Exactly, a wider range of options would improve the daily challenges a lot.
Even 6 sounds limiting, it could easily be 2 out of 10 while keeping the objective of daily challenges to ‘make people actively engage with the game daily’.
Add some simple general challenges like
And then players are rewarded for actively playing the game that day no matter how they want to engage with the sandbox.
Selling/Filling orders would be a good one to add as I regularly sell the items that are ultimately used to gank me and it would be nice to occasionally log in and see my dailies have already completed in my absence 
incidentally, “get killed/podded” could also be one.
I can sympathise with the feeling.
Except you can only do the complete row once in a month. Delaying a day doesn’t reduce the SP you get provided you get all twelve done in a month.
I’m on holiday this week - I’ll still get the same SP this month as you despite not having logged in for the last few days. I’m about half way along at the moment.
That “n days remaining” becomes “next in n days” when you’ve completed it.
Except you can only do the complete row once in a month. Delaying a day doesn’t reduce the SP you get provided you get all twelve done in a month.
After completing 12-tasks chain you still get 5K SP a day for completing those tasks.
I know it doesn’t sound like a lot, but I see SP as critical game asset.
I think the point of the dailies isn’t to provide guaranteed completion regardless of your chosen playstyle or region every single day.
The point is to get players, especially newer players, to branch out and try different things. And that means some days, where RNG doubles or triples a reward, just might be enough to entice someone who never missions or PvPs or mines to give that option a try. And only needing 12 days out of 30 for the main rewards means you can afford to miss some days if they don’t suit you.
I may complain about quite a few of CCP’s design choices, but in this case I think they’ve tuned the daily reward system in a way that does that rarest of things - benefits new and intermediate players as much or more than established players.
5k SP and 500,000 ISK and 500 Evermarks is meaningful to a newer player. If you’re a vet and worried because that daily reward doesn’t match your regular playstyle, I’m pretty sure you’ve got other things you can do to make that level of reward back in 30 minutes or less.
The point is to get players, especially newer players, to branch out and try different things.
I may be wrong, but I think AIR Career Program plays exactly that role.
Dailies are permanent and applicable both at the beginning and later when we should follow the sandbox approach.
All the whining and complaining in this thread.
If you don’t like the daily opportunities, for whatever reason, don’t do them. It’s really that simple.
Seriously, you’re going to sit there and complain about how you get your free stuff. Talk about entitlement and inflated egos.
Here’s my suggestion, CCP ditch this entire mechanic and go back to where you can only get SP from training. Bet you’d scream even louder if they did that, so why don’t you take your freebie with a little bit of grace?
I know was not really an important aspect of your post but just a fun(ny)fact: They won’t do that as this is their way to bribe their players to artificially inflate their login numbers (in the past) daily active player numbers to fulfill their commitments to their investors and Pearl Abyss (by the most effortless way possible).
Oh, I know that. They made that clear in their explanation of why the login rewards disappeared.
People should still have a bit of decorum about getting handed freebies. If the daily rewards are the only reason they’re logging in, then I’d think some reevaluation of the gaming budget is in order.
Personally, I’d like to see the people who just log in for the dailies leave. CCP isn’t going to address any of this game’s real issues so long as it looks like they don’t need to. This is partly why my solution to people who complain about things is that they leave. Because as long as they’re padding the numbers, CCP won’t make any major changes.
True but you (might) have it backwards. So the reason for not making the game better and making major changes is not due to padding, instead: they are padding so they can skip making a better game and major changes. (Maybe you already understand this though so just stating to make sure.)
So in short this is the easiest for them that takes the least effort is why they do this and it is their deliberate choice to do this instead of making a better game that attracts more valuable player interaction with the game and achieve more playtime that way. Bribing is cheaper, easier, lazier.
And as you imply as long as they can get away with this instead of putting in real effort they will stick to this as long as they can.
I think this is the key one. The devs have said in the past that making changes is a nightmare, and it can only have gotten worse over the years since they said that. It’s not that they don’t want to make changes, it’s just nearly impossible to do at this point.
That’s the purpose of the AIR Career program, which is made for newbies.
The Daily Challenges are made for every player. These are meant to encourage every player to engage with the game every day.
However, in their current state the dailies are ignored when they give challenges that people cannot complete without going to a different part of the universe to do something they otherwise would not do. Or worse, the dailies completely miss the point when someone like me decides not to engage with the dailies at all because I cannot be bothered to let a game bother me with daily chores when I could be playing what I want instead.
Player: “Let’s play EVE today! I want to do X”
EVE: “You need to do Y today”
Player: “But I want to do X.”
The player now either has the choice to ignore the challenges and feel bad, or to waste playing time doing Y while they wanted to do X.
That’s how a game becomes a chore and that’s how the intended purpose of the daily challenges misses it’s goal.
If the dailies aligned with how people would normally play the game, people would be encouraged and rewarded to play the game daily no matter their playstyle. That’s a win for CCP and a win for the players.
Making players branch out to other parts of the game is the AIR Career program and Career agents purpose.
I don’t see what your problem is.
When I log on there’s either some suitable, or not.
So I either do them, or not.
It’s swings and roundabouts.
What I don’t do is stress about them or claim the system is wrong.
I don’t stress about them either, I haven’t touched the system since the start as I decided I am not going to let the game tell me what to do.
What I do recognise is that this mechanic is currently in need of improvement if it isn’t accomplishing it’s intended purpose. So that’s why I chime in on a thread like this.
Happy B-Day! 
Thank you.
I don’t see any problem with this. The days with quick double tasks compensate for the days with tasks that are more tedious. Tonight it took me a while to scan down five sites, but just recently I was able to knock out my dailies with a single agent mission. It balances out. It’s not pretty, perhaps, but it doesn’t seem particularly lopsided.
First of all, most times it takes way longer than 15 minutes to complete the Daily Tasks so if you get a day with duplicate tasks listed, give thanks to the Eve Overlords that you didn’t have to do a lot of work that day.
As for the Daily Tasks not listing something you’d rather do, well that’s just too bad… Players need to either suck it up and do it or don’t do it.
Hell, I use to be a fanatic for running Events until CCP decided to script them. Instead of having a choice of doing certain tasks to complete it, you now have to complete all tasks in specific steps just to progress in the Event. Also over the years CCP has constantly increased the amount of Agency points required to complete the Event basically turning it into a gigantic time sink. Not to mention decreasing the rewards over the years as well.
So yeah, most everything is now being turned into a scripted grindfest theme park ride but you still have a choice… either get in line and enjoy the ride or go hit the gate and do something else…
So what if the Daily Task is listed multiple times or not, it’s not important… The main thing to remember here is we don’t need CCP wasting more time and resources on something that is already working fine when there’s much more important things to work on in Eve. Maybe something like fixing old bugs still infecting this game.
Yea, the scripted Agency Events also are a turnoff. I have done some when they were new, but I usually ignore them now.
I’ve left games in the past that went this route. Eventually everything ‘exciting’ was another time limited event that you ‘could not miss’ if you cared about your efficiency or about the rewards.
It’s a bad direction to take a game, in my opinion. Focus on good interesting gameplay instead of using cheap tricks to manipulate people to log in to your game. Daily challenges are an example of the latter.
Yeah, myself I don’t particularly like the fact that the reward is skill point’s. Course that’s a whole different topic…
I don’t run the Events anymore either due to being scripted. I’ll check it out right at first, look at the rewards (now pretty much worthless), look at the points spread, run a few sites and then after getting to a point where I have to do a task I don’t want to do, I then just close the Agency and forget about it.
Same goes for the Daily Tasks, if I get a bunch of PvP tasks, like defend a FW site or apply x-amount of Damage or Repair x-amount of points, enter Abyssal space, etc, I just close Opportunities and forgot about it until the next day.
What I definitely don’t do is push for CCP to waste even more time and resources on content that’s already working when that content is something that I didn’t even want implemented. Especially when there’s plenty of other things they should be working on…