Guild Wars 2

And replace them with “weeklies.” I like the idea of dailies, to give you something to do and encourage you to play regularly, but I don’t like the gameplay consequences. In practice, dailies make me feel that if I’m pursuing tasks that don’t increment the daily goals (for example story mode missions or dungeons or crafting which doesn’t increment things like events), then I feel like I’m wasting time, so I only do those once my daily has been completed. It also means that when I do want or need to take a couple days off for other activities, I miss out on my daily rewards.

A good MMO should encourage people to play regularly, but not this sort of OCD compulsion.

So my suggestion would be to switch to a weekly goal instead of daily. Make it so that it requires the same total effort, and offers the same total reward (7 of everything), but that you could do over the course of 7 days if you like, or over 3-4 days if you have a busy week, or even over 1-2 days if you can’t play during the week but can play for long hours on weekends.

You are compulsive, not the game.

It’s not life-breaking if you miss a daily once in a while. I think. Just go make your dungeon and don’t think about the rest.

Weeklies would indeed be nicer than dailies, but players fear the new so it wont get pushed through

On average, there are 30 dailies a month to complete, missing 10 of them doesnt harm you in any way. It is an MMO, expect to spend a little time in it.

your reward should be playing the game, not getting a cookie at the end of a ‘grind’ for a daily. Daily’s are there to incentivize that people log on each day and that there are people to populate the mmo other than just the weekends.

You are compulsive, not the game.

It’s not life-breaking if you miss a daily once in a while. I think. Just go make your dungeon and don’t think about the rest.

I’m aware that it’s a combination of my own personal attitude and the game’s mechanics, I’m just saying that the game’s mechanics function in such a way to encourage that sort of behavior. Game design is all about analyzing human behavior and designing mechanisms that encourage positive behaviors and discourage negative ones. That’s why they designed DEs to only have ways that a player can make it more likely to succeed, and very few ways to make them less likely, so that cooperation is encouraged and trolling is discouraged.

I think that the daily nature of dailies encouraged an unreasonable response, that is, that players are encouraged to play every day, and to prioritize doing the daily objectives, since that personal story or dungeon will be there tomorrow, but if you don’t get today’s daily then you’ll have missed out on those rewards for the day. If you don’t play 1-2 hours each day to collect the daily rewards, then it doesn’t matter if you play twelve hours over the weekend, you’ll be down five mystic coins, five laurels, and five karma jugs on someone that plays each day.

I’m not saying that the player bares no responsibility for how he chooses to interact with the game’s systems, I’m just saying that the system should probably not be encouraging daily participation, there’s too much burn-out factor in that.

On average, there are 30 dailies a month to complete, missing 10 of them doesnt harm you in any way. It is an MMO, expect to spend a little time in it.

If you miss ten dailies then you’ll be ten mystic coins, ten laurels, and ten karma jugs behind where you could be, not to mention ten chances at getting a bonus perk. I’m not suggesting rewarding players for playing less, I’m only suggesting more flexibility in how they play. If it takes around an hour to complete dailies (I’ve done it in less, but often in more depending on how I’m playing), then it would take around 7 hours to complete seven dailies, one each day. I’m not suggesting that a move to weeklies should require any less than 7 hours of participation, equal work, equal skill, equal investment, I’m only suggesting more flexibility, in that a player could invest that time into an hour a day, or into to hours a day for four days, or three hours for two (and a little more), or even an epic seven hour run if they can only spare one day per week.

It would be more respectful of people’s lives outside of the game, while still requiring the same effort/reward ratio.

Ideally perhaps they could retain dailies, but allow them to stack up. Like if you miss the daily for Monday, then on Tuesday you could complete Tuesday’s, and Monday’s too if you took the time to do so. It would only need to stack up for several days, and beyond that they’d be lost, but that level of flexibility would be very nice.

your reward should be playing the game, not getting a cookie at the end of a ‘grind’ for a daily

Maybe so, and if they removed the dailies entirely and distributed those rewards via some other means then so be it, but so long as there remain the daily rewards, the specific time investment it takes to earn them remains a concern.