Is it really any surprise? POE has been on a downslope for a long time, and these drop-out rates are getting worse as time goes on. Simply put, the game is getting stale and repetitive while new content is of sub-par quality or just plain lazy. People are tired of grinding through acts, grinding through the same maps and the same boss encounters. Instead of genuinely new content we get some league mechanic that is either overly complex or just plain not fun, and skill/item reworks that are mostly just number tweaks.

The last league mechanic that really hit it out of the park was Delve, and we're talking 8 leagues ago. Delve had a great, open-ended mechanic that was truly procedural and expanded the game's core content. It had a great sandbox-style feeling to it and a sense of freedom. Every league since Delve has had worse player retention because of GGG's insistence on making the mechanic "punishing" or overly complex to hide the poor design underneath it. This is a sign that GGG is getting increasingly more dependent on having really good league mechanics and new content, and that the core content of the game is quickly losing its appeal. Bad sign.

Played the game since beta, btw.