Observable player retention issues on fest minigames

A lot of people play Wynn. One assumes a substantial portion of those players will engage with the festivals regularly when they're on. Yet usually pfinder queues for festival minigames are noticeably long, and it's the same faces when you play. This makes me think that most of the festival minigames simply... aren't liked by new players.

The obvious explanation is that they're hostile. It's extremely easy to miss the tutorials, and if you're just trying to do this cool thing Wynn just told you about, you almost certainly won't be expecting a full gameplay disconnect. This is especially observable in Claim to Heroism because these new players will be attempting to kill enemies with their ordinary weapon. Faced with such a confusing environment, players are likely to quit. One would imagine that a one-time, mandatory tutorial would help with this.

Aside from that, I can't speculate too much. I don't have access to whatever statistics Wynn tracks about engagement with festivals, if any, and as a long-time player who takes time to regularly run festival minigames (once or twice per day, typically), I'm familiar with them and therefore am not a good source of new player psychology. But I think it's at least worth some investigation to determine if this problem exists and, if so, its particulars and potential solutions.

 

Counterpoint: Claim to Heroism's complexity and team-less-ness will probably make it harder for inexperienced players to win/enjoy. I know I just played it for the gathering bucket and haven't played a single game this Heroes.