The Rift is Way Too Grindy
I know this has been said a lot as it is a large problem, but the rift is too grindy. I already know there's going to be people complaining that I should just "not buy it if you don't want to do the grind" or "it's supposed to be grindy" but can we all just agree that in the time it takes for you to complete all the challenges, you should have enough fragments from just playing to make the difference? It's bad design and you shouldn't just make excuses when someone points it out.
I completed every last challenge and I only managed to get to tier 48. Now I didn't play a whole lot when I wasn't working on the challenges but that shouldn't matter. It's too grindy if I can manage to complete every last challenge and still be 22 tiers short of getting it finished. Keep in mind that it would take me a whole day of straight playing to get 2 tiers done after completing all the challenges. That is absolutely horrible, and the way they go about it is terrible as well. You get rift fragments based on just time played, there is barely any increase in exp for actually playing the game so I could just load a match as a killer and do nothing and still make progress towards tiers, even if it was extremely slow.
Can anyone see the problem with this? Now I get that the devs said that you only need to play an hour everyday to get maxed out, but who actually wants to play the same game every single day for an hour, especially dbd. The game play can get stale real quick and that's why the rift pass was supposed to be a blessing, it was supposed to give an actual reason to play the game, but if by the time you complete all the challenges, it only makes the situation worse. Who the hell actually wants to play for an entire day to just get 2 tiers? Like really?! On a lucky day I'd get 3 but If I wasn't on break, I would never have the time to actually give an entire day to this game. I can give them a little bit of slack because it's the first one but it really just seems like the devs really want you to either sell your soul to the game or buy the tiers. I'm not even going talk about the pathetic reward for actually torturing yourself to get to tier 70 since I only got it since it'll be exclusive one day, not because it was cool. This is just sad and I'm disappointed this is how the rift makes its debut.
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I absolutely agree. It’s kind of a literal hell having to do the challenges and progress through it when the rewards aren’t even that good. Yay, I got a slightly altered body for Hillbilly! That was worth $10!
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I need to grind 30 more tiers but thankfully have all the survivor challenges left. However doing the math it only gets us halfway if I finish them all. I just pick nurse and go afk (that's what survivors ultimately want facing killers to be like anyway) and it's been good enough to grind out a few levels while i read a book or whatever. You get 300xp per match and it jumps to like 400 if they run in front of you for a little bit. I haven't gotten a single complaint or report for hours
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And you're right, the rift is definitely designed to force you to spend on tiers. It takes 2 games to get one shard, say 10-15 minutes per match start to finish and you're at maybe 2 shards per hour, and you need ten for a tier. "Just one hour a day" is a boldfaced lie
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That was point. It is meant to burn you out so you buy tiers. That is the battle pass model and why so many of us were dismayed when they added it.
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I am hoping that they will make the next one less grindy.
Maybe drop the tiers to 50 or 60.
Or drop the exp points per fragment from 800 to 600.
Anything would help because trying to finish up the rift without any challenges is horrible.
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To be fair, it was originally designed so that people would be able to complete all or at least much more of the Rift just by doing challenges. This was taking into account Rift Fragments earned from master challenges, as well as estimated time to complete each challenge relative to the challenge's difficulty.
Because players complained that the challenges in Level III were too hard, many of the challenges in Levels III and IV were made easier, and half of the Level IV challenges were converted from master challenges to regular challenges. The effect of this is that while the challenges themselves are easier to complete, the progress earned from completing them is reduced overall. The devs warned us that this would be the case when they originally agreed to reduce the difficulty.
TL;DR - Although the Rift is by no means perfectly designed and the grind definitely could be reduced, the fact that it is as grindy as it is is largely the fault of player complaints rather than a flaw in the design.
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Players sort of had to complain as some of those challenges were ridiculous and if they did want to keep them then they should have saved them for level 4 not level 3.
The Rift is fine if you can sink dozens of hours into dbd but for people who have jobs and what not it's kind of unfair towards those players.
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Like I said, I'm not denying that the Rift could use improving or saying it's perfect by any means. It's okay for people to think the challenges are too hard, or that the Rift is too grindy, but it's also true that the Rift would not be as grindy as it is if those challenges had remained as they were.
Personally, I would rather spend 10 games trying to complete a challenge than to finish it in 2 games and spend the next 8 slowly grinding progress. That feels more rewarding to me. Some people feel differently, and that's fine, but we need to acknowledge the cause and effect relationship here and the fact that, in the case of the first set of Archives, the grind is a tradeoff and not a simple matter of bad maths on the part of the developers.
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I would like to see some stats on the actual hours to reach tier 70. I don't think the hour a day was even close....
I am on ps4 so I have no clue about my hours, did anyone else happen to track their time on steam? Would that time include queue times or not?
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I tracked mine. It's looking to be around the 180-hour mark, roughly.
I actually have plans to put out a survey for the whole community next week after the Rift ends to find out exactly that, among other things, and I'll be sharing the data from that after it's done, so keep an eye out for that if it's something you're interested in 🙂
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My main complaint is the state of matchmaking for me. Unable to find matches and therefore unable to play to complete challenges to progress in the rift. I bought the premium pass and since reaching level 35 in the rift over a month ago I have only been put into about 5 matches for literally over 5 hours of searching. I cannot buy the next pass with the state of the games matchmaking. It's an embarrassment to have a timed limited event which you have to pay for to get all the rewards only for the games problems to make it impossible to complete.
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I was in the exact same boat as you, I just turned on the match and read a book, But it's absurd that's what I have to resort to in order to grind it out.
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No, dropping the amount of tiers is unacceptable. When I first saw that they're was only 70 tiers, I thought "oh good, it's a more casual battle pass" and I was happier to pay for that. However, it's the worse battle pass I've ever seen with less rewards for actually grinding.
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While that is a valid point, it is not an excuse. The devs themselves also said that "casual" players could do it as well. However upon seeing the challenges that were clearly pass the definition of "casual" (through a bug to make it worse) that would by no means be all completed with another claim of theirs that was that the rift could be completed in one hour a day, so people obviously complained. It wasn't the vault of the players, but rather the devs making a false claim that the challenges were reasonable without actually showing us what the challenges were. Lessening the challenge was what people wanted, if they had to lessen the reward as well then they should've found another means of getting through the tiers to actually make the rift a "casual" friendly battle pass. If they had actually warned people that it wasn't "casual" friendly, then all the people that were complaining that the absurd challenges (which they were) weren't worth the reward they were given when some took up to multiple hours to complete, with the reward being 30,000 bloodpoints (which you get double of by performing well in one match with bbq or we're gonna live forever) and 3 rift fragments.
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I wasn't trying to excuse anything, just making sure we're being fair in our criticism.
On that note, the devs never said that the Rift would be completable by "casual" players. They said "the average player" would be able to complete it, which isn't the same thing. "Casual" implies that anyone should be able to complete it, but "average" actually means that around half of the playerbase won't be able to complete it. People have conflated the two and so blamed the devs for something they never said, which I don't think is fair. Whether or not the Rift was actually completable by the average player remains to be seen, but it was never meant for "casual" players.
The 70-80 hour estimate was clearly off, I agree, and should be called out as such. Players are right to complain about having to put around double the time into the Rift than they were apparently supposed to.
When it comes to challenge difficulty, though, I can think of only one challenge in the entire Tome which was actually unreasonable and deserved to be changed. Whether the challenges overall were "absurd" is a matter of perspective, but if you're approaching them on the assumption that "casual" players - that is, basically anyone - should be able to complete them all fairly easily, then I can see why you would say that.
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Well, the first rift is nearly complete. I would assume that there is a lot of feedback on these forums and also stats from within the game, which the Dev team will be able to review and act upon, to either lessen the grind, or leave it as is.
The final stats would make for very interesting reading and i hope that they are released!
Good luck with the last few levels!
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You are right, average is different from casual, that's my bad.
But this clearly isn't meant for the average either (At least in my opinion it isn't). If we're talking about average in both playtime and skill, then this is still surpassing it. Your average player isn't going to spend days upon days grinding out this game for the challenges, especially when they're told it was going to be easier than it actually is. They'll give up after purchasing the pass when they realize the time required isn't worth it and feel like they've been cheated.
Of course people like me who grind it out because they want to get their money's worth will feel even more cheated because they actually had to struggle when the reward was clearly inferior to the effort they put in. Like I said, I only worked towards it because I like having exclusive items. As for the challenges, I agree with you, I only see one challenge being completely unreasonable no matter the player as well. However, my point still stands that the time required to complete them is unreasonable. It's tedious to complete the challenges and the reward feels lackluster because of it. Either increase the reward for each of the challenges, or keep them as they are and add a fifth level to the archives.
My main complaint isn't really the challenges themselves, it's just a salt in the wound. However, I feel that if they had increased the rewards for the challenges then they've would've killed two birds with one stone. I'm not talking about the bloodpoints, people barely care about that, it's just a bonus when the actual desire is the rift fragments. Increasing the amount of rift fragments, even if it was only by a slim margin, would've drastically changed the amount of time required to max out the rift. I just feel like the devs did that whole warning thing because they wanted to get back at us for actually complaining on how they designed it. The pass seems like it forces you to buy tiers to complete it already and when the community complained that the challenges themselves were unreasonable for the reward given, they did this as a sort of petty revenge. Of course this is how I see it and I may just be being pessimistic.
It's just that it was clear as day that this would just trade one problem for another if this was how they decided to solve it. The already wrong 70 hours was only worsened when they decided to lessen the reward while making it easier. And that's why I have to disagree with you on the matter that we should be generous with our criticism. I believe that being as brutal as humanly possible is the necessary route to take. In my opinion, we should acknowledge that this is their first attempt, so of course there was room for error while being strict so they don't get the idea in their head that this type of treatment is okay. It was a blatant lie that it would only take 70 hours and I don't think it still would've reached anywhere near that time frame even if they hadn't touched the challenges. It just astonishes me that they managed to get their estimations so massively wrong. They just messed up so badly with this that being generous would only add a toxic element to the game. Right now, people are just so desperate to complete the already limited challenges that they don't play normally and the game actually encourages them to be afk after completing them all, it isn't healthy for the game.
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When I finished the archives, I was at tier 60, and almost all my games in the last months were played with a challenge (not saying I got them all on the first try). The last 10 tiers are hell for me, it's fun at the beginning, but now it's just playing again and again for baby steps.. I played a lot more than usual since november, I don't see how I was supposed to finish it with 1 hour a day. Maybe they should decrease to 60 or 65 tiers? Or have each tier worth 700 xp? Or add more challenges/rift fragments per challenge? I liked the challenges, but if it stays so grindy, I don't think I will bother with the pass next rift
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So my friend gifted me the battle pass for Fortnite, which coincidentally is also 10$.
I have never played Fortnite since it was in Alpha, and had always judged it with a biased eye for no apparent reason.
Yet, my god, is that maybe 10X less grindy than DBD's rift, with significantly better rewards.
Yes, I get it, DBD does not have the team and budget that Fortnite does, but the overall experience is significantly better, as it doesn't seem like I'm exhausting myself trying to advance in a system that i paid for.
Also, the challenges in Fortnite were much more streamlined, and rarely involved something you wouldnt normally do unless it could be done in one match, or didnt make you go out of your way.
I never thought in my life i'd choose any aspect of Fortnite over another game, but they simply do it right. The pass has a value, the pass is fun, the pass does not feel grindy. These are the things that DbD should strive for.
Warframe has a slightly more grindy experience with "Nightwave" in comparison to Fortnite , but it still doesnt make you feel like you're pulling teeth just to advance, and you are giving an extreme amount of time to complete Nightwave's.
Overall, the DbD battle pass experience is lackluster, I wouldnt mind it as much if the rewards were better, but there's barely anything I could care about.
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Even if this doesn't have much to do with my topic, I just want to comment on it.
While I do agree that as a whole, the Fortnite battlepass is significantly better, with superior rewards and less grind, but I completely disagree about the challenges part. Fortnite has a terrible tendency to give challenges that just send you on a treasure hunt or some sort of goose chase without actually participating in normal gameplay. It's one of the reasons I didn't like the game. The battlepass was the only reason to play the game (unless you purely play it for fun) yet a great deal of challenges encourage not participating in normal gameplay. Not that I like the gameplay anyways but still.
I found myself spending a great deal of time spending matches not actually playing the match, but going around the map collecting and doing odd things. Both game's way about going challenges are bad examples in my opinion. Fortnite spends a great deal of challenges encouraging players to not participate in normal gameplay, and DBD encourages players to instead farm or give up the match just to complete the tedious challenges that don't offer a significant enough reward for it to be considered worth it.
You just have no other choice but to complete these challenges if you want any chance of completing it.
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Don't know how you were so lucky to get to tier 60 after completing all your challenges. I'm jealous if i'm being honest, if you still have free time, load up the match as a killer and just be afk, a stealth one preferably. Trust me, if you can do that all day, it'll be much easier. I did that for twenty tiers and it was hell on earth so it should just be a nightmare for you. Good Luck!
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As I said, it remains to be seen whether the Rift was accessible to the average player or not. If, after the Rift ends, it turns out that around half the playerbase was able to complete it, then maybe we can conclude that it was accessible to the average player. That's something I'm personally interested in finding out.
I agree that the grind can be tedious, and could use improvements. I acknowledged as much in my original comment. I just don't think that, in the case of the first Rift, that can be blamed entirely on the developers, since changes made as a result of player complaints also contributed to the overall grind. Perhaps increasing the Rift fragment gain from the challenges would have helped - I'm not entirely sure why they didn't do that, to be honest. I doubt it was to try and get back at the players, though, since that would be a pretty stupid motivation from a business standpoint.
I didn't say we should be generous with criticism, although I tend to lean that way myself. I just think we should be fair - or rather, just - in our criticism, and only criticise things that are actually deserving of it. I see a lot of people criticising the devs on the basis of things they never said, like the "casual players" thing. I believe that if we're going to criticise them, we should criticise things worth criticising. Which is what you seem to be doing, for the most part, so I commend you for that.
I'm also not sure how they got their estimate so badly wrong either, unless they weren't taking queue times and failed challenges into account. But again, I believe that we can give them the benefit of the doubt there and assume good intent, not because we're being generous but because it makes rational sense. If they knew that that figure was false, they wouldn't have published it, because it was only a matter of time before the players figured out that something was up (which they did almost instantly, in this case) and that could only be detrimental to PR.
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I dunno what people are complaining about. I still have 5 challenges left, and 2 are master challenges, and I'm tier 70. I think the majority of players complaining only play one side, because you get bonus exp for your first game playing killer and survivor each. I didn't even play every day, and have 5 days left.
When I played Fortnite and bought the battle pass I never ended up finishing it. That said, I wasn't a hardcore Fortnite player, but I only remember getting around tier 24 or so on it playing nearly every day. I finished DBDs with 5 days left and that was without playing every day. Fortnite's system also pretty much tried to push you into buying tiers by giving you an outfit that had upgradeable looks at higher tiers, so you felt pressured to complete the outfit. I only wanted David's tank top in this battle pass super hardcore, but all the other stuff was nice to get on top of that. I really liked Huntress' new axe, the Trapper mask, all the charms, Billy's shotgun, Wraith's outfit, Meg's shirt(not her hair because that #########'s ugly asf), Nea's top(again same with Nea's hair), and Jake's outfit.
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Yeah, you're right. I'm just being extremely pessimistic I doubt they really would be so bold as to purposely lie but it just one grand mistake that caused a huge annoyance. I also acknowledge that it is unlikely that they were petty enough to do it as revenge but my point still stands that a lot of these large problems couldn't been solved had a little more thought been taken in. I also should be fair in that it still isn't absolute statistics wise. However, I seriously doubt this to be considered average unless everyone is in the red ranks. Well everyone will be by the end of this but that's beside the point.
I know it's too late to fix anything now and the damage has already been done, but there is one thing I want. I want the statistics of how many people got tier 70 WITHOUT buying shards. I don't want them to be under the assumption that buying shards is average. Purchasing shards should be a last resort, not a necessity. That's why I feel like a large portion of people bought shards in a desperate attempt to actually get to 70. This massive failure of a debut has a large chance that a more than normal amount of players bought shards to actually get their rift maxed out. I'm not wrong in thinking that this should be relatively common right? Considering how bad the grind is.
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The fact that the archives screw over players that only main one side is a problem for another day.
However, I have to disagree with you completely. I just think that you're probably in the minority that play this game enough consistently to not even notice the grind. The rest of us who actually can't play this game for that long of a time (especially when the progress is so absurdly slow) are obviously going to complain that it's too grindy. It is literally not possible for you to not play for an absurd amount of time and get to tier 70 while not even doing 5 challenges.
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I will be able to make it to 70 (currently at 69.6) without buying any tiers. I was at 64 or 65 after i finished the last challenge.
I am on ps4, so I have no idea how many hours I put in on this but I am sure it has been well over their estimate of an hour a day.
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I mean, I maxed it out without buying tiers, and no one I know who managed to do so bought tiers either, but we'll find out soon. I actually have a survey ready to go that I'll post after the Rift closes, with the aim of finding out exactly what proportion of players finished the Rift, whether they bought tiers, how long it took them, etc.
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I don't really know either, but I ended up roughly the same tiers as my friends, I guess we played a lot together. :D
Yeah, I've been doing that this last days. I don't like it, and I don't think it's good for the health of the game, but I'm just burned out at this point. I usually take trapper so that people can run around me to farm some points if they want too. Tier 69.5, almost done!
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It's far worse for newer players since there are so many that require using specific perks or specific characters to complete. I just gave up on it.
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Um, I played for maybe 3 hours a day for the days I did play. That's not an absurd amount of time, that's average gaming hours. Some days I didn't even play that long. In fact when I reached around 22 days left I was playing Ark most of the time, and missed many days consecutively.
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I started around halfway and mostly played about 2 killer and 2 survivor matches a day and now i'm almost at the point where i got all the serums
Doesn't seem that bad tbh
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