I also found it very interesting. And the mere fact that there are several threads on this topic now and that people are actually writing down long, structured and conclusive thoughts on the matter should enable CCP to grasp that they did something very wrong which needs correction.
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(off topic general explanations, feel free to skip)
I think itâs a bit too long but at the same time my feelings on the topic are too complex to be summed up in a shorter essay.
I have always been in the ânon dailyâ team, for the first reason that it exacerbates biases in players and IMO a game that makes his playerbase worse is making itself worse ; and as well a making it less appealing for me, as it creates the need and provides the product at the same time instead of focusing their work on making the product better.
Dev time ( including testing, design, feedback loop etc we are talking weeks of man work for a simple feature ) being spent on player-altering mechanism is likely not dev time spent improving the user experience. In reality it can also be, itâs not necessarily exclusive - features can be used as a playtest with simple dailies and then used as the reward platform basis, but there is still always time spent against players rather than for players.
That being said you canât discuss a feature without understanding itâs pros and goals first (least you do a strawman) ;
And whatâs more you canât say âremove itâ to a feature that is already in place (as it would require more work to remove work and from the dev lead it means a net negative effect- yes I know, sunk cost but it actually is negative gain from an exec PoV, they HAVE TO give value to features in place) , instead you need ways to incrementally improve a feature to make it less toxic and more appealing, that is focus on its strong points and âround the edgeâ on its weak points.
I make that digression, because I noticed a lot of people (including me) requesting to remove features (with good reasons ! Itâs me 
) but the issue is, those reasons were provided solely from the one-sided view of a player, and therefore going against some ⌠untold rules that are likely to be present. As much as a player opinion can be nicely constructed and make sense, if it goes against exec goals itâs a waste of time from a constructive discussion target.
That being said, thank you for taking the time to read my (previous) long post.
/digress
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@Power_Armor It should but will it? We would first have to trust that CCP even read some of these threads and that if they do would understand that action is urgently needed. Alas, we almost never get updated on such matters. If itâs positive we would only find out by logging in one day and discover that the 8 dailies are back, no note in patch note or anything.
If itâs negative then players will engage less with it CCP will be left with more questions than answers and so will we.
I think that CCP DO listen to the player base, I found many proposal I made actually implemented, the issue is that the way players see the game and exec want the game may be fundamentally disjoint.
What we want is not what they need, and reciprocally. Whatâs more they may not know what they want, and so do we ^^
That being said, I think we already have a good start, as it seems to me that CCP already agrees that player satisfaction is more important than players paying (alpha, the new thing that gives skills), which avoids the greedy loophole of âonly doing things that bring moneyâ and which in turn would actually make the game worse, thus dooming us all.
Remember that most companies have a very small prevision range, 3 months usually, one year at most, and so what is usually better is what brings money in those 3 month time frame, event if it is ârorqual onlineâ and the game needs drastic measures to get healthier 3 years later.
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Another interesting post ( all of it ), and thank you for going more in depth. You see things from an interesting perspective and I appreciate that.
Iâm not afraid of long posts as long as theyâre not preachy, haughty or self-serving.
Yours arenât too long and do not have the aforementioned characteristics.
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Iâm glad they do listen once in a while and I agree with you that what the execs want and need isnât necessarily what players want.
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At the end of the day, we have to remember, they are making the game, not us. They have designs and concepts that they want even though we dont.
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@Geo_Eclipse_Oksaras Thatâs true. We players do not have the full and complete picture of what CCP wants and where they want to take the game. Not only that but complaining will avail us naught.
Iâm happy to log in and do what I enjoy doing. Iâm also happy to leave issues like Player Retention, balance and coding to the Devs. Itâs too easy to criticize when we donât have to deal with it so I will slow down on complaining and criticizing and I still congratulate the arts team who do a fantastic job.
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There is no scenario where manufacturing will ever be difficult. Not without making very specific out of the way tasks akin to the FW tasks. Even if you have to do two separate jobs itâs easy. But even that easy task is still more than simply bringing up the character select screen, which was all it took for years. I assumed they merely wanted people to actually log in with characters. But with this change I guess thatâs not the goal either.
The issue is two completely different activities genres that arenât necessarily related. The miner should not have to do missions (not even mining missions, which are just dumb and shouldnât even exist in-game) or shield rep somebody. I think the Faction Warfare tasks should be removed in their entirety as that requires a specific corp alignment/character state and being in a particular region. Seeing as they fixed salvaging (you no longer need to be successful) they should bring that back. And mining should be static like manufacturing, but based on a raw amount and not m3 (as obviously anything other than veldspar takes more time). They could also make modifications like having to do a set number of security missions and 50LP for courier missions. But why should it be artificially time consuming in a way that detracts from the things the player actually enjoys?
I donât think the point should be to make a chore. Which is what CCP seems intent on doing. If they donât want people to have the SP then just get rid of the whole thing. Iâd love for them to state honestly and openly what their goal is with this stuff. What it is they want to achieve.
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To add to what you wrote, i repeat here what i wrote elsewhere on the difficulty to do the daily tasks:
How am i supposed to apply damage or repairing someone if iâm not in a corp, live in highsec and donât want to lose my ship?
How am i supposed to do missions if in the space where i live are no agents?
How am i supposed to get Evermarks if paragon stations are not reachable for me? - either because traveltime is too high or my security standing is too low so i canât do the missions without getting blown up
What if signatures to be scanned takes ages, because i suck at scanning and they are very scarce in the space where i live - like 1 in every 5 systems?
That list goes even on, depending on your location, playstyle and other circumstances. While this is a plus for Eve as it shows the diversity in the universe, this is a problem when you design âAIR daily goalsâ to be supposedly doable for everyone without keeping your game design in mind.
That is why people are asking for 2 goals of each track including doubling of goals, as this is the only way for those goals to become doable at all. Or if that is out of the question a complete redesign of the goal content is needed.
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I think you and some other posters are mis-perceiving the primary point of game mechanics like Daily rewards.
First, youâre analyzing it here from the perspective of a vet player with multiple captains that can easily move from task to task. âDailies are easy if you have 1 pilot positioned to Manu, 1 running missions, 1 in a WH, 1 doing Abyssalsâ etc. Also the âplayers only want the rewardsâ partâŚ
Well sure, for Vet players, 10k SP and 1M ISK is useful, but not truly meaningful. So of course they want the rewards in few clicks, because the rewards arenât worth spending more than a few minutes on.
For multiple players I spoke with who were still either working on their first few million SP and with less than 10-30 million ISK or so, these rewards were meaningful, they were worth spending time on, and having pilots able to mission, mine, scan, PvP, Abyss etc. wasnât exactly trivial.
Take a look at a typical 8-mission list:
(from Ancient Gaming Noob blog: The Ancient Gaming Noob )
Sure, some vets could cheese the daily there in 5 minutes or less. But for newer players thatâs incentive to try Manufacturing, Mining, Scanning, Mission Running, and PvP or fleet PvE all in one day. And to figure out how to âcomboâ their rewards, like run Security missions with a fleet-mate to get the LP, Kill NPC, and Shield boost rewards all together.
Who the heck cares if vets are getting paid a dribble for 5 minutes of clicks? Even if 100,000 pilots a day are completing 4 tasks for 10k SP and 2 million ISK, thatâs a drop in the bucket. EVE pays out roughly 5,600 billion ISK per day.
The point should be to keep players coming back, keep EVE top of mind to more players, give both new and old players some incentive to log in and check every day. And for once, that system proportionately benefitted newer players more than older ones.
Giving new players more reasons to engage with the game in those first few weeks (when they normally drop like flies) seemed like a fairly good idea to me. But then, itâs always been difficult to restrain CCP from finding fancy new ways to shoot themselves in the foot. Any time they come up with something decent, itâs generally only a matter of time until they reverse it or remove it altogether.
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Just an update that Iâm finding both in-game and in external media (like these forums, Reddit etc.) that more and more people appear to be finding the current 4-task Daily Goals to be ânot worth itâ and just not participating.
While the upcoming task of âmake 3 jumpsâ may improve the situation somewhat, from what I can tell players were much more interested in the 8-task version of AIR Dailies. Especially newer players who could use those tasks to generate a small decent income while also trying out different activities in the game.
CCP should really revisit the 8-task version, itâs hard to see what the downside of that could be.
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It appears that each change to these things has been more unpopular than the last.
Why donât CCP simply ask players what they want?
Get the CSMs on the case, come up with some options, and put it to a vote and then, finally, put the issue to bed.
These daily activities push players to expand outwards and interact with different game mechanics. This is a good thing, and requiring you to do two different play-style activities is a very intentional choice.
Now, there are a few areas to improve, such as:
â FW-specific dailies should only be given to FW folks.
â mining should count m^3 vice quantity of ore chunks
â exploration gameplay is more than merely scanning, it also includes data/relic hacking
â wider variety of quest choices within each game play type, with easy/medium/hard and increased rewards for the medium/hard options
Easy, players will say they want free stuff and donât want to do anything to get them.
Half the reason for the current era of Nullsec Stagnation is nullsec leadership/CSM saying they want it easier to defend their space, etc. etc. and CCP did that. It has not been good for the gameâs health at large.
Wormholes saw a similar imapact, with the biggest C5/6 corps complaining about needing to defend their sites from people ratting them, and then CCP removed the drifter boss to combat that⌠which made a lot of people leave WH space with notable increased stagnation, and even now CCP only âsemi-revertsâ that change with a lesser drifter boss to bring those smaller groups back.
Listening to the players who scream and shout âgimme gimme gimme I want more but I donât want to do anything to deserve moreâ usually doesnât improve the game at large, and only benefits those specific players at the expense of everybody else.
Yes thatâs why I specified getting CSMs involved, coming up with options and then voting on it - but I understand why you needed to ignore that part as it served your rant to do so.
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The CSMs have been involved, and were a key factor in the Nullsec Stagnation issue.
Sadly, that hasnât helped anybody except the in-group and leaders of the Nullsec alliances.
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As I said in another thread, the downside is it was being used to SP farm. You create two new toons, the dailies gave you just enough SP to inject a couple of needed skills, you complete the first ârankâ of the AIR challenges, and get your 50k SP on both toons, for a total of 100k. Delete the toons, wait 10 hours, create two more new toons, rinse repeat. Players were getting 200k SP for free every single day using that method, to the tune of 6 million free SP per month.
For veteran players with more than 80 million SP, that is 40 Large Skill Injectors of SP worth 32 billion ISK. Thatâs why it was changedâŚ
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Except you can still get the exact same 10k SP per day via Dailies, so it appears nothing was changed. If the design problem is AIR Career reward abuse by vets, then fix the AIR Career reward payouts for vets.
Leaving the AIR Career abuse untouched and screwing up the potential good of AIR dailies for new players (which was one of the few systems that benefit newbros more than vets) is an extremely useless âfixâ.
What about, âFocus on the activities you enjoy the mostâ, says to you that a PvPer in Lowsec flying a Firetail wants to stop everything to mine 2000 veldspar? You say this is an intentional choice. Are you agreeing that CCP is full of you-know-what?
And how is this a âgood thingâ? Why?
That has nothing to do with the Daily Goals. Itâs the AIR Career Program that can be SP farmed. Daily Goal SP is not transferrable. It is directly injected, doesnât go to unclaimed and itâs 525 SP every 30 days max as an Omega. You need 5M SP foundation before you can start extracting SP so itâs not efficient at all to farm as you can only skill queue one character at a time. If youâre investing MCT or wasting Omega account for this youâre farming wrong and itâs even more ridiculous.
Now back to AIR Career Program. The ability to complete the SoF (if you have a friend or run multiple accounts) or Industrial activities every day has not changed. This will net you 150 SP a day or 4.5M SP a month that can be given to your main. This is regardless of Alpha or Omega status. People can still do this. None of the changes to Daily Goals effects the AIR Career Program one iota.