The First Rift Has Closed - How Did You Find It? (Community Survey)

Fair enough. I went through several titles trying to think of something interesting, but it was meant to be a more general "what was your experience/what did you do with the Rift", as opposed to "how did you feel about the Rift". There are a couple of places to share that sort of thing as well, but it wasn't meant to be the main focus. The goal of the survey, as I outlined in the OP, was not so much to measure player satisfaction - which I feel is more a job for the Player Satisfaction Surveys the devs put out - but rather to gather numerical data about whether people completed the Rift, how they did so, how long it took them, etc.

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.

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.

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.

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 🤞

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.

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.

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!

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.

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?

Thank you! I hope so too 😅

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!

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.

Only 8 more responses to go, ideally, before I close the survey.