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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.
Daily quests, yes or no?
Nerror
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Inspired by the login rewards thread, what do you guys think about daily quests?
I am a little torn here.
On the one hand, I really don't want the generic, same 10, 15, 25 daily quests we know from a lot of MMOs. It's really just a sign the game lacks quality content, and it has that same shitty skinner box feel to it, if the rewards are worth it. I hate games where you end up disliking the gameplay (like repetitive dailies), to get a reward you feel you need to stay competitive.
Even worse is when developers only look at the metrics, and see that a lot of players do the daily quests, and interpret that as players also liking the daily quests. No, people do boring shit for rewards all the time (it's called a boring, shitty workday for money). I don't ever want AOC to feel like a boring, shitty workday to get the rewards I want or need.
On the other hand, we know there are social organizations in the game, as well as religions. They have ranks, and there is a competitive element to those ranks. Only one person can be at the top at any given time, at least for the religions.
Even if there is a main questline for each religion, at some point it ends, and I don't really see an option other than daily quests, if you want to stay or move to number 1 in the ranks. Maybe a mob grind of a specific enemy of that religion, or gold donation/tithe can work as well I suppose. Any of you know of a game where they have this figured out in a fun way?
I think we are going to get some daily quests in AOC, in some form or another. My hope is that they make the pool of quests really big, and randomize them every day. Maybe that can alleviate some of the suck.
Edit: Actually, my real hope is that they either drop that competitive element of the religion-ranking altogether, or at least make it not dependent on any daily quests.
I am a little torn here.
On the one hand, I really don't want the generic, same 10, 15, 25 daily quests we know from a lot of MMOs. It's really just a sign the game lacks quality content, and it has that same shitty skinner box feel to it, if the rewards are worth it. I hate games where you end up disliking the gameplay (like repetitive dailies), to get a reward you feel you need to stay competitive.
Even worse is when developers only look at the metrics, and see that a lot of players do the daily quests, and interpret that as players also liking the daily quests. No, people do boring shit for rewards all the time (it's called a boring, shitty workday for money). I don't ever want AOC to feel like a boring, shitty workday to get the rewards I want or need.
On the other hand, we know there are social organizations in the game, as well as religions. They have ranks, and there is a competitive element to those ranks. Only one person can be at the top at any given time, at least for the religions.
Let's say you go to the temple and you sign up to be a follower of that religion. There is an inter-organization quest line that can advance and rank and title and only one person can be the leader for a period of time. If they advance all the way to the top. So like during sieges they'll have special benefits like they can you know grant divine prayer buff to allies within x amount of distance of them during the siege. - Steven Sharif
Even if there is a main questline for each religion, at some point it ends, and I don't really see an option other than daily quests, if you want to stay or move to number 1 in the ranks. Maybe a mob grind of a specific enemy of that religion, or gold donation/tithe can work as well I suppose. Any of you know of a game where they have this figured out in a fun way?
I think we are going to get some daily quests in AOC, in some form or another. My hope is that they make the pool of quests really big, and randomize them every day. Maybe that can alleviate some of the suck.
Edit: Actually, my real hope is that they either drop that competitive element of the religion-ranking altogether, or at least make it not dependent on any daily quests.
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Secondly I hate dailies. When players are doing quests it is because the DEVs could not come up with systems to inspire players to go after their own goals. So they trick you into doing quests, by giving you a little bit of meaningless story in exchange for a disproportionate amount of XP for the work of actually doing the quest. To restate that, the only reason anybody quests is because the XP and items received from questing is always more than what you would get grinding out your own goals. If you want proof look at some oldschool MMOs like FFXI or L2 where quests did not give you much, unless it was a required quest to unlock something. Even in those old games people would have trouble staying on task with their own goals because opportunities would come up that incentivized them to participate in other activities. I would log into FFXI and tell myself "I am going to work on getting my craft to X level, and a few whispers later and I am in a group looking fighting rare spawns.". These are old games with far less activities than AoC and they did not need dailies, or XP quests.
Thirdly, If players are doing quests because they have been incentivized out of making their own goals by the DEVs. Then Dailies is the DEVs giving up on writing a dumb story for you to click through. Now they are just trying to keep you logging in everyday, to keep their participation metrics high.
All of those competitive elements you hope they drop are in place to make it so you will have things that you do because you want to do them. If you want to live in a dynamic ever changing world that is never the same. You can't expect to have the game hold your hand, and tell you what to do. We have plenty of MMOs that do that.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I want the game to be about making ANY plan you want for the day and head out of the node in the OPEN world, either with a few friends or with the guild.
As for the types of nodes and their progress I'd like to see free resource farming in order to contribute to various constractions, not tied to dailies.
scroll of knowledge
torn page from holy/dark book
that can be looted from environments that a scholar or a scientist would adventure.
No daily required, just go and look for them if you want to help your node.
The problem is the way daily quests are often implemented turns them into daily chores that have to be completed in order to be competitive. You wanna raid at a half-way decent level? You'd better have done your daily quests every single day then or you will have fallen behind.
In doing so, daily quests contribute to the skinner box that I've talked about in previous threads.
unexplained daily quests in the UI - I'm not a fan.
I'd much prefer Collector NPC's - so you can hand in 100x ___________ certificates for a small reward.
^^^ that creates a loophole that the rich can exploit, though.
If a Player needs to do them in order to Progress, that sucks D***. Especially, if they be the only Option to gain Favour´s from Fraktions.
If they are an Secondary Option, do a Dungeon or do Daily Missions. That would be Okay. For me at Least.
The game should not increase the powerlower of people just for being online every day.
Lets say there is guy A
He can play 7 times a week for 2 hours each.
And there is guy B
He can play 2 times a week for 7 hours each.
They both have the same play time but guy A gets all the daily quests done every day so he keeps getting ahead of guy B.
Also as some have stated.
Daily quests are for devs that dont have any other content to keep players in the game.
Ashes will have enough content on its own. No need for daily quest.
And dont get me even started how Daily quests feel like work.
Daily quests in wow ended up being hundreds of quests and it truly felt like an eventual time sink which you don't want any game to feel like. There is a fine balance that can be had with dailies IMO.
If a daily quest that is expected to take 20 minutes to complete rewards you with something, there should be a method to get (as an example) 4 of that same reward after an activity that would be expected to take an hour.
What this does it is allows for players with very small time windows to log on and do "something" (though the efficacy of that will be more determined by who wants to PvP with them than anything), but it also doesn't mean players that don't do these daily quests would be missing out.
As to qiests for religious node leadership - I don't think daily quests would really work too well for that. If there are daily quests for it that make up the bulk of the ways to earn leadership positions, then all players that do all the daily quests in the 30 day period would be equal.
To me, it makes more sense for the tasks for this to be infinately repeatable.
Don’t attach artificial “once per day” progress in a big burst. Spontaneous, setting appropriate quests with thresholds for the whole community is much better. A carpenter putting out a notice they need more lumber, every player contributes to this “quest” and gets small gold payouts, or an piece of common gear, or a special material if they contribute a significant amount. A religious organization would have many books and holy scrolls throughout the world. There’s no need for a formal quest system to contribute to religious orgs beyond the narrative aspects.
Dailies are the bane of fun. They make each game session a chore because their progress cannot be matched by standard gameplay. (If they could, there would be no point to dailies at all)
Daily quests have been done. Done ad nauseum. Done. I'm expecting, as with many of the systems in Ashes, IS to carefully think through the point of dailies from different perspectives. Why is this important for the player? How does this tie the player back to the node? How does this drive a group or group of groups around a node? How does this keep players engaged / interested / staying with the game?
We've all seen enough random blue exclamation marks to last a lifetime: make it meaningful.
Some players are obviously more-inventive than others, so it feels like there should be a direct path for people with time to burn and the need for money to be able to go and do something, for it; not everyone will be running a shop, and running around the wilds looking for stuff to kill can be a very dull grind.
A few dailies make sense and are OK - e.g. taking a job to help a baker make bread every day.
Traditional dailies to kill an arbitrarily fixed number of monsters are so overused and badly placed that's it hard to want them in a game anymore. They haven't made sense because the situation never changes (i.e. even after 5 years players have failed to drive back the encroaching orc settlements by burning 10 tents every day).
If the node system provides an end condition to daily kill quests (and this is critical), a lore-based or context-based justification for the killing, and severely limits how many of them there are, then it'd be OK I think.
I stopped playing SWG because the only thing I could do when I logged in was to make a speeder round of my resources extractors.
Honestly you should login to Verra and then decide what you feel like doing today not feel an obligation to repeat the same quest every single day.
Getting people in the habit of actually supporting their node, instead of passively leeching, is only a good thing I think.
Any daily quests that aren't node related should probably not exist I think. Like for rank gain with the religions, that shouldn't be quest based after the initial questline, but based on killing or donating stuff. Letting the highest ranks go to those that can put in the most effort makes sense.
Like WanderingMist said, thinly veiled psychological manipulation. SHOO!
To the hardcore players: forced to do the dailies because they're more efficient that anything else in the game
To the casuals: literally repeat the same quests and get bored. Give them something that accumulates instead.
I agree, want to be the most religious guy on the server? Go kill 40k zombies every day to prove your devotion to your God.
Without static hubs and fast travel, dailies cannot really be implemented in conventional ways otherwise you risk forcing people to coalesce around metros and cities and really make the rest of the world sparse and barren. I think this game should not further promote (there are already tons and tons of reasons to travel to and be around metros and big cities) aggregating around big hubs. Furthermore, having to go back to a hub just to grab your dailies without fast travel feels bad. Conventionally dailies also aggregate to some reward that could act as a catchup mechanic which doesn't sound very much aligned to most AoC philosophies we know of.
I think a good solution, one that would also work for the daily log-in rewards, is to just make some xp gained threshold where you get a generic reward for it. Similar to how mobas give you a reward for your first game and win or something that just happens by playing the game anyway. Gaining xp could be done through literally doing anything in game and would fill up a daily bar until some reward. You provide that incentive for people to remain active, you promote them to play the game the way they want to and all is well in the world. The only issue with this is afk farming like afk fishing which I would strongly recommend not provide xp if it is in the game. You should have some active variant of, for example, fishing that gains xp but afk variant should just give you the fish.
Dailies are what drove me away from ESO. I would log in and after I completed all of my crafting dailies, rogue guild dailies, personal mob route for random drops, and then participated in the nightly world boss circuit, it was time for bed. So the only time I had to do anything else would be the weekends and even then I felt guilty if I went to PvP before I had done all those daily tasks. Hell I didn't even feel as if I was even PvEing because I feel that even PvE requires a certain challenge level which I was not experiencing. Really sucked the fun and motivation out of playing.
I think this is actually a great point. Even though as @Wandering Mist said dailies give you something to do if you don't have much time to play, they also often feel mandatory and therefore burn into your time to play. Especially with no fast travel etc, if the dailies are location based they would then dictate where you go and as a result what you can do which would really take away from your autonomy in your play session. If there are dailies then I really think they should be location agnostic at the very least but also optimally task agnostic, again, just make it a xp threshold