The First Rift Has Closed - How Did You Find It? (Community Survey)
If the post is too long, skip down to the bottom for the survey link!
Now that the first Rift is officially over, I think it's a good time to start asking how it went for everybody.
Did it achieve its goal of being completable by the average player? How accurate was the 70-80 hour completion target? How many people bought the Rift Pass, and why? How did the completion of Tome challenges factor into all this?
With those questions in mind, and more, I have designed a survey to collect some actual numerical data so we can see what the general community experience of the Rift really was. My goal is to get as many responses as possible, so that we can most accurately determine things like the average number of hours it took to complete, and what proportion of players were able to do so.
The aim is to generate a pool of data which is accessible to the DBD community, so that all of us have something tangible we can draw on when giving feedback and drawing conclusions about the Rift and the overall player experience.
I will leave the survey open for a week, after which I will be collecting the responses and sharing the data here on the forum. I do have plans to share the results with the developers if there are enough responses to generate meaningful data, since I imagine it could be helpful information for them to have for the sake of improving player experience in future Rifts, however the survey itself is not officially created or endorsed by BHVR.
The survey is multiple choice and completely anonymous, and should take you less than 5 minutes to complete. I would really appreciate it if anyone who is willing would take a few minutes to contribute by answering some questions about their experience with the Rift. The more responses we get, the more accurate the data will ultimately be.
Thank you very much in advance to all respondents! 😊
If you have any questions, comments or feedback, please feel free to leave them below and I'll respond as best I can.
Here is the survey link: https://www.survle.com/s/5df8d4afc2e6c
EDIT: Some respondents seem to be misreading the questions, particularly the question about how many tiers the player had already unlocked when the Rift began. Please read the questions carefully before answering! If you think you may have made a mistake in one of your answers, feel free to go back and retake the survey. Your second response will overwrite the first.
Comments
I didn't mean it at the begin either. It was easy to get multiple levels a day just by completing challenges, something I really didn't struggle with at all. The only one that took me some real time was the end game collapse unhook.
But once I had all my challenges done, it quickly became clear that to grind the levels you need to be more than a casual player. But this is pretty much my experience with every battle pass I've ever bought except Rocket League's. That's the only one I know that you can just play a couple hours a week and still unlock the entire pass.
Yeah, that was generally my experience as well. I did play a fair bit in between Tome levels, after finishing all the available challenges, but I never felt any pressure to progress at that stage because I knew I would get a huge progress boost with each Tome level that was released. After finishing the entire Tome, though, the grind started to feel tedious towards the end. Luckily, the issue of the challenges not quite carrying most players through to the end of the Tome should be a fairly easy fix, and something I'm hoping they will therefore adjust for the next Rift.
I got a chunk of it completed...but with how grindy it ended up being and some of the challenges were badly designed, along with the sabotaging nature that matches & players ended up taking, it burned me out of the game and I just ended up not playing DBD at all :/.
Love the concept and design of it...but the execution just ruined my experience amd felt way too much like a job to grind levels and attempt challenges that were easily ruined by other players (on both sides) once they realized what you were going after. Also had the displeasure of players getting their Challenge done and then AFK or suicide on Hook and leave....
I thought it was challenging and at times fun. I don't play survivor often so I never got the skills to complete the flashlight ones. I didn't like that several challenges relied on luck or dc not happening, and it made for a repetitive game when using survivors that most killers were trappers. I think the worst was having to select a challenge. Sometimes you would complete several in a single run but only the active one counted. They should be designed so you can complete several on the same match if you meet the conditions rather than having to do several variations of the same thing multiple times (have survivors step on 3 traps, 4 traps, 5 traps... What's up with that?). That would help with the luck based ones since you could adapt based on what was going on at the match
Yes!!! I love Rocket League Pass. Not only you can complete it by simply playing but also the rewards are pretty nice (sooo nice sometimes) + you get all your "money" back + there are hundreds of levels after you reach level 70 with some color variations and special edition stuff. That's why I will always buy it and I am happy that I can give some money to the devs. They take such a good care of their playerbase so I just want to support them.
The Rift pass is very underwhelming in comparision. Its super grindy, challenges are not so well thought through and rewards are pretty much basic. And I dont even like charms very much. And it is also more expensive than Rocket League pass. So I just wont buy another Rift pass again soon... the grind was so frustrating towards the end!
Aren't both the Rocket league pass and the Rift the same price?
If I recall correctly I paid €10 for both.
Only difference is, in Rocket League I've had 5 passes so far and in DBD I need to spend extra to get another pass because of the grind.
I'm sorry your experience with the Rift wasn't great 🙁 Unfortunately some people are just selfish or mean-spirited and will go out of their way to ruin the experience for others, and there's not a whole lot to be done about it because you get bad eggs in every community.
Having said that, I do agree that there were certain challenges which weren't well-designed, and in some cases encouraged that kind of behaviour (like the Spine Chill one, for example). Hopefully the devs will take the feedback from the community on the first Tome and use it to make adjustments to the next one.
By the way, tasks 2 tome of all levels have long been known. And they are much simpler than in tome 1.
I saw level 1 on the PTB, but I haven't gone looking for the others. It's always possible that they will change prior to release, of course, but if everyone is happy with them as they are that's admittedly unlikely.
When will you close the survey and present the results?
Enjoy
All Challenges 2 tomes
Interesting! I actually really like the look of all those challenges, and there also seem to be a lot more of them. Seems like they've taken a lot of feedback on board from the first Tome. The only misgiving I have about it is that there are a lot of DLC character or perk-based challenges, which leaves players who don't own and/or can't get the DLC at a pretty huge disadvantage, progress-wise.
The survey is due to close in abut a day and a half. After that, I'll need to go through all the data and organise it, then extract actual meaning from it in the form of figures and percentages and such, and then I'll need to figure out how to present that in as clear and informative a way as possible. All that will probably take me another few days to a week, but I can post some rough preliminary data and/or progress updates here in the meantime if that's something people would be interested in.
We are all not stupid, and we perfectly understand why a tome with 4 characters was introduced, and not with 2. But yeah, the challenges in this tome seem to me much better than in the first.
We do? I was under the impression that there were four characters in this Tome so that they could fit in more lore, appeal to a wider range of players and have the challenges be less monotonous. As for three of them being DLC characters, though, and from different DLCs at that, there may have been monetary motivations there (which seems to be what you're implying).
At the very least, the fact that there are two killers in this Tome, not just one, might make the issue of always going up against the same one(s) a bit easier to bear. Although personally, I'd rather go against two Trappers than a Doctor and a Spirit.
Although the idea of being able to complete multiple challenges in a single trial is a popular one, I think the reason that's not a feature is actually, counter-intuitively, to lessen the perceived grind. The Archives are designed such that players should complete the Rift through a combination of challenges and XP earned. The more challenges you can do at once, the quicker you get through them all, the less XP you earn while doing so, and so the more "ordinary" games you have to grind through to make up the difference in XP. By forcing players to work through the challenges more slowly, progress through the Rift is more steady and players therefore feel like they are making consistent progress instead of making huge bursts of progress and then having to slug through hours of minimal progression through XP alone. In other words, it's a psychological thing to keep players motivated towards completing the Rift. At least, I think that's the theory.
I personally think, as a compromise, it would be good if players could gain progress in all available challenges (that is, ones they have unlocked on the web) at once, but have to choose a single challenge in which to invest that progress at the end of the trial. All progress made in that trial on other challenges would be lost. This would, I think, lessen the frustration for players who didn't quite meet the requirements for a master challenge they were attempting in a match, or who met the requirements for a challenge other than the one they had selected. It allows them to feel like they're still gaining progress, without drastically reducing the time it takes to work through the Tome overall.
Appreciate the response and kind words! I def understand that griefers and such behaviour is something that can never be fully handled, was jus an extra push (for me personally) on top of the grind + certain challenges that all added to me not having as much fun as I wished.
Hoping some good changes/alterations are considered for this game's future. I'm also wanting to change how I approach and view the future Tome/Rift to get more out of it and play much more/longer
That's fair enough, and sounds like a pretty reasonable approach 😊 So far, the challenges for the next Tome are looking pretty promising, both in terms of design and numbers, so hopefully we'll see some improvements on the second run 🤞
I am very interested in how many players and how many levels the players bought for the cells. How many people were led to this manipulation and bought levels for money.
Well, according to the results so far 2/3 people who bought the pass didn't buy any tiers. About 20% of people bought 1-10 tiers, and barely anyone (around 5%) bought more than 20.
It's pretty decent anyway, don't you think so?
A decent proportion of people, you mean? Yeah, I see where you're coming from. The 5% is 36 people out of 648 who bought the pass. So it's not insignificant by any means, but it's still very much a minority. I expect they're the type of people who have a lot more money than they do time and are happy to just buy most of the Rift - I believe one such player commented in this thread earlier.
Once I'm able to go through each response properly, I'll be able to look at other things of interest, like whether people who spent a lot of money on the Rift were happy having done so, or why they bought the pass in the first place.
To be fair, Rocket League has done a lot of battle passes at this point. I don't know what the first one was like, but I think BHVR still has room for improvement before they start getting compared too closely to other games who have been doing this for a while.
Just to let everyone know, the survey will be closing in about 24 hours, so if you haven't taken it yet, or if you are interested in a successful outcome and wanted to share it with any DBD-playing friends for them to share their experience as well, now would be the time to do so. We're now at 900 responses - thank you to everyone who has contributed so far!
The first one was exactly like the one there's now. Rocket League's pass was user friendly from the start.
I just don't understand when there have been multiple examples of passes that work, like Rocket League or Fornite's. And there already have been multiple examples of passes that just completely failed until altered completely, Apex for example. That they take the route of battle passes that received the criticism that they get now, gain the same feedback that all the other fails have gotten, and now have to alter it to appeal to people again.
Like we have a saying where I live, "It is better to steal something good then to invent something bad"
I'm not really sure what the research process was like, they haven't really shared much about that side of things. Perhaps they wanted to forge their own path, or perhaps they simply didn't do a lot of research into what has worked and what hasn't in other systems.
They did seem to genuinely believe that it would be completable in about an hour of playtime per day, which I suspect was without taking things like queue times into account. My guess would therefore be that it's a matter of the preliminary research and testing not being done thoroughly enough. Which in my opinion is actually a good thing - obviously, it would have been ideal if they'd gotten it right from the start, like Rocket League apparently did, but since they didn't, the fact that their fault was more likely ignorance than arrogance means they're much more likely to be able to improve upon it in future iterations.
I loved it, it gave me something to work for however i wish there was more interesting and cool stuff in it
Thanks for your response 😊 Did you take the survey as well?
Regarding the Rift, I agree that it was nice to have another objective to spice things up and feel like you were working towards something between games other than just levelling characters. What kind of interesting and cool stuff would you have wanted to see?
I've decided to extend the survey for another day or two because we're only a few dozen entries off the target sample size of 1000 🤞 I feel like it's worth aiming for since it would be a good round baseline to go off and also make percentage-based statistics easier to understand in context.
Filled out the survey, hope you got what you wanted Fibi 👍️
Cool. I'm glad you had such a high response. I'm looking forward to the results.
Thank you! I hope so too 😅
Is the second rift open yet? Survivor is gonna be so easy that I'll grind out those challenges so damn quick it'll be hilarious.
Then I'll hate my life when I try to do the killer challenges.
Thanks for the support 😊 I'm pretty interested in seeing them all myself. I'll be sure to let everyone know once they're available!
I believe i did take the survey, and i thought the rewards were great however id love to see some more unique cosmetics such as skins that have there own cool animation a onzie for a survivor could be a great skin, more animated charms would also be amazing! Thank you for the response and sorry for my late reply ive been rather busy 😊
The second Rift hasn't opened yet, that should happen sometime within the next week. So far, all the challenges look to be pretty easy - in my opinion, the survivor challenges are actually the harder of the two this time around.
I love the animated charms, so I totally agree. And fun new skins are always welcome. I'm still holding out for Bunny Feng 🤞
Also, no need to be sorry, everyone gets busy. Well, except people who basically spend their entire lives on these forums. Glad I don't know anyone like that >.>
I need Bunny feng!!!! WAIT Bunny trapper!😂
Wait... when you say Bunny Trapper, do you mean he is a bunny or he traps bunnies? D:
Only 8 more responses to go, ideally, before I close the survey.
As you all know, I am planning to release the results of this survey publicly as soon as I can get them properly organised. For everyone who is interested (and I know many of you are), I have created a thread calling for suggestions as to what kind of questions you want to see answered, what kind of graphs you might want to see, etc. So go there and make your requests!
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/121454/what-rift-related-data-do-you-want-to-see#latest
Oh, that's what I thought. It would be very useful, thanks.
So do I. There have been some delays, because there's a lot more data to go through than I anticipated. There were over 1000 responses, and about 15-20 questions in each response, and I need to enter all 15-20,000 individual pieces of data manually into a spreadsheet in order to analyse it properly. So it's taking a while, as I'm having to juggle it with university work and things like that. I can promise that I am still working on getting it done as soon as I can, and the good news is that I have been through the majority of it already.