TLDR: How to Fix Dailies (Once and For All). Back to 8 choices, fewer Evermarks to manually complete.
. . . . . . . . . .
Opportunities
• Revert the choices back (again) to 8 and make sure there is something for every type of game play and region, ie: salvaging (salvage 5 wrecks), timers (get 3 weapon timers), etc. Duplicates are fine.
• Drop the price from 2,500 Evermarks to 1,250 Evermarks to manually complete any challenges.
• Add two (2) more reward tracks - bringing the total to six (6) from the current four (4).
• The fourth reward should be a reduced amount of skillpoints (Alpha = 50k SP, Omega = 100k SP).
• The fifth reward should be something like a cerebral accelerator (Alpha = basic, Omega = standard).
• The sixth reward should be the original amount of skill points (Alpha = 75k SP, Omega = 150k SP).
• This means it will take 18 days to max out the opportunities rewards (instead of the previous 12), but you’ll also receive between 50-150k additional skill points and a cerebral accelerator.
Daily Logins
• Reintroduce the daily logins, but change the skill point bonus to between 2.5-5k SP (regardless of character type) and just random SKINs (no boosters) as before.
I think there are ways of implementing rewards to incentivize players to login, undock and play. I’m not sure the current system achieves this (I’m also not entirely sure of what would).
I would also rather like to see them gone. However, this is probably not going to happen, thus they should at the very least not punish people for playing the game and using this system (which the latest iteration does blatantly).
This pushes dailies further into FOMO territory with less options for players with limited time to complete them.
I don’t think that’s the right direction to ‘fix’ dailies.
I don’t really like the idea of using dailies to increase engagement with games as it’s a cheap trick that exploits people’s fear of missing out; if you want people to engage with your game daily make it fun enough to let people want to engage with it daily instead of resorting to tricks.
However, if CCP insists in using daily challenges I would like to see it implemented well, which means easily accessible to keep many players regularly engaged with the game over a long period of time.
One aspect to keep it easily accessible is how often CCP asks players to log in. Keep in mind that not every player will have the time (or energy) to play daily.
Ironically, the more days a daily log-in system or daily challenge system pushes all players to log in, the less likely people who cannot log in daily will feel encouraged to take part in such a system.
After all, if you cannot reach the end rewards anyway, why would you care?
Pushing for more days per month therefore undermines the goal of dailies.
Well that’s not necessarily true, to get the final reward from the Daily Goals takes 12 days. The ultimate goal of the dailies per it’s current set up with the big reward at the end is to get players with limited time to actually log in and play the game.
I think expanding the options and increasing the amount of days would actually help CCP to achieve their goal of getting players with limited time to log in more often, especially since most of the Daily Goals can be completed rather quickly.
For the past few months I’ve been doing the Daily Goals just for the big skill point reward at the end. In fact I even did them after completing the 12 day track just to get the extra ISK and SP’s from the 8 task options. Usually I would complete 5 to 6 of the 8 tasks within an hour each day.
Main reason I’m doing the Daily Goals is because the big skill point reward definitely helps speed up my skill training on Capital Ship skills. Now that CCP has dropped the task options back down to 4, I’ll still do the 12 day track for the big reward but I won’t be doing them after collecting the big reward.
The reason for that is the newly implemented 4 task options severely limits the amount of extra ISK I was previously getting so if anything, this change will actually cause me to log in less than I use to…
Good dailies are dailies that incentivize you to log in, but doesn’t require the player to do something they don’t want to do for the rewards.
So you keep the dailies, but you make the dailies easy to complete with normal play.
This could be, but is not limited to
2x dailies of type:
Scan 1 signature
Manufacture an item
Deal any damage to a non player character
Deal any damage to a player character
etc.
Yes. When designing good dailies, you pretty much make it impossible not to complete the dailies. The main goal is to get people to log in. Not to force them to do something they don’t like.
If people then does not undock / play the game, then that is a separate issue entirely and should not be fixed with dailies.
Good dailies don’t make you go out of your usual way.
I’ve played games where daily rewards are easily accessible by playing as usual.
I’ve also played games where daily rewards are unique and give inspiration to try something new every week.
EVE does neither, it keeps trying to make us do the same boring tasks of killing NPCs or repairing allied players even though my plan when I log in is neither.
I think CCP can still improve a lot with the daily challenges and broaden the selection so that almost every player who logs in and plays what they wanted to do anyway regardless of their play-style will automatically finish some dailies without noticing.
Dailies should reward players for logging in and playing as usual.
EVE dailies try to force players to jump through hoops. Earn LP? Vast amounts of players aren’t doing any missions or FW. Scan signatures? Some days I may be scanning hundreds of signatures, but there are weeks I do none.
CCP’s challenge is to design a big enough selection of challenges that anyone who logs in and is in space for and hour doing their usual thing automatically completes some of these challenges.
First of all “Once and for all” implies “my fix is the perfect one and no one else can offer anything better than that in the future”, which is NOT TRUE, as people can always come with better ideas than yours as time goes by!
The idea behind suggesting an improvement of something is to make it better, diversify it, not request more of the same!
Now for your suggestions,
Duplicates/Triplecats/etc are not fine I don’t know why they had them in the first place, it looked like a bug to me! They should DIVERCIFY such activities. like “Destroy ships while doing lvl missions for <corporation name - and that’s a random corp from the list of corps that the char has standings high enough to complete the mission>”, “Destroy 50 ships in warmhole spece”, etc, so people have more choices and those that want to do more daily activities to be allowed to!
Actually there should be no way to manually complete CHALLENGES, what’s the point of calling something a CHALLENGE or an ACTIVITY when you pay some currency to get it done? Even if they decide to keep the “paying out”, the price shouldn’t be lowered as it will make it easier to complete these CHALLENGES and ACTIVITIES by doing nothing! What CCP could do is have players put them in a sort of a mission board, so OTHER players can do it for them and get paid half the EverMarks and all the ISK, while the player that issued them collects the other half of the Evermarks, or something of that sort.
No need for 2 more tracks - 12 is fine that leaves the rest of the month for doing something else, also allows players to catch up if for whatever reason they fall behind and doesn’t give access to too many free skill points!
daily logins - again FREE SKILL POINTS?!? An Omega account gets 12 x 10.000 + 150.000 + 75.000 = 345.000 free skill points a month, an Alpha gets 195.000 - that’s plenty and very generous from CCP, isn’t that enough that you want more?