The new Rift Pass overall seems great, but it's going to be a GRIND

TL:DR I included two screen shots breaking down the fragments earned and how much play time I'm expecting you'll need to play. Now I understand we don't know what the event quests will look like, but currently this system is flawed and is going to take A LOT of grinding that many of your casual players are not going to want to do.

I’m here to discuss positives and negatives (mostly negatives) about the new Rift Pass Quest system that DBD developers have given us in the 8.7 patch update. I know everyone is talking about the new quest system and overall I do believe people like this new system. However I think this new system is a huge grind for less consistent players and will feel scary to the new wave of players that will be coming with the anniversary chapter for Five Nights at Freddy’s.

Now to begin I’d like to point out the good things about this new system compared to the old system. The old system you had to select each challenge individually, for each role. In a way I did not mind this, but some of these challenges were difficult and you had to play a certain way to achieve them. While I do think the newer Tomes were much easier compared to the old ones (Complete 4 gens while running Dark Sense - yes I’m looking at you), there were so many instances where it took me many games to complete a challenge or had to farm for a challenge and it was very frustrating to deal with. Open the hatch with a key, TWICE. Yeah, that was a pain and required everything to be perfect to make it happen. Kill all 4 survivors in the basement? Yikes. 

Another downside of the old system was the consistency of the new challenges. Originally Tomes were shorter and we typically got a new page every 2 weeks. But me personally i’d finish the survivor challenges in a day or two, then be stuck with nothing for two weeks. Recently the levels were split for 3 or even 4 weeks so it was extremely boring waiting around for new challenges. Luckily, you could always go back to old Tome challenges to complete. But once they’re all done.. You have nothing..

So let’s come back to this new system. I love the layout, being able to see all the challenges in one spot was a great change. Being able to complete multiple challenges and pin multiple challenges, great change. You can select for the challenges to pop up as you’re progressing them like before, or only when completed. By default, it is set to completed, so if you like the old set up with it alerting you as you were progressing, you’ll need to change it in the settings.

When it comes to the rift pass, I like the changes they made. They come in with more outfits up to 100 tiers. After the 100th tier, instead of it going up to 200 with blood points, you’ll now earn blood points for each tier you would be completing.

All this sounds good yeah? But once you look at the numbers - I am very worried that the average player will not complete this pass in the given time. Let’s break down the numbers.

So originally the Rift required 10 Rift fragments for one level. Every game you play you earn rift fragments, and occasionally DBD has Rift Fragment Frenzy where you earn double the fragments as you play. Personally I never really noticed how many I actually earned in game, but it wasn’t a lot. Maybe 1 or 2 each game? I never actually looked at the numbers. But now with this new system, you do need to look at the numbers. Each tier requires 100 fragments, compared to only 10 before. Scary, but the quests do give you  a good bit for each one completed. I know people were saying you don’t earn any for just playing, but in reality, you do. There’s no pop up while in the lobby to see your progress, you have to physically click on Rift Pass to see. I’m upset about this, because currently i don’t know if this is a bug but each tier pops up EVERY single time you click on the pass. This noise is so mind numbing to me and I hate it and I try to avoid clicking on the pass. But since theres no where to see your progress in the lobby, you are forced to click on it. So one game I saw i was at 40/100. After playing a game and earning my dailies (which equaled to 45) I was now at 90/100. Which means each game you earn 5 fragments. We’ll touch base on this again in a bit.

Now I mentioned the dailies. There are 3 dailies each day, resetting at midnight (I am EST and I don’t know if this is based on your own time or EST. So if it’s based on midnight EST, it would be 11pm CT, 10pm MT, etc. Each daily works for both roles which is great. Since I mostly play survivor I rarely got any dailies for survivor, killer specific ones were always popping up. However lets look at the rewards. Each one you receive 15 rift fragments. Because the new system allows you to complete multiple challenges, you can basically get these dailies done in one game. The blood points are not great either, with one of them being only 2.5k, enough for a single brown add on, cool. Compared to the old system that gave you anywhere from 30k-60k blood points, this sucks.

Now lets look at the rift pass quests. They broke this up similar to other games like Fortnite and Apex to where you get new quests every week which is a W in my book. More challenges every week, I dont have to sit around and wait for 3 weeks. Each challenge rewards 75 fragments. Now I don’t know how the rest of the weeks will work if we will have more or less, but I’m going to assume each week is a similar set up. Each week has 3 challenges that work for either role, 1 for killer only, and 1 for survivor only. So far this first week does not have any specific killer/survivor or perk requirement. I am hoping we will see these along the line, but I am worried there won’t be any. It’s weird to me that this week we get to play Dredge and Haddie for free, but usually they did this when there was a challenge related to those characters, and currently there isn’t. So if you complete all these challenges, you will receive 375 fragments, just under 4 tiers on the pass. Assuming all the weeks have this same set up, with rift pass quests alone, you will earn 4500 fragments, or 45 tiers. As you complete the rift pass quests, you also earn banners/badges. But no extra fragments like before when you complete each level? I think this is a major L and should be considered for the next pass.

But we still have 55 more tiers to go. Let’s see how we continue to earn them.

Next we have the Milestone quests. This is uniquely set up where each challenge you complete, you’ll be bumped up a level to do more, and also earn more. The first level is worth 10 fragments, then 20, and so on til you reach level 10 and you’ll receive 100 fragments. So each milestone fully completed will reward you 550 fragments. Currently there are 3 killer only, 3 survivor only, 1 that works with either role. 1650 fragments earned for each role, and then 550 for the both role. This total is 3850 fragments, or about 38 tiers. So for both rift pass quests and milestone quests, if you complete all, you’ll earn 83 tiers.

So you need 17 more tiers, or 1700 more fragments to finish the pass. This means in the 83 day period of the pass, you’ll NEED to do the dailies to finish this. Since the 3 dailies only give you  45 fragments, you’ll need to make sure you do 37 days worth of dailies to get that done. You can also factor in the 5 fragments you earn per game. Also, there will be event quests added in. We will be having a 2v8 coming up with quests, as well as the anniversary event coming up. We do have a lot of opportunities to earn those fragments. We don’t know what those quests will look like, but I’m hoping they are similar to the rift pass quests, because if they’re like the dailies, 15 fragments is so little (unless there are a LOT of quests add for the events, then I wouldn’t mind this).

Ok so overall those rewards don’t seem too bad right. However, what if you only play one role? Can you still get it done? This is where I worry. For myself, I typically only play survivor. I dip into killer sometimes but overall I do enjoy the survivor role more. Especially if these challenges don’t require specific roles to move forward, I will likely not touch them too much. But remember how I broke down each role for the quests? Only playing survivor, I will miss out on 1650 fragments that would be earned from killer on the milestone quests, thats 16.5 tiers. I will miss out on 900 fragments on the rift pass quests, or 9 tiers. Thats 25 tiers I will not earn from quests.

Ok so how do i make this up? I’m not considering event quests, I’m solely basing this on regular play. So i would have to focus on just simply playing and earning those grand 5 fragments per game. Looking at just that, 20 games, yes, 20, will earn me 1 tier. So to make up for 25 tiers. I will need to play 510 games in that 83 day period, roughly 6 games a day. 

To me, this is not a lot, I play daily for a few hours so based on how much i play, I do believe I’ll get this pass done. I’ve gotten them done in the past no problem. But I am worried about the players that don’t play as much as me. Your casual players. The ones that have normal 9-5 jobs, that have families to take care of, that play OTHER games that also have passes they purchased and want to play, when live happens and you don’t have time to play video games. So if you aren’t playing every day, you’re missing out on those daily rewards. And what about that week 12 challenges? What if you don’t log in at all last week and don’t get those challenges done? Thats 375 fragments they miss out on and 315 from dailies. I feel like this new system is forcing the players to play more than they would normally want to for the battle pass. Hell look at your fog whisperers, so many of them just opted to buy all the tiers with the auric cells you give them. Sure its cool to see the new skins in game, but it’s not giving the viewers a realistic idea on how long these quests will take or how much play time these quests will take.

I request to make daily challenges more challenging but worth more fragments. Individual games also need more than 5 fragments a game. Even 10 per game would make it 10 games needed to play to earn a tier. Please keep in mind with this latest update, a LOT of bugs are occurring with the killers and some of these players may not even play right now because of the bugs. And lets not forget about the cheater problem we have going where a lot of your biggest content creators are being effected by this and not playing either.