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World
of Warcraft has done a lot for the MMOs in general
and drawing new players into the genre. Some things the game has done
have been
boons to everyone, while others have been created in the pits of Hell
to be
unleashed upon the souls of the weary. Case in point? Daily quests.

 

I
will freely admit that the concept of daily quests is
nothing short of brilliant – giving players a series of
quests to repeat every
day in order to either gather enough “tokens” (this
term will be used
throughout the article to describe a game’s daily reward) to
purchase gear they
would otherwise have to raid indefinitely for. Other incentive ideas
also
include the need to do dailies in order to have a hope in hell of
gaining
enough faction points with an ally to purchase the incredible gear only
their
merchants possess. On the surface, it sounds like a win/win for
everyone
involved. Game companies get to keep people playing regularly while
players get
to work towards some awesome loot. The sad truth is that not everything
that looks
good on paper works as well in the real (or virtual) world.

 

The
execution of such a system has caused more than one
gamer to throw up their hands in rage and lash out at everyone around
them. For
myself, I hated them so badly that after the first week, I never did
another
one again after I completed it the first time. I don’t like
repeating any
content more than a few times at most and game companies expect me to
repeat
the exact same content every single freaking day? They’re
welcome to hold their
breath waiting for that cold day in Hell. I’ll be damned if
I’m going to sit
and repeat the same content every day for months on end.

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The
very idea itself is complete lunacy to most, yet
what’s even more astounding is that World of Warcraft players
actually did it.
Some old friends of mine did it so religiously that they would have a
complete
meltdown if the servers were unexpectedly down during their daily
ritual time
or if they were hung up by work, etc. This sort of behavior may be
music to the
ears of corporate bean counters, but it’s no way for a human
being to live.

 

Fortunately
for everyone, nothing ever stays completely
the same. It’s been a while since I’ve played World
of Warcraft, and even when
I do, the last thing I pay attention to is the daily quest system, so I
can’t
tell you whether it’s improved or not. I’ve heard
it has gotten worse in terms
of having to grind out faction, but I don’t know. Let me know
in the comments!
What I do know is that a number of games have taken the idea of
ensuring players
come back every day and modified it into some pretty ingenious systems.

 

One
such game is Guild Wars 2. The development team
realized that there is serious value in having a system in place that
strongly
encourages players to return to a game every day, but at the same time,
they
didn’t want to try and force players to suffer through the
same drudgery as
games in the past. Enter what I like to call the “Wheel of
Random Completion”.
What do players want to do when they play a game? To do just that
– play! So
why not give players a random list of goals they can accomplish each
day to
earn a token? Why not indeed?

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Players
immediately found themselves with a reason to hop
on and play Guild Wars 2 every day without going through too much added
effort
to gain their daily rewards. The system wasn’t perfect, but
it was a far cry
from the pain and suffering players went through with World of
Warcraft. Gone
was the need to repeat the same content day in and day out. Instead,
players
now had choices to craft X number of items, kill X number of monsters,
kill X
number of players in PvP, etc. There were still times when the given
list
didn’t contain enough choices for players that
didn’t want to change their
general play style but it was a drastic improvement over the days of
yore.

 

Personally,
I think that EverQuest II has finally
introduced the perfect daily system (at least for my preferred style of
playing
games). Players have a list of objectives just as they do in Guild Wars
2, but
there are always two adventure, two tradeskill, two PvP, and one
exploration
options. Players also only need to complete two of them to gain their
loyalty
point for the day. Unlike other games, this loyalty point is
account-wide,
meaning that once you’ve completed it on one character,
you’re done.

 

Well
what the hell kind of challenge is that?!
It’s not, and that’s the point. Daily quests
shouldn’t be a contest to see who
can generate the will to torture themselves with mindless tasks every
day. The
system has one purpose and one purpose only – to give you an
added incentive to
log into the game every day and have some fun. The method introduced by
EverQuest II does that perfectly. I always get my loyalty point each
day I have
time to log in, and I have never
gone
out of my way to complete the objectives, instead just letting it
happen
naturally as I go about playing. And that’s exactly how it
should be.

 

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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