The problem with dailies is that they are... daily. You have to set time aside to do them every day or you will fall behind (yes i know it is not a lot, and likely doesn't actually matter, but the problem is how it feels to miss them, not what the actual outcome is). If you skip you dailies today,you will not be able to just do them twice tomorrow and catch up. Ergo you are "forced" to do them every day.This is true to a degree, and I sympathize with this perspective. But the alternative to dailies isn't a game where you log in whenever you feel like it and complete tasks on your own schedule.
The alternative is a game where you grind like crazy the first couple of weeks, and then spend the next few months complaining that there is nothing to do. If you don't do the hardcore grind, you "fall behind", just as much as if you miss a day of dailies. This is especially true if the rewards are half-decent. It's only the grinds with trivial rewards which players feel free to work on at their own pace.
Of these two extremes, I prefer the dailies.
There's certainly room for improvement though. For example, suppose you could do 5 dailies per day. But you could "bank" up to 25 dailies. This would allow you to skip a day here and there, and make it up the next day.
FFXIV does something similar with its levequest allowance, though that is mostly used for leveling classes. In fact, FFXIV offers two types of leves: one type gives you, say, 100 XP per quest and costs 1 leve allowance. The other type gives you 500 XP per quest, but costs 10 leve allowances. So one is better XP per time, and the other is better XP per allowance.[1]
But overall, I think dailies were an improvement over very long grinds, especially those grinds with meaningful rewards.
1. To be honest, this is probably more complexity than is warranted. I think it also ended up confusing most players.
For years people have been suggesting that they switch to weekly quests instead. Just put a cap of 7 weekly quests per week. Let people choose when to do them, but it is exactly as grindy or not as it is now. Really old idea, still no idea why Blizzard won't do it. Well, I sort of do know, Blizzard really loves forcing us to play exactly their way with as little choice as they can allow.
ReplyDeleteI think weekly quests generally make the "size" of the quest too large. Daily quests allow the quests to be bite-sized and easier to start and finish in a short period of time.
DeleteIt was done by Blizzard at a time, with the dungeon daily. I've no idea why it was reverted back, but a completely random guess is that people were not logging in daily, losing the "habit" and unsubscribing.
ReplyDeleteThat's another possible explanation for the lack of weeklies. Perhaps also the game works best with a mixture. After all, raids are on a weekly cycle, so mixing in dailies with that balances better.
DeleteHah. When i read this i was confused you didnt mention my "solution" to the problem. Then I realized that I had accidentally posted the first half of my reply to your last post twice. Instead of the second half. As soon as I get to my computer I will find the remaining half of the comment. In short I think the best solution is something akin to the conquest system for all progressions. At least for the customer.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering about the double post. The conquest system is nice, but it's also too complex for a lot of things. I'm not sure I really understood when it was first presented.
DeleteSometimes simpler systems that the players don't need to decipher are better, even if they are less "fair".
The relevant part of the missing comment to the last post were these:
ReplyDeleteSolution to the feeling forced issue: The PvP conquest point cap structure is actually very good. Rather than capping you to earning X tokens(rep/free ore/whatever) per day/week. They set a moving cap on how much you can have earned at a given point in the expansion/season. If you could normally earn 1k tokens/points per week (just a random number) then the cap after 5 weeks would be 5k. Meaning if you had not done the activity in question at all and started in week 5 you would be able to catch up if you did it a lot. With conquest points there is a 'tax' of sorts, in that your cap is not AS high if you start in week 5 than it would have been had you maxed it every week, but it is still significantly above the 1k/week cap. I SORELY wish they would introduce a similar mechanic to daily quests. Allowing you to catch up (or almost) even if you skipped your dailies a couple of busy days. This is obviously a simplified example of how conquest points actually work, but the point should be clear enough.
Blizz tried another solution with HS and HotS by allowing dailies to stack 3 days at a time. Giving you some leeway for when you want to play. They also tried something like it back in WotLK with 7 weekly (dungeon)-quests replacing the 7 daily quests you would get in a week. The problem then was that people felt even more pressured to hop in and do them on the last day of the week if they had missed them during the week than they do with dailies (or some people do at least). By using the conquest cap model you effectively remove the 'forced to do it now'-feeling, while still limiting progress so people can't just blaze through on day 1.
Looks like you got your wish! Well, not the conquest cap style mechanic, but the HS dailies stack.
DeleteJust fyi, in FFXIV you can "stack dailies" by one reset. It works like this:
ReplyDelete1) On Day 1, pick up daily beast tribe quests
2) On Day 2 (or 3 or 4 or whenever), do "Day 1 Quests". Once you've done *all of them*, then the Day 2 allowance unlocks. The "all of them" part is crucial because so long as you have a single old daily in your journal you won't be able to accept any new ones.
This also works for weekly stuff like hunt targets. If you have an old target, you can complete it and still pick up the current target as well.
I found this by accident, but I really like it for days when I don't have time/feel like doing my daily quests. I can grab them and then do double on another day.
Yeah, this works, but you still have to log in each day to pick up the quests. But it does relieve the pressure to do all your dailies that day. If you run out of time, you can simply do them the next day.
DeleteFurther musings on the daily ”problem”. More wall of text sorry.
ReplyDeleteDailies probably aren't going away. They serve a purpose. They reward regular play, giving a psychological push for you to log in every day, and this helps to retain customers (at least in the short run). By "forcing" you to think about the game, and play, daily you make it harder for people to take a real break away from the game. For retention this is a good thing, for with MMORPGs absence does not actually make the heart grow fonder. This is exactly the same trick used by soo many mobile games. Reward regular logins with daily login gifts, spins of the wheel of fortune, accelerated progress (or exlusive progress even). These mechanics are all in essence skinner box mechanics. And skinner boxes work.
The problem arises when people miss whatever action you are pushing them to take, because this will feel bad for them. Sometimes people WILL miss a daily for one reason or another, and it will feel bad (at least a tiny bit). Other times people will do the daily even though they didn't really have the time for it and end up feeling bad for missing the other thing they were supposed to do instead. Both of these situations are bad. The daily system ought to minimize the times the 'bad' feeling is triggered, while still maximising the push for you to play regularly. It also has to minimize how bad it feels the times you miss out. (As far as i recall Neverwinter had/may still have a daily login system where each day gives progressively larger/better rewards, but missing a day, or maybe a few days, reset the progress. I am sketchy on the specifics so take it with a grain of salt, but i remember hating the system. Missing day 30 felt really bad)
Seemingly similar solutions can interact very differently with the above. Some causing to small or large a push, or too many bad feelings, etc. Blizzard has tried quite a few solutions by now.
For instance: The 7 weekly quests instead of 1 daily from WotLK dungeons. While i may prefer them personally they were not as good at serving this purpose. A lot of people either got them all done the first day each week, leaving no push to play anymore that week (ignore other similar mechanics for now and pretend this was the only hook/push), or saved them for the last day of the week essentially making them very long dailies that it felt really bad to miss. The 7/week setup was better with regards to allowing people to structure their own time and miss a day or two once in a while. But they were way worse at making people play regularly, and the bad feeling when you missed them was worse.
Continues below
In defense of Neverwinter, there was never a "missing day 30" as the "vanishing coins" only stacked up to seven. That said, it was definitely a needy system and Cryptic has eased up considerably on it over time. In fact, I couldn't find any references to the coins vanishing anymore either in the official Wiki or in game.
DeleteAnd weren't the 7 weekly dungeon quests a Cata thing? People only want to remember the bad stuff from that expansion... :D
I do agree, though much of it is the fault of the players. There's usually more than enough slack built into the schedule that you can finish your goals well before the next patch or whatever.
DeleteI quit WoW when dailies was the only way to progress (for me, as a retired raider). I think the best system is one that you can continue to progress in the way you enjoy the most. In WOTLK that was through faction grinding, which you could do through 5 mans, which I LOVE! So I did it everyday and had a blast doing it. In MOP it got to the point where rep grinds were behind dailies, did a week, unsubscribed. Dailies themselves are not necessarily a retention tactic. I still may be playing today if it was tabard faction grinding. I haven't even played Warlords.
Delete
ReplyDeleteContinued from above
You could play with the length of the period, but the fundamental structure of it means that there will be breakpoints where if you haven't done your quests yet, tomorrow you will lose the option to do all of them. Contrast this with the system blizzard is currently using in HS and HotS. A system that actually strikes me at fairly (if not even 'very') good at achieving the abovementioned goals. The dailies are still dailies, but they allow you 3 days leeway to get around to them allowing you 1-2 days off without punishing you. You are still rewarded for regular play. There are no breakpoints where you lose all the quests from last period, rather they slowly cycle out, making each missed day (after the 3 day leeway) only cost you 1 days worth of rewards. I still find the 3 day period a tad on the short side, but it is definately better than regular dailies.
A system like this on a weekly schedule, or even a 5 day schedule like Rohan suggests, would be decent for me (though I still prefer the conquest-like progression cap i mentioned in my previous post). It would allow me to schedule my own time over the week to (hopefully) get around to doing all my dailies before the backlog gets full. It might not be as good for skinner box retention though, as the possibility of 1 week away might be too much. I would imagine that Blizzard have done a lot of research and decided that playing at least once per 3 days is enough for good retention with HS and HotS. They make have made a conscious decission that it is not good enough for a game like WoW, or there may be some less well thought out reason for why the 3 day leeway havent been introduced in WoW yet. I really really wish they get around to updating the daily system soon though. I am tired of needy MMORPGS trying to decide when I should play.
I still think that you aren't giving enough weight to the idea that if the MMO doesn't decide when the player should play, the player will front-load everything into an intensive start and then simultaneously burn themselves out and become bored.
DeleteI strongly think that players do need to be "paced" through content. But there needs to be more wiggle room in the pacing.
Just noticed this on mmo-champion:
ReplyDelete"The game shouldn't feel like a daily chore. The Emissary system lets you stack up three days of quests so that you don't fall behind if you miss a day."... Guess they were just waiting for legion... 3days, so same as HS/HotS, but definately better than 1day
Heh, yeah, good timing to match our discussion.
DeleteI like the system in SWTOR (and Neverwinter has something similar), where the major reward is tied to a single weekly quest but there are dailies that give you smaller rewards. This way, there is something for you to do if you want to log in every day, but you can still "keep up" with minimal effort.
ReplyDeleteIn LOTRO, some repeatable quests have a cooldown timer of several hours (say, six hours). This way you're not falling behind when you're doing your dailies at the exact same time each day, but the vast majority of players still refer to them as "dailies" and don't camp the NPC, because that would be tedious and interfering with RL.
ReplyDelete