The actual concept of daily achievements available has changed several times trough the year the game is up.
For a recall:
- originally, there were 4 daily achieves, always the same
- then they got replaced by the 7 achiev system, when some of the dailies stayed and other changed day after day
- PvP dailies appeared, then got switched to an extremely time consuming version, then got switched back
- actual version of dailies appeared, with 8ish achieves per day changing in 14 day-long cycles, with a 5/8 for daily reward
- couple more WvW achieves for daily added
- daily activity appeared
- even more daily achieves bound to the living story added
Now why I am scholaring on this?
The idea of a reward for playing the game daily is great and makes ppl log in way more, therefore keeping the game alive. However, as time passes by, the amount, overall conception and therefore time demanded for rushing through dailies went from 15 mins at launch to well over 2 hours nowadays.
As the game provides very nice rewards for achiev points, and with the distribution of those ingame, it is really profitable to actually do every single one daily available, and thats for everyone, not only us, achi OCDers.
Guild Wars 2 presented itself as a very casual game, (no subscription fee to start with) available to people who grew up playing games and lost the majority of their free time without makin them feel they are missing something.
The trend of dailies changes is slowly shifting into traditional scheme “do this, that, and some more for 2 hours – now you are free to play the game”. The dailies nowadays make you explore pretty much everything the game provides – which is okay. On the other hand, many ppl already have the kind of stuff explored, completed and they are returning there for the achiev point only (fractals? exp dungeons? story dungeons? costume brawl?).
I personally, miss the old dailies, which allowed me to play whatever I wanted and get the credit. This system is forcing players to do things they dont want to/dont need to, just to give them the achiev point.
The section is named suggestions, so enough moaning.
Although I wouldnt be sad if the original dailies came back, I understand the reasons for the change that happened – to make ppl explore the game more and to bring them to content they might wanna try, or to provide others doing the content someone to play with.
The issue with growing amount of dailies can be solved by:
- making achieve points as a reward for “completing daily and reaching reward”, not for every single daily achiev you can do
This way you can actually choose from the scale of achieves possible the 5 ones you want to do (aka original intention of current dailies system), and the game would stop to make you feel like you have to do them all, therefore allowing you to miss the ones you re really not interested in (again, original intention of current dailies system).
It could go even further, as it is with laurels today – pick PvP or PvE, you get achi pts for that, you can do the other as well, but you get pts only once.
With new content every week, I am not afraid people wouldnt play the game if not told what to do for two hours every day. Such a subtle change would make a huge difference by letting ppl do what they want ingame instead of chasing dailies until bedtime.
Expect a lot of flaming, dont disappoint me ;-). +1s are welcome. And as always, sorry for the wall of text.