Quote Originally Posted by Exmo View Post
Player count was up a little last month. Last 30 days show a 13% increase. The doomsayers all crawled back into the woodwork
Steam Numbers specifically, but I'm sure you agree the sample size is large enough to be indicative.

So, there was a patch. A Savage patch. Percentage is a bit of a weird metric to use here, since the percentage would get buffed if the last month is especially shitty. As an example, the last 30 days shows an average of 18988, a 13.6% rise over the 30 days before it, whereas November (Patch 7.1) shows an increase of 12.4% over the last month despite the average being higher than 7.2s "last 30 days" window you refer to, at 19651.

Overall, savage patches (x.2) are often stronger than their non-savage counterpart (x.1), so this isn't surprising. What is surprising is the decline after the first week of savage is rapidly getting us back to pre-patch levels, and we still have a few months of the patch to go. 7.2 is an extremely strong patch as far as Dawntrail's content cadence is concerned, but it also confirmed that compared to it, 7.3 will likely be a very weak one. For the next 7-8 months, this is likely your playerbase.

That being said, we're currently missing the occult crescent, which will be a key component in retention for the foreseeable future, so I wouldn't be able to predict to what extent they'll be able to hold on to this playerbase. If the trend holds though, we'll likely see record lows we haven't seen in years, which is worrying.