That is a very interesting question I tried to explain in the Survey already:
However there is a trigger point where you either feel resignation because of the full wipe or hyped about achieving something until the very end.
The latter should be our goal!
So it’s a fact that over the last 2 years you see a big drop of players after about 60-70 days.
You can check it out a bit here yourself:
https://empyrion-servers.com/server/21190/stats/
So your claim that it isn’t the duration but the full wipe itself which causes population drop is interesting.
However, making analysis of fully season based games you see a different pattern.
Games like League of Legends, Heores of the Storm, Clash Royale, PUBG, Fortnite, Diablo 3, etc.
These games made season changes not really something to scare people off, but giving them incentives to push hard until the last second.
Because the higher your “rank” (global score) at the end is, the better your reward.
That is what I wanted to highlight in the survey. If we implement features, which rather makes you excited about a full wipe than upset, wouldn’t it be cool to make it shorter than 3 months?
I mentioned examples like a Hall of Fame for different things you could achieve and get rewarded for. Or maybe implement the factor of loyalty as well? The longer you play, the more your permanent bonus will be? For example for every day you played in the season you get +100 stack size in your OCD. You get the idea.
2 month personally would be better for me overall. Sounds paradox but I think it would burn me out less than 3 months. Because the things on my TODO for 3 months are at the end like a monster big mountain I have to climb and pressure is high to fulfill the expectations of players who get pumped for 3 months.
Especially reacting faster on Eleon patches, implementing fundamental improvements faster would overall be better.
I would like to tackle gameplay related stuff like @TacoIsland mentioned with high motivation.
I thought my Deathmatch events would reduce such “PvP obstacles” for new and old players. But they are not really accepted, even though I boosted the reward already.
I would like to implement a feature or universe set, where you can play like casual pvp games. Like Battlefield. You queue up, pew pew in that instance and call it the day.
Will think about such ways.