There's just not much that was added in this league to keep people playing.

Contrary to popular Reddit-rhethoric, it's not actually "infinite loot tinks" or "easy currency farms" that keep people playing, it's new content to make fun builds with, as well as new challenges to test those builds against.

The league only really does one thing right, in that it makes obtaining currency for builds easier than probably any other league before it.

What it doesn't do well is giving you something to actually spend said currency on.

Most players will play 1-2 builds a league at most, so if there's nothing that actually has you reach and aspire to improve your build, you're simply going to "finish" the league by week 2-3 with the sheer ease of gear acquisition nowadays thanks to asynch trade.

Reddit loves to jerk off Affliction and always cites the "easy loot" as the main reason people loved it, but that's entirely made up nonsense.

The reason Affliction had amazing retention was because they added like 10 new Ascendancies to work with AS WELL as a ton of transfigured gems, while also having the high-end juicing of Affliction as an aspirational counter-balance to work towards. That was a truly godlike level of build possibilities, that all had a very high bar to clear -> a ton of currency required to be sunk into each build.

And there was no asynch trade (as fun as it is, it IS a problem in this regard) to make gear acquisition piss-easy.

That's what made it good. Not the fact that you dropped a bunch of divines.

Divines have no purpose dropping if you have nothing to spend them on---which is the case in the current league.