DEFENDERS,

A couple weeks ago we started a DDA Community Survey to gather feedback from the community about various topics. We received over 1,200 responses and so this post will go over various elements from that survey and talk about the results and what our thoughts are.

Quality of Life Section

Question: Do you think accessing the inventory during combat phase should be allowed without the ability to swap gear?

• Results: 66% Yes | 21% In-Different | 13% No
• Thoughts: With a large amount of people voting yes I think this is enough to implement into the game. That said, looking through the feedback in this section, it’s clear that the major concern is that host’s don’t want their players to be managing inventory in combat if their build needs support. With that in mind we’ll be implementing a gameplay option that allows the host to disable inventory management during combat for the session.

Question: Do you think swapping heroes should be allowed during combat phase?

• Results: 36% Yes | 17% In-Different | 47% No
• Thoughts: With the mixed results and the majority saying no, I think this is something we will avoid adding.

Question: Would you be in favor of being able to swap ONE time during the wave?

• Results: 63% Yes | 17% In-Different | 20% No
• Thoughts: With the majority saying Yes, This is something we’ll be looking into adding. That said, reading through the feedback it was commonly suggested that instead of allowing one swap, we allow players to swap freely within X Seconds of the combat wave starting. I think this is a better solution as it prevents accidental swapping to the wrong hero and then being locked to that hero.

Question: Do you think upgrade costs should be refunded on towers built in the same build phase.

• Results: 79% Yes | 15% In-Different | 6% No
• Thoughts: With an overwhelming majority saying Yes, this is something we’ll be adding to the game.

Question: What are your opinions on the Hybrid System?

• Results:
  

• Thoughts: In general this is definitely still a divided topic even among the different sections of players, and there are many good pros and cons for both sides of the argument. Overall this question was mainly just to gauge where the player base stands, with the results there’s probably not going to be any major changes at this time, but something to keep in mind for long term goals.

Arcanist Armor Set

Of all the ideas, the Power Crystal idea was the clear winner out of the group. With 75% saying Yes, 19% saying In-Different and then 6% saying no.

That said there was a lot of good feedback provided by you guys. One of the main concerns would be inventory space and management. While Tavern Storage would help with this, we’ll be keeping in mind this when we go to implement the system. Hopefully doing some kind of dedicated storage UI for power crystals that can be utilized when applying them to equipment and also making sorting and management easier.

Now that we know the direction of Arcanist we’ll begin the process into implementing, that said we don’t have any kind of estimate on when this will be finished but we’ll update as things progress. 

Features and Improvements

This section had a ton of feedback to go through, too much to really summarize in this post. A lot of the responses to this section were things already on the roadmap or generally things like more difficult content, more variety. 

A couple notable suggestions that stuck out to us were:

• Adding a way to see what killed the core and from where instead of it only having to guess.
• This has been requested before but having items that get dropped off the map be teleported somewhere on the map instead of being sold.

Maps and Heroes

For this section we won’t be showing the results as we want to keep some mystery when it comes to future heroes and maps, but that said we’ll mention the top ones for each section displayed in the order they showed in the survey.

• Heroes: The top 4 heroes by very close margins were Barbarian, Jester, Lavamancer and Gunwitch. 
• Maps: The top 3 maps were Aquanos, King’s Game and Tavern Defense.

With that said, We don’t have any idea if or when specific heroes or maps will be added but it’s good to know which ones players would most look forward to seeing return. That said, we’ll be revealing one of those maps today (5/12/2023) so tune in for a sneak peek.

Monetization 

This topic was really good information to have, as monetization is an important topic for both players and developers. The results were as follows:

With the following results in mind, we’ll look into how we can expand into the various cosmetic categories. We've been working on a new cosmetic emporium shop UI similar to DD2 as this gives the ability to add more cosmetics without bloating the amount of DLC’s. Additionally it allows us to make cosmetics purchasable on console platforms easier and quicker.

As for Heroes, Maps and Quality of Life Enhancements, we’ll remain cautious on if and how we expand into those categories, but ultimately at the end of the day depends on other factors as more revenue for DDA directly correlates to how long we can continue to develop and improve the game.

What’s Next?

We’ve been hard at finishing up the next update that we hope to have out by the end of the month. We’ll likely be starting a small PTR test for some of these features & content as soon as potentially next Friday. This test would include Tavern Storage, In-Game Titles, A New Schedule System, A new returning map which will be revealed on stream today (5/12/2023).

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