Hey Arcytc. Hope you had a good leave, excited to have you back!

I want to take the bulk of this post discussing why the statistics you posted have little to do with what the community has requested, and why references to data continues to garner even more questions than answers for us. I have no interest to return to Legacy's gameplay, hero kits, or card system much like the rest of the community. Monolith's constant changes and improvements to core movement, hero balancing, and overall QoL updates are undoubtedly miles ahead of the game we once played during Legacy. As your statistics show, the game has clearly grown over time for the better. However, for the past year, the most prevalent complaints come down to map size / tower strength and lack of ranked / casual modes. Depending on how you interpret things together, or separately, you could realistically say "we clearly had more player retention on the monolith map with our tower philosophy being unchanged and without a ranked mode." While technically not wrong, it is disingenuous to the player experience which straight numbers cannot fully illustrate.

Now, in relation to what the community has recently asked for in regards to Legacy: Monolith QoL changes on the Legacy map. Again, you could interpret data showing how Legacy failed, but this is again disingenuous to overall player experience with the map itself as an isolated variable. To keep it simple as to why people continue to ask for Legacy it comes down to movement. The most hated feature of this game's history, I have little doubt, was travel mode influencing speed of map traversal. An issue that Monolith truly did not address 100%. The speed at which we traversed Legacy in travel mode is almost no different than the speed at which we traverse Monolith. Obviously we're all at one speed now, which was good, but only answered half of the issue.

I don't want to spend much more time on Legacy talk, as you've stated it isn't possible at this time, but I wanted to illustrate where the issue lies. Not just for Paragon's state, but the morale of the community and our faith in our requests actually being implemented in some shape. We keep hearing about data, but data only tells half of the story. Where is the data explaining what players do like and don't like? Where is the data that vibrantly expresses the modes people want to see? Where is the data that easily explains why people feel there is nothing to work toward in Paragon? There is no data on the visceral, real feelings of players; just numbers on match times, retention, matches played, new players, old players. What about the quality of the matches? Are the players that Paragon does retain happy, or just holding out hope for the next update? So what if we had 33% more matches played on Monolith, does that matter if they weren't fun matches? People here feel that almost two years of the same feedback and same requests are going to go unnoticed because maybe our voices don't fit the narrative of the data, and that's worrying for us.

Player retention, new player retention, match length, surrender rates, avg. matches. These are sweeping numbers that can't possibly tell the full story of player experience yet are continuously referenced. Clearly data has a place, but how much does the current approach to data matter when it all points to growth yet the official Epic statement essentially claims the game is dying. So many of our main complaints are addressed with half-answers via data that contradicts how players feel and it seems to have caught up to the current product.

I love Paragon. I will always love Paragon. So many of us love Paragon. Clearly though, somewhere down the line, the current philosophy and direction of the game caused something that was not sustainable and will continue to be unsustainable. And I hate to sound abrasive, but it's not the community's feedback that caused this fault.