So I got bored recently, and I kind of have a thing for spreadsheets. So I made one, charting out registration and activity on each continent based on the game-generated graphs. I made one chart for registration, one for the 3-day activity, and one for the day-to-day activity. I was particularly curious because the game-wide chart shows a strange divergence whereby registrations have been increasing lately, while 3-day activity has been declining.
A few summaries of the past 3 months worth noting:
In terms of registration, Beluaterra and Dwilight increased, FEI and Colonies declined a bit, while EC and Atamara declined the most. Thus, in terms of new characters, it would seem that Beluaterra and Dwilight are the best attractors, while EC and Atamara are the worst. Beluaterra say regstrations increase by almost 5%, Atamara fell by almost 4%.
But registration isn't everything. In terms of number of players who are "active" (3-day login line), Beluaterra and Dwilight still dominated. Colonies and FEI were next, followed, again, by EC and Atamara. The gap was wider, however: Beluaterra had effectively no change in number of "active players," while every other island declined. EC fell by 14%, Atamara by 12%.
In terms of highly active players (the 1-day login line), the story change somewhat. Dwilight and FEI lead the pack in retaining highly active players, with EC and Atamara next, followed by Beluaterra and the Colonies. However, the Colonies is an outlier: it lost 53% of its active players in the last 3 months... mostly because these data reflect a weekday measure beginning with a weekend measure ending, and the Colonies, being a "casual play" island, can be expected to have a bigger weekend effect. Dwilight had effectively no decline in highly active players, Beluaterra lost 27% of its (perhaps a weekend effect again? Though why Beluaterra would be abnormally effected is unclear to me).
What seems evident to me is that we have basically two worlds of BM experience. In Dwilight and Beluaterra, it would seem that player counts are not suffering too much. New players arrive and are broadly able to sustain the population. In EC and Atamara, this is just not the case. Those two continents are experiencing what I would call a precipitous decline (losing 12-14% of the active players seems like a big deal to me, especially on two very large continents).
It is possible that some of the decline in Atamara and EC is due to emigration. However, FEI, the Colonies, and Beluaterra are comparatively small. They would hardly seem able to account for the almost 150 active players Atamara and EC have lost in the past 3 months (probably more, as no doubt some new ones have arrived in the interval). Dwilight is big enough that it could have absorbed many, but, still, it seems like a stretch to me that this entire phenomenon can be explained by older players emigrating from EC and Atamara to FEI, Beluaterra, and Dwilight, especially given my own experience in Dwilight that newer players are remarkably prominent. The end of the invasion probably has a lot to do with Beluaterra's bouyancy and no doubt sucked many active players from other continents, but it seems strange that this "Invasion-ending" effect would drain exclusively from EC and Atamara. Rather, I would expect Beluaterran exiles to gravitate towards other unconventional islands, like Dwilight (the advent of the Manifest Path demonstrates that this migration pattern does have a significant effect). So I would not think the end of the invasion would be to blame for EC and Atamara's decline.
EC and Atamara represent a large chunk of the game: about 1,500 characters between them. Most players have a character on one or the other, I would bet.
However, that may be the source of some of our retention problem. EC and Atamara can't hold players very well, and loss of players on those continents gains a wide audience due to being large continents. Moreover, it isn't like Dwilight were losing nobles is just part of the game, and realms fade and die. On continents of long-term realms that have remarkable aversion to their own death (for BM realms), losing nobles is a remarkable crisis.
I would thus suggest that the retention problem (and it is a problem) should not be phrased as "What is Battlemaster doing wrong?" But, rather, primarily as "What is it that happens regularly in Atamara and EC that we are doing wrong, and that sometimes also happens elsewhere?"
I will venture two guesses:
1. Low turnover in positions (purely hearsay, but I "feel" like the other continents have more new-player opportunity, especially Dwilight, and the Dukes-per-capita rate of FEI is quite impressive)
2. Lack of concept (the islands that are prospering are all "concept islands")
3. Stationary alliances
Large alliances are briefly fun. Arcaea's bloc may be able to maintain the fun in FEI by virtue of being very concept-driven, same for SA in Dwilight. However, even such concept-driven blocs seem likely to have negative effects on retention. A prime example is Thulsoma/Averoth. As much as we were all frustrated about the clanning and abuses, those realms brought in tons of new players who, were they allowed a longer time to prosper and gradually integrate in other realms, might have provided a bigger boost to retention even as they settled down slightly. Maybe that's just wishful thinking, but I think it has a base on a reasonable argument.
This post was quite long. I don't know a way to share my raw data with others, but I can e-mail it to anyone who is interested. I also calculated some composite scores for continents and compared activity rates. For the curious, I was unable to find any meaningful connection between activity and retention: continents with more activity and high activity did not seem much more likely to retain players, and activity throughout BM has declined in the past 3 months, on every continent, but differences in activity have flattened out somewhat.
