the central thesis of the talk is that it's better to get players to want to return next cycle than it is to try and keep a player playing forever.

So a lot of what you said actually summarises the talk we are giving.

If there is a trend for challenges being harder each league, I can assure you that it's not intentional.

Let me ask you this question: If I told you to create some challenges that are intended to take players a 1 month to complete, how accurately do you think you would be able to hit that target without having a a month to test it? Yes, you can do some modelling in excel but quite honestly it's not easy to make predictions accurately over that kind of time scale. Players tend to always find ways of doing things faster than we expect, so the designers of challenges tend to err on the side of making them harder.

This isn't talking about RNG-gating end-game content (which I believe is what you're worried about), but about the concept of having content that can vary in as many different ways as possible simultaneously. For example, even a simple league like Breach has the following axes:

• The location of the breach in the level can be either good or bad. It could be in a wide-open area or a narrow corridor.
• The flavour of the breach (out of the different types) is random
• The positions of the random spawns of the monsters around the perimeter can favour the side you happen to be clearing, so you can be lucky or unlucky on that
• The number of monsters spawned is random
• The composition of monsters spawned can be good or bad (more rares or not)
• The hidden breach chests are spawned randomly
• Breachlords can spawn randomly during the right
• The splinters dropped have a large random element
• And so on. We had a longe...