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

Looking at the results so far, a lot of people who didn't manage to complete the Rift seem to have gotten to within the 50-69 range, which I thought was interesting. It's possible that those people completed the Tome, but didn't want to grind out progress through XP alone since, as you say, that part did get a bit tedious.

Aww, thank you! ❤️ I'm really looking forward to sharing the results with everyone. They're looking pretty interesting so far.

Opinions seem to be very much divided when it comes to the grind, difficulty of the challenges, and how excited people are about the next one. I agree with you in general, although I do think it would be nice if most people were able to make it through the next Rift just by completing the challenges (through a combination of challenge rewards and XP gained in matches while trying to complete them). I believe that was the intention for this first Rift, but changes made to the last two levels of the Tome made that much less doable.

Your point about challenges repeating is the main reason why I am generally happy with the way they've done the current challenges, even if many of them seem unhealthy, unreasonable or luck-based to a lot of people. I don't want them to restrict themselves to a certain kind of challenge like "complete one generator" too much, because I feel like that would get really boring really fast. Having said that, I do think that the character-specific challenges should remain fairly limited as long as DLC perks and characters are involved, since I think it puts new players and those who can't afford to unlock the characters at an unfair disadvantage.

I asked a few yes/no questions in the survey about the general experience with the Rift, but I was more interested in the raw data than in measuring general player satisfaction. I think that kind of opinion-based information is more valuable to the developers, and it's something that as a player, you can get a fair idea of just by looking at people's ideas about the Archives on the forum. What you can't get just from looking at the forum is any kind of accurate numerical data, so that was primarily what I was looking to get out of this survey.

Also, I didn't want to make it too long or overwhelming in case it turned people off, which is why I stuck to multiple choice and a few (optional) text-based responses, rather than open-ended questions.

Having said all that, I do appreciate you taking the time to do the survey, and sharing your opinions here 😊 The experience with the challenges does seem to have been generally pretty mixed, which has been the case since they were first released, so hopefully the devs will be able to take some of that feedback on board when it comes to making improvements to future Tomes.

Yeah, I think the balance is probably harder to strike than a lot of people give them credit for. I think designing it for the average player was the right idea (which, incidentally, does seem to have been the case based on the survey responses so far - 60% of those who responded were able to complete the Rift). However, whether or not it was completable within 70-80 hours, an estimate which was based on the average player's daily playtime, according to the devs, is much more in question. So far, the answer to that is looking to be a general "no".

I too was surprised about the turn they took with the archives - I thought for sure the next one would be about Wraith or Hillbilly, given that the devs had expressed a desire to expand primarily upon the lore of the older characters who didn't get much backstory when they first released. I feel like all of the original characters are in much more dire need of additional lore than, say, Jane or Spirit, which is why I'm a bit puzzled as to why they decided to do it this way. I do like the fact that we're getting four characters in one Tome, though, because it will hopefully mean more lore and more variety in the challenges.

I definitely agree that it's a good thing to incentivise players to try out new characters and playstyles and discover fun new ways of playing the game that they might not otherwise have considered. That's one of the best things to come out of the Tomes, in my opinion. And I would also be interested in seeing more perk challenges, for the same reasons. Even if they don't end up working that well as challenges, it would be nice to give them a go just for the sake of putting the spotlight on underused perks and encouraging players to break out of the meta and discover different builds and synergies.

The main reason I'm interested in knowing how many challenges people completed is because I want to know how much of their Rift progress was earned in that manner. But you're right, that definitely could be an interesting question to find out the answers to, particularly when it comes to the difficulties faced by solo versus SWF players.

I agree that the Rift could be somewhat alienating for new players, but even veterans may be forced to play with characters and perks they're not experienced with in order to complete challenges. It could be more difficult for newer players while they're still trying to learn the game, certainly, but I don't think it's particularly polarising.

It's very possible that some new players might struggle with it a lot more than others, though. My assessment is based largely on my own experience watching my brother, who started playing about a week after the first Rift opened, trying to complete challenges. I know him to be smart, a fast learner, good at video games in general and to have a very relaxed attitude, so perhaps he had some advantage there, but he was able to easily make it to tier 55, and could have gone well beyond that if he (a killer main) could have been bothered to complete more of the survivor challenges. For a new player who has less gaming experience or is a slower learner than my brother, however, the Rift may have proved a lot more insurmountable. And with the introduction of DLC characters into the mix, I worry that the issue of alienating newer players will only worsen with the next Rift.

Having said all that, I do definitely agree that veteran players have some significant advantages when it comes to completing Rift challenges. But off the top of my head, I can't really imagine a way in which the challenges could be designed where that wouldn't be the case to some extent.

From what I've seen on the PTB, "you don't need to do the character specific challenges in order to get to the end" does seem to be what they're going with as far as designing the Tome to be fair to all players goes.

That's interesting. What made you want to complete the last Rift?

Fair enough. I wish I could afford to do that, lol! Are you planning to do the same thing with the next Rift as well?

That's totally cool to mention. And no, the PTB didn't add the ability to see which challenge you had selected while in game. I agree that that would be a good feature to add for future Tomes, as well as the ability to see how far you have progressed in your challenge during the match.

As an alternative to the "able to select challenges for both roles" thing, which I think is a good and probably much easier to implement suggestion, I think it could also work if the system were changed such that players could gain progress in any and all valid challenges (that is, those that have been reached on the web) during a match, but they have to choose one challenge in which to keep the progress at the end. This would remove the frustration that a lot of people seem to experience whenever they forget to select a challenge, or forget to switch to a different challenge when changing roles.

The developers do have access to these statistics, that's true, but we as a community do not. Since we can't expect the developers to necessarily share their statistics with us (they are under no obligation to do so, after all), I decided it might be useful to generate our own for everyone to access.

And yes, it was fairly clear from the start that the 70-80 hour estimate was probably inaccurate, but we didn't know that for certain, and we didn't know how far off that estimate was on the whole. We knew that we and the people we talked to weren't able to complete it in that time, perhaps, but my hope here is to give everyone a more accurate picture of what the community experience at large was like, outside of our individual bubbles.

If you don't find hard data of this kind particularly valuable, that's okay, it's not for everyone necessarily. But I personally am very interested in statistical data here, and I think enough other people are as well that I felt it was worth doing.

For anyone who is curious, the survey is currently at 627 respondents! Thank you again to everyone who has shared their experience so far.

Aiming for 1000 as a stretch goal, because I think it's a nice round number and significant enough to make for a solid sample size.

Incidentally, there have been some interesting patterns emerging from the responses so far. If anyone is curious about particular stats, let me know and I'll be happy to share them 😊

Yes, I'm eventually going to share all the stats in one big post, and I wasn't saying I would PM the results to anyone. What I was saying is that if anyone is interested in particular data points, for example what percentage of respondents so far managed to complete the Rift, I can share that here. But I wasn't going to do that unless someone asked, which is why I invited them to do so if they were interested.

Yeah, I think DCs and other players generally sabotaging (or in the case of survivors, often competing for) one's challenges was a widespread issue in the first Tome. Unfortunately, it's not something that's easy to solve without making all the challenges pretty boring, but hopefully the DC penalties that were tested recently might help when they get implemented, especially for the killer challenges.

The one hour per day thing does seem to have been nowhere near accurate. I can only imagine that the initial calculation didn't take queue/lobby times or early disconnections into account at all.

I have mixed feelings about the disconnection thing. In the case of the basement sacrifices, for example, I think if the last survivor disconnects on hook or while being carried, it should perhaps count, because you were clearly about to complete the challenge. But if someone disconnects at the start of the game, I don't think that should just grant the challenge automatically. It's not the player's fault, of course, but they still didn't earn the challenge. In any case, hopefully the disconnection penalties will be implemented properly soon, and we'll see a significant reduction in that kind of behaviour for future Tomes.

I agree that the grind towards the end especially, after completing all the challenges, was quite wearing, and I hope that at least is reduced for the next Rift.

It's probably a good idea generally to wait and see how far you can get in the Rift before investing money into it, so you know you won't regret your purchase. I think it's unfortunate that so many people bought the pass because they assumed the devs' estimate was correct and that they would only have to play for 70 hours, and now are feeling disappointed and resentful because of it. That figure probably should have been looked at much more carefully, because the effect it's had on a lot of players hasn't made for a great start to the Archives in many ways.

I spent some time at the start of the Rift, after I had finished the first level of challenges, trying to grind out one tier every day. Typically, it would take me about 12-15 games to do so, or around 2-3 hours of playtime. The challenges helped a lot with progress, so I didn't have to do that for 70 days straight, but ultimately unless you're someone who is outrageously passionate about the game and/or plays it for a living, I don't think that level of dedication is very sustainable over an extended period of time. So it doesn't surprise me that a lot of people who play more casually, or who like to spend their time on other games as well, got pretty burned out by the end.