Kilsin said:Community Opinion - Daily/Weekly Rewards - Are you a fan of them or not? Do they make you want to log in or turn a fun game into a job? Let us know your thoughts below!
IMO:
This particular mechanic is: Poor, lazy, and/or punitive design followed by poor, lazy, and/or punitive implementation.
Of all the ways to make a game not fun, this one is in the top 5.
Sorry Kilsin but your question can be interpreted two very different ways. And has been.
1 I am guessing you refer to rewards just for logging in. SWTOR gives a reward for logging in and a better reward if you log in for an entire week. I do not recall if it has to be every day of a calendar week or just any 7 days. LOTRO gives a reward each day. And subscribers get a separate reward once a week as long as they log in at least once that week. Other games have similar set-ups.
Some people seem to see this as turning a game into a job. Or a source of disappointment or frustration if they miss out. I do not. I see it as a minor encouragement to log-on and play. As a minor benefit to being a subscriber (and I hope other than any trial periods we are all subscribers). I do not really care if we have it but I assuredly do not see it as a negative.
This somewhat contrarian opinion is based on two assumptions which may not be accurate. That the reward is relatively minor. That getting the reward does not require a serious commitment of time. If the reward was a best-in-slot item and the requirement was to play at least an hour every calendar day of a month I would dislike the system greatly. So maybe all of us actually agree but we are making very different assumptions about the system you posit.
2. Having daily/weekly rewards for doing certain content - a ubiquitous feature of many MMOs today especially at level cap. Generally tied to daily or weekly quests - in Pantheon it might be tied to doing at least x dungeons during the period in question. My guess is you are not polling us for our opinion about such dailies or weeklies. If you were my opinion would be to say they are a good idea - it is always good to give "bored level-caps" an incentive to play and quite handy to incent them to do group content that will help others get enough people to complete.
dorotea said:1 I am guessing you refer to rewards just for logging in....
2. Having daily/weekly rewards for doing certain content... it is always good to give "bored level-caps" an incentive to play
I'm sorry but I totally disagree with your reasoning here.
#1 IMO 'rewards for just logging in' have no place at all in a game that describes itself as "No hand holding. No easy mode." and whose tenets include "11. Apathy or lack of action should not be rewarded with bonuses". Getting a reward for logging in for 10 seconds once a day is exactly this.
#2 If any significant number of players have nothing left ingame that interests them at all - AND have made no real friends that they would log in just to hang with & help out with their own accomplishments while waiting for the next expansion, then the Developers have failed in some significant way. Daily/weekly quests aren't going to fix that.
I'm against anything that forces / encourage you doing something you might not want at a precise moment or on a daily / weekly chore basis.
-If you want something : do it
-If you want it later : do it later
-If you don't want it : don't do it
Daily / weekly rewards were a bad try into making people with less time having more rewards for it, but it doesn't bring anything but a distorded value of each one's time and a feeling you have to reach your cap or your time is not well invested.
Pantheon should be a game where your time is linear in gain and no one should feel ashamed to achieve only a few levels a months at best, as playing is the reward and not reaching some kind of ressources / benefits / level cap.
"#1 IMO 'rewards for just logging in' have no place at all in a game that describes itself as "No hand holding. No easy mode." and whose tenets include "11. Apathy or lack of action should not be rewarded with bonuses". Getting a reward for logging in for 10 seconds once a day is exactly this.
#2 If any significant number of players have nothing left ingame that interests them at all - AND have made no real friends that they would log in just to hang with & help out with their own accomplishments while waiting for the next expansion, then the Developers have failed in some significant way. Daily/weekly quests aren't going to fix that."
Point one - I generally agree with you but a small reward to get someone to log in can help keep people active, and once they are logged in they may decide to do things not just log off after 30 seconds. So while I said this is not something I viewed as a significant benefit I do see it as helping the game a bit. If the rewards are relatively small.
Point two - I agree with you that it would be ideal to have players always have something to do and to always have friends that they want to help. But we do not live in a utopia and in the real world a significant number of players are likely to run out of ways to improve their character, be uninterested in alts, and have few people that they care enough about to log-on for hours just in the hope that one of these people will be on and will want help at that exact time. Dailies and weeklies by definition give something of benefit to the player above and beyond altruism and if this means an extra 50 top level players are logging in and looking for groups - surely that helps the people that don't give a rodent's hindquarters about dailies or weeklies but do want people to group with. Plus those 50 people are subscribing - not lapsing the subscription until the next expansion.
dorotea said:Point two - I agree with you that it would be ideal to have players always have something to do and to always have friends that they want to help. But we do not live in a utopia and in the real world a significant number of players are likely to run out of ways to improve their character, be uninterested in alts, and have few people that they care enough about to log-on for hours just in the hope that one of these people will be on and will want help at that exact time. Dailies and weeklies by definition give something of benefit to the player above and beyond altruism and if this means an extra 50 top level players are logging in and looking for groups - surely that helps the people that don't give a rodent's hindquarters about dailies or weeklies but do want people to group with. Plus those 50 people are subscribing - not lapsing the subscription until the next expansion.
That sounds very much like what most people hate about these things. A mental "trick" to get people to keep doing something they otherwise don't actually want to do. Trying desperately to cling to subs from people who by all means should move on.
I know I have fallen prey to such things in the past and it really has started to grate on me when I see it now. I played Destiny 2 well beyond when I was actually enjoying the game because dailies/weeklies and I honestly can't tell you why. Same thing for FFXIV. Log in even when one doesn't really enjoy it just to do their "chores."
It should be okay (if not embraced) for players to sometimes take a break if they have no goals in a game. Come back when new content drops or other friends get into the game etc. Don't try to manipulate players into overstaying their enjoyment with cheap tricks.
I am not a fan of daily or weekly rewards that are based on our real life world. By that I mean if it's based on how often I log into the game or how much time in between log ins. If it's based on Terminus, the world you're creating, and if it makes sense in the context of THAT world then I'm probably ok with them.
Example: If there really is an NPC that needs X wolf pelts then that quest should be repeatable by anyone until that need is met. The NPC shouldn't say "oh, you've already done this today, I still need Y pelts, but if it's from you you'll have to bring them tomorrow." That makes no sense.
I am not advocating for any type of quest or task specifically, I'm advocating for those things to make sense within the created world and in no way related to our outside world or timeline.
No, but with various limitations and adding, not limiting immersion, it could fit.
A really horrible example could be a visually/other impaired character; maybe evil or some ogre, who needs help every 10 or sometimes 5 days, offering money for an item where they accept certain junk items instead.
Taking advantage of the villainous handicapped aside, it's RP character advancement in a highly immersive and fantastic, massive-feeling world that makes you come back regularly, i.e. 'adventure'. You also need to experience downtime, regular setbacks or "watch the commercials" to continue enjoying that adventure.
These sort of immediate to fast rewards take away from the persisting feeling of adventure and accustom you to replace adventure with an assortment of condensed gameplay.
The worst offender of this I have played is ESO, which has daily/weekly login rewards and special rewards that exploit fomo if you log in 20 days out of the month, something like that. It's more of a free to play forced player engagement thing, and doesn't really have a place in Pantheon, imo.
Lunacea said:The worst offender of this I have played is ESO, which has daily/weekly login rewards and special rewards that exploit fomo if you log in 20 days out of the month, something like that. It's more of a free to play forced player engagement thing, and doesn't really have a place in Pantheon, imo.
I was about to mention ESO having the best systemj when it comes to that. Blade and Souls also has a similar system but with BaS you get rewarded to catch up when you're starting a new character so it can be a positive outcome, but I do get your point. Either is valid.