PAYDAY 3: Blog Update #30 – Modifiers Feedback Survey

Hey heisters,

A little while ago, we put out a little survey about modifiers on our social channels, which we were happy to see spread. In total, we received over 3.5k responses (good job, gang!) and have been taking the time to parse this information, taking some learnings, and formulating a plan on how to proceed with modifiers in the game.

First thing’s first, why did we want to ask about modifiers and get feedback? Anecdotally speaking, we knew that there was resistance to some modifiers in the game–which of course leads to assumptions forming, and you know what they say about assumptions.

That being said, a few of our assumptions were on the mark, but others were way off. Looking at the data of heists played across weeks with certain modifiers, and drawing conclusions showed an unexpected lack of change in the most played heists. Rather than continue to read data without context, we decided to put the survey out to you and here’s what we got back!

Do you look at the modifiers before choosing the heist, or do you accept any that are active for that period of time?

Do you play on Very Hard, Overkill or both?

Would you rather the modifiers change on a hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis?

If there was a option for you to choose what modifiers to have active would that be of interest? (Payout scaling with each modifier added.)

Would you be more receptive to difficulty modifiers if they came with rewards? (Money, C-stacks, XP.)

Some of our assumptions on which modifiers would be the most or the least popular surprised us, with Lead Guard being more of a negative than some of us predicted. That’s why this kind of feedback is really useful to us, though.

Threat Detection is a highly contentious modifier among those who responded to the survey–which appeared in both the top 3 most liked and disliked modifiers… simultaneously–so what we’ll end up doing with it is still up in the air. We’ll see how our short-term plans (explained in the next section) will affect this before we do anything drastic.

What’s Next?

Long-term, this is still to be determined since there’s a lot of work being done behind the scenes to various aspects of the game. If you missed last week’s blog post on Armor 2.0, that’s a good example of a big “something” that’s on the design table right now that takes priority for the designers.

It’s very clear from the survey that the community wants the ability to “build your experience” with selections of modifiers and gaining extra rewards for the increased risks. That’s an approach we like, but since this is still early in the feedback, we’ve not yet started work on designing what this means or what is possible with all the other things we want to cook for next year. We’ll be sure to share design concepts and ideas as we start working on them, just as we did with Armor 2.0!

In the short-term, we’re going to make a few adjustments to modifiers based on your feedback in this survey.

Firstly, we are investigating the possibility of having an automated rotation to cycle new modifiers daily as this was the most popular time scale from the survey. This work has not yet begun, so we don’t have an estimate on time, but will let you know more in the near future. We’ll also look at the frequency of certain modifiers based on their popularity. At the moment, we’re not going to change the modifiers that are available, but we’ll try to find ways to minimize the most egregious combinations. Stay tuned!

Finally, we just wanted to show appreciation to those of you who took the time to answer the survey, and more so to those who wrote feedback in the free-text section. there were more than 1k of you that did. We see you. We appreciate you. <3

We’ll see you next week for more PAYDAY 3 goodness!

-The PAYDAY Team