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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Do you want "Daily Quests" if so, to what extent?
Marzzo
Member, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Many MMO:s have daily quests to give you a steady source of income and reputations, as well as to keep you logging in everyday. Do you want daily quests? Why/why not? If you want them, how important/impactful should they be?
Personaly I would like some form of daily quests but I want them to be interesting and relevant. The best ones for me are quests that make you go out and explore the world. This helps making the world and "older" less relevant areas feel more alive.
For me, if daily quests are present in the game, they should be for max level and they should not take more than 30 mins to complete. They should be optional and focus mostly on income. I also like profession quests.
Personaly I would like some form of daily quests but I want them to be interesting and relevant. The best ones for me are quests that make you go out and explore the world. This helps making the world and "older" less relevant areas feel more alive.
For me, if daily quests are present in the game, they should be for max level and they should not take more than 30 mins to complete. They should be optional and focus mostly on income. I also like profession quests.
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They could implement different types of weekly quests: "Craft x amount of uncommon swords" "Collect 500 iron ore with your own hands" "Slay 5 Raid Bosses, and 300 elite monster in raids" "Transport these letters all over the map".
The only things you would get in return would differ. A weekly quest from a divine node would give you some special resource for items from your god, while mercantile node weeklies would give you money. Nothing thag would give you a true advantage, but a nice little reward at the end of a week.
IF we had to have dailys rhen make them like little challenges or something, "Kill 50 enemies in 10sec" "Craft 10 Epic gears in one day" each challenge would in turn give you some exp, reputation with your node and gold.
Daily quests always demand so much constant labour from you and force you to log in, while also giving you too good of a reward to not do them. Lets take WoW for example. If you want to be one of the (lets say) top 10% then you have to do:
-all important dailies on all maps for the azerite and potential gear
-weekly mythic+ runs for the random chest reward
-raid normal/heroic/mythic for all random titanforging
-repeat with at least 2 other characters so that you can switch your class if needed
That makes you burn out faster then you think xD
The best way to rectify that would be to take down the gear rewards for the weekly chests and the daily quests.
If they do move to dailies I don't want them to be mandatory or generate large amounts of xp and gp. I am not playing to have a job.
To me, daily tasks in an MMO are like clickbait videos. They aren't real content, they aren't worthwhile, but they are (usually) so short that you aren't really missing out on the real content if you do partake in one or two.
The problem with daily tasks over clickbait videos is that if you take a day off YouTube, you can come back the next day and watch all those clickbait videos you missed, and all is well. With daily tasks, if you miss a day, that task is gone.
This is a bad thing, as it punishes players for wanting to do something like taking their significant other out for dinner and a show - and any person that has a significant other would understand how a game that punishes this type of thing would likely be short lived in that particular household.
The other major issue with daily quests in MMO's is the amount of time they take up. If you have a daily quest for one zone, chances are you're going to have a similar quest for other zones. If you have a PvE daily quest, you'll end up needing to add in a PvP daily quest, a crafting daily quest, a gathering daily quest etc.
To me, Archeage was the pinnacle of how bad this can get (I never played WoW, maybe it was worse). In Archeage, during particular events, it wasn't uncommon for me to spend 4 hours just doing daily tasks. By the end of that, I'd have to log off. This meant that during some events (the river rapids thing as an example) I wouldn't actually have time to play the actual game, I'd just be doing daily tasks the entire time I was logged on.
I can think of two mechanics that allow for the same function, but remove that major drawback.
The first is making weekly quests rather than daily. Rather than allowing players to do a given quest once, and then resetting that at midnight, allow them to do it 5 times and reset it with the weekly server maintenance. This allows players to do their weeks worth of daily quests at a time that best suits them. This almost totally clears up the issue with having to log in every day or being punished for it.
The other mechanic is to make all daily tasks gated with a token. It may be an exploration task, a PvP task, PvE task, a gathering task, a crafting task, a dungeon crawl task, a node specific task, what ever.
Then you give players exactly 5 tokens a day, whether they log in or not. Players can horde these tokens if they want and do 100+ "daily" tasks at once, or players can do those same tasks every day. For an added sense of depth of mechanic, the tokens could even be tradeable (this opens up a potential can of worms, though I think it could well be worth it).
There are also no doubt many other mechanics that could be used to improve on the standard daily task system most games have - all I know is that as soon as I feel like I have to log in to an MMO in order to do a daily task, I'll unsubscribe from that game and uninstall it.
My issue with challenges is that they're a very meta mechanic and don't fit in the game world. They suit other game genres better.
Yea, a bit larger weekly quests feel more interesting. But I hope they are not so important that you feel like you failed if you missed a week for studies or travel.
Thats why i am of the opinion, that the only rewards should be something like gold or extra experience for your node.
They are intended to have people login daily for at least a few minutes each day while waiting for the next expansion. This is part of endgame content.
Ashes of Creation doesn't have an endgame - the content is designed to be dynamic, rather than static, so there should always be new content, rather than being stuck with repeatable quests and raids as we wait for expansions.
So, daily quests should be superfluous.
Daily quests should probably be great for crafting.
Daily quests might also be great for caravan runs.
And daily quests should also be great for castle sieges.
All of those are basic prep steps.
But, there should be plenty of new content -new quests, objectives and tasks- always churning from the progression and deconstruction of Nodes.
For me a quest needs to have a purpose and be a real quest, not a repetitive activity.
If there is meaningful progress, slow leveling and meaningful questing, you get to enjoy each zone and make memeries in them.
You feel the need to go back to "low level areas" let's say because of an artificial, forced reason such as a daily quest.
1. Give new max level characters a starting point into end-game content
2. encourage players to log in every day
I totally get the need to offer players entry points into end-game content, especially for newer players who are getting to max level on their first character. However, there are other ways of doing this and quite frankly I don't think daily quests will be needed in Ashes. The second reason is why I don't want daily quests, as it contributes to the skinner box that a lot of games rely on to get people to keep playing their game. It's manipulative and lazy gameplay that causes more problems than it solves.
So no, I do not want daily quests at all.
Agreed. Soon encourage will start to feel forced.
If I only have 15 minutes to play, I can probably find something of some small significance to do.
Doesn't necessarily matter whether I'm max level.
I'm not max level in Wiz101, but I know if I log in for 10 minutes, I can win some gold or crowns.
I'm not max level in Apoc, but the Daily quests help push me a bit closer to the next level. It's great when I can jump in for one match, finish a daily by opening 3 chests and jump back out. Especially on nights when I have class or homework or really need to be studying for an exam.
And, it's easy enough to ignore the Daily quests when they aren't enticing.
The problem isn't really the Daily quests.
The problem is having nothing else new to do for months and years except the Daily quests.
ESO daily crafting quests are a prime example of this, you want to make lots of gold just get 5 or 6 characters with craft skills levelled and the gold just roles in. You get so much from doing these quests and basic crafting materials are so worthless you just purchase them with the huge amounts of gold you have thus you don't even have to farm your own mats.
The daily quests should ideally be tasks that players want to do... and they should be relatively meaningful.
Feeling obligated to do stuff in an MMORPG is subjective.
Your node will need materials every day, and your node is your progression to getting stronger, unlocking new content and harder enemies.
So logging in, and working with members of the node to forward plans to making sure everything is okay, will probably be a thing.
Logging out and not playing for a week, so many things could happen. Node destroyed, you no longer own a house, or node upgraded and your house upgraded.
Perhaps a daily board of tasks will need to be completed, something that the mayor of the node that every citizen needs to complete, or if you're looking to get some extra rep with one of many player guilds (NPC guilds) you'll probably have something there
The only way to make daily quests worthwhile is to hand out easy rewards and then they become meta.
You're bleeding for salvation, but you can't see that you are the damnation itself." -Norther
I guess most people understand why daily quests usually exist as part of the end game content. However, the problem is, that repeating the same quests is getting more and more boring everyday. Eventually it will lead people to hate the daily quest -system in general. But you are right, that the other side of the problem is, that if there is not enough other activities to do, then we could say that daily quests are better than nothing. Now this is where we throw the ball to the developers, they are responsible for offering players meaningfull content everyday, even in the so called end game or may be we could speak of late game content instead.
I can recognize myself from your example to have days when I just have a very limited time to do anything in the game. Still I do not want to use that time to repeat same old quests over and over again. I want to do something else, maybe different things in different days. I do not want to feel like I am forced to log in to accomplish boring dailies, I am still logging in if I know there is something reasonable things to do.
I'd rather see something like work orders created by players, and completed by players: something like: Player X requires 50 bars of iron. Deliver to Market node Y. Reward of Z gold coins. It would give some guidance to people who are looking for some, while also allowing facilitating cooperation among the player base.
In Wizard101, it feels like it's a different quest each day on a monthly cycle, so we're only repeating the same quest once a month.
For Apoc, I like some daily quests more than others, so it feels great when I get one like Open 3 Chests. I know I can complete that in one match and jump out.
I know I can complete Deal 200 Damage With Maces in 2-3 matches, so I'm happy to give that one a go. I suck at Wands, so it's not worth any amount of time or effort for me to attempt that Daily. I ignore that one and I don't feel bad about ignoring it.
I don't feel bad about skipping that one or skipping both Dailies on any given day because I know there will be several that I won't mind doing throughout the week.
Completionists probably feel pressure to always complete all the Dailies.
For the Ashes MMORPG, Dailies need to feel meaningful - and should it be easy for them to be meaningful - like helping to prep for a Castle Siege or building/escorting/attacking a Caravan. Or participating in a Node/Religious/Social/Guild vote.
For me, it would probably feel great to have a Node related daily one day, a Religious related daily the next day, a Social related daily the day after that and a Racial related Daily the day after that. I would expect there to be some combat, crafting and exploration dailies available, too.
There should always be meaningful tasks for us to do. And it's fine for some mini-tasks to be repeatable because there will be stuff that we will want to do repeatedly anyway - even if it's prepping or participating in a Siege or prepping or participating in a Caravan run.
Player work orders are fine and good, but I don't want to be stuck without something to do just because other players don't have anything for me to do during in the minutes that I have free to play on any given day. or because I'm not interested in any of the player contracts that are up when I'm online.
I'd rather know that there will be something I am interested in doing when I log in - especially if I can anticipate the day when the mini-task I like will be available.
That doesn’t mean I need or want a checklist of repeated tasks as fluff in place of worthwhile activities
I just don't want the game to tell me what that is. I can work out what worthwhile things I will do on any given day myself, thanks.
Agreed. There are so many different ways to spend my time in a MMO but daily quests just take up unnecessary time
While I am against dailies in general, I am the first to say that there will likely need to be something that fulfills the role they provide to MMO's that make use of them.
That aside, even if Ashes did have dailies as per other games, the three examples above are literally the worst thing Intrepid could have as tasks for daily quests, and I'm going to go through each of the three and explain why.
Castle sieges are essentially going to be events between two guilds and/or alliances of guilds. They are not things for individual players to get involved with. Furthermore, most days, most servers won't even have a castle that is in a state of being sieged - or any declarations of such - and so such quests would not be possible to complete.
Caravans should not have their economic importance diminished by encouraging people to simply create one and then disband it immediately just so they can complete a daily. If they are cheap to create, this is what will happen - if they are not cheap to create, people simply won't complete it as a daily task. It leaves you with the question of "why even bother having it there?"
Attacking or escorting a caravan is equally pointless - there is enough risk to running caravans without people attacking them for quest credit - and people tasked with escorting a caravan will likely just click on the pop-up button that asks if they are attacking or escorting the caravan when they are near to get that same credit, and then carrying on with their day.
Lastly in terms of caravans, you have to assume that players will always take the path of least resistance. In an MMO where people actually talk to people on their server (rather than just paying for friends on Discord) you have to make the assumption that they will use that communication to find that path of least resistance. If there were daily tasks to build/escort/attack a caravan, it won't take long before people work out that they can all communicate with each other to make thing easier. Player X will build a caravan, player Y will claim to be escorting it, and player Z will claim to attack it, and then all three players walk off having done that daily task in a matter of seconds.
Real meaningful content right there.
As for the voting idea - what votes? As far as I know, the only actual player vote is for the leader of scientific nodes - and this only happens once a month. Basing a daily quest on an event that happens once a month for 1/4 of the population is probably not going to be popular.
To my knowledge we have no indication that religion or social entities will have any form of voting, and it is stupid to make a daily quest based around a mechanic that a guild can initiate - it becomes less of a daily quest at that point and more of being online at the point in time where the guild leader initiated the pointless vote that serves no purpose other than allowing guild members easy daily task completion.
Again, real meaningful content.
No game has ever had actual meaningful dailies - because no task that you do in 10 minutes every day in a game is meaningful. All games do is increase the rewards of dailies so that people associate the acquisition of that reward with the daily task, and so the daily task takes on the meaning of that heightened reward.
The problem is, in increasing this reward, these daily tasks become the best use of player time in many games - and when you factor in daily tasks for different aspects of the game, different zones etc, doing these daily tasks that are the best use of player time quickly mount up to taking several hours every day.