Do we have some stats showing that newbies tend to leave after playing for several months?
Because being a newbie myself I'm not seeing that. Newbies love it here.
What I see is old players leaving because of OOC drama and devs' awkward attempts to control population density. So maybe we should concentrate on veteran retention strategies.
I'm sorry, but this is
laughably wrong.
As a matter of fact, we do keep stats on how long a player has been here when he leaves. Well over half of the 35,000-odd records we have (there were some periods when the stats collection on leave wasn't working) are of people who left after trying the game out for
less than 2 days.
Of the remainder, the
average amount of time in game is between 6 and 7 months. Less than 7% stayed in the game for longer than a year before quitting. (And among those who did, the average amount of time played was around 3 years.)
So our #1 problem is, and always has been, keeping the interest of newbies. That's not trivial for a game like this, but if we could increase newbie retention by, say, 20%, that would go a
long way towards solving the decline in the player base.
And, as an aside, if we could get 10% of the players who ever
left this game to come back and stay...we'd more than triple our player base.
