So it looks like we were getting a new (5th) Air Daily goal, but it apparently got pulled (along with the patch notes) at the last minute yesterday. Source: Reddit (but it appeared in EVE Hoboleaks as well).
āYou will earn progress towards this goal whenever you complete a jump between solar systems. This includes jumps via Stargates, Ansiblex Gates, wormholes, travel filaments, Shipcasters, or Cynosural jumps.ā
Take this with a grain of salt, though (the new jump daily goal wasnāt implemented yesterday for whatever reason).
If they augment the ādaily jumpā goal with at least one more non-career goal (for a total of 6), Iād be pretty ecstatic. I know āundockingā is a total cheese, but if they want to get players out and about having an āundockā and ājumpā daily goal certainly couldnāt hurt. They donāt even have to provide ISK or Evermarks for these two (just progress on the overall bonuses for completing 2 daily goals).
On the other hand I like that these daily goals are finally getting aligned with regular gameplay so that people who play the game complete the daily goals by simply playing the game the way they wanted.
In an ideal situation daily goals should never push people to do certain tasks only ābecause the daily told them soā. Ideally daily goals reward players by playing the game as usual that day, so they donāt become daily chores.
In other games theyāve done this much better. Back when I played Albion I never felt like I had to do specific things to complete their daily goal - simply playing the game in almost any way filled it.
Aside from getting daily goals aligned to regular gameplay, I do think thereās another challenge in EVE with daily goals: all the alt characters we have even on a single account.
In my daily gameplay I may not play with all my alts daily, but for daily goals (which are per character) I might feel encouraged to log them in, jump some gates ābecause the daily told me soā, which again goes against the ideal design of dailies.
I would suggest that dailies are on a per-account basis rather than per-character. And that the rewards go to the redeem queue (to be used on any character) and a bit higher to make up for the lost alt revenue.
Makes me wonder how much the ADG activity must have plummeted after CCP āimprovedā the system the last time that they seem themselves forced to introduce a completely non-activity activity as a daily goal. Doing a few gate jumps is not really an effort activity like scanning sites.
Though, I wonāt complain about CCP doing what I asked for a while back: introduce activities that you can complete while you engage in other gameplay activities. Some semblance of reason returns to this skinner box. This is good.
Yes, it is. They couldāve left it at 8 tasks to choose from, added a few new ones and eliminated the duplicates. Theyāve needlessly lost a lot of good will with players with all these counterproductive iterationsā¦
I disagree with that. I think a portion of the benefit from something like daily goals/rewards is due to encouraging players to try different aspects of the game, or different fits, or different activities than they normally would.
It gives at least the occasional reason to break out of the standard rut of their daily routine and try something else. When they had the 8 rewards, I encouraged new players to try completing more than just the 2 needed, because they could get an extra 2 or 3 million ISK per day while learning different parts of the game.
I do agree the tasks shouldnāt be set up to feel like a āchoreā (which the move to 4 tasks increased) but they also shouldnāt just be mindlessly completed without thought or effort by doing what you always do anyway.
The current daily tasks feel like a chore and there isnāt really any incentive to try new things. Thereās nothing that encourages players to train into new skills, ships or to venture into new areas like low-sec, null-sec or wormhole space.
There should be a lot more done to not only encourage players to upgrade to Omega - but remain so. Everything is so expensive that it actually disincentivizes players from doing anything beyond logging in and performing the bare minimum - because players can ill afford to risk anything they canāt immediately replace.
The main goal of daily goals, regardless of whether the dailies are log-in rewards or rewards for doing some basic tasks in a game, is to encourage players to come back and interact with the game every day.
After all, players who are already logged in are more likely to keep playing a bit more that day, which boosts daily player numbers, engagement and sales.
If there also is a goal of making people try different aspects of the game thatās a secondary purpose at most.
In EVE this other goal is already covered by both AIR challenges and the Agency, both created to guide new and existing players towards various activities in the game. This makes it redundant for daily challenges to do this same thing again.
I do not think it benefits the primary goal of daily challenges to focus too much on this secondary purpose.
From personal experience the only time dailies succeeded to make me log in more often was when dailies were simple and easily completed while normally playing the game:
log-in rewards made me log in and interact with the game more often
simple easily completable tasks made me try to at least log in daily and complete the task
Yet when CCP removed double challenges and forced us to spread out and āalso try other activitiesā, instead of also doing those other things I simply stopped paying attention to dailies. I log in to play EVE, not to chase chores because of a fear of missing out.
In other words, by trying to fit the secondary purpose of making me go out of my usual way dailies have failed their primary purpose: I no longer log in daily for those challenges and only log in when I have other reasons to play.
I call that a failure of dailies.
I suggest that CCP focuses on the primary purpose of dailies instead: let players complete dailies by playing the game as usual without going out of their way for the dailies.
And if CCP wants to encourage players to try other content in the game too - thatās what AIR and the Agency are for.
Technically, thatās a failure of the current daily design - not of either dailies or primary/secondary purposes. Itās not an either/or situation, dailies can accomplish both objectives.
By your own admission, prior iterations worked for youā¦ presumably the ā8 tasks with doublesā variant. If CCP had slightly limited the doubles, and added in 1 or 2 tasks like the ā3 jumpsā one, that would have suited both your own preference and the ādo more variety of thingsā for players that wanted to do extra.
I promoted the 8-tasks version to new players because in effect it gave them a decent ābase incomeā level of 2 or 3 million ISK per day, plus encouraged newer players to try different aspects of the game before settling into a rut.
Iād call that a win-win for players and CCP both.
The problem is that literally keep changing the dailies every 1-2 months. At this point I really have no desire for things to āreturn to the way they wereā because Iām so jaded over how this entire process has (and continues to) devolve.
Scatter as much cheese about as you will - this rat (and I suspect many others) are tired of playing this shell game.
But thatās not what dailies were being used for. They were being used for SP farms via the AIR achievements. Players were getting 200k SP free per day. Every single day. That adds up to 6 million SP per month that you didnāt have to buy skill injectors for.
I believe youāre referring to the SP rewards from the AIR Career program. Which donāt have anything to do with AIR Daily Opportunities rewards, afaik. (Except in those few cases where something like ākill 25 NPCsā might contribute to goals on either side.)
AIR daily goals only give SP rewards to the player completing them, arenāt transferrable, and canāt earn more than 10k SP per day (plus the monthly complete-12-tasks reward).