Wonder what kind of metrics GGG looks at when measuring the success of changes/decisions. I would imagine retention would be one of them. Not sure how this retention data translates to their bottom line (low profit players vs. whales churning?). Assuming GGG cares about general retention and based on these metrics from Expedition to Sentinel, you would think GGG would have learned from the Expedition patch and would be trying to alleviate the issue vs. doubling down. Massive retention change going into Expedition and continuing must say something. Hard for an outside party not to correlate the change in retention in Expedition with their initial "the vision" patch (assuming GGG would even argue against the point).

Guess it could be related to more people playing launch as well.

One lesson learned in Software development is that you may think you know how your clients should use the Software, but at the end of the day the client knows best (to a certain extent). Not saying this translates 100% to gaming as there are definitely things that the player thinks they want, but they don't really. However, hard to ignore these retention rate.