GW2 has revamped dailies. I’m torn, to the extent that I still care about GW2. It makes it easier and less interesting to coast and not care, which is probably not a good thing; Ravious, any insight into how this affects play for someone emotionally invested?
GW2 now has daily login rewards. Okay. It’s not a horrible mechanic, even if it feels like a F2P gimmick. The implementation here is better than many because it does not demand that days be continuous. If you don’t log on for a week, your login rewards progress stays on track.
WvW and sPvP achievements are still more or less the same. They tried to sell that one, but no, rotating amongst the WvW objectives is not a new thing. The newish bit is asking you to win in sPvP as a particular class or two per day for a bonus chest.
PvE dailies are the big change. This seems like another step in the continuing march away from the pre-launch design philosophy, here away from “play however you like.” The picture on the link above is representative: daily achievements are now very specific, such as defeating a particular world boss, one of the gathering types in a quadrant of the map, or completing events in a particular zone. If population spreads over time, this may not be a bad design plan, because it channels players back together in the zone of the day, the way Zaishen dailies do/did in GW1. I have not seen how well that works; I have seen mass piles on a world boss, but I have not had the interest to complete 4 quests in whatever random zone was picked today. I am not part of the population being channeled there.
The channeling effect must be minimized by the range of dailies. In the linked example, players are simultaneously being channeled into three different zones and then another quadrant of the map. You get all the restrictive feeling of highly specific dailies while still spreading your players across a fair amount of the map. Maybe that’s better than spreading them across the whole map? It seems like a lot of design philosophy to give up for a small gain.
: Zubon
I logged into GW2 for the first time in a couple of months to check out the new daily system.
I waypointed to the Maw, since that was the boss event of the day. I tooled around near the Maw for half an hour, maybe 45 minutes. Event didn’t pop. I logged off.
I’m unlikely to log into GW2 for another couple of months, now. Really doesn’t seem like a very smart change to make a daily achievement specific to a single event that only occurs every couple of hours.
Highly anecdotal and silly… It being 1 of 4 PvE choices. I saw players trying to learn about the Maw and timed bosses in map chat.
I on the other hand thought the Maw was quite fun. It was like a little reunion since I haven’t been part of the boss rush in months and months.
Still, I guess if you just tool around by yourself without contact to others in map I can see how that imposition wouldn’t be fun.
Actually you’re absolutely right. The very reason I stopped fighting the dragons was that even when they had a specific spawn time, they’d be late to their own party on multiple occasions. Something else they still haven’t fixed in the game. I’m sure though you’ll be told how terrible of a player you are, that it’s somehow you’re fault that you weren’t satisfied with the game design, or that something was wrong with the way you were playing. Oh wait, I see that they beat me to the punch below. So long as apologists keep apologizing for this trainwreck it will continue to be a trainwreck and any future updates won’t really make it to the main game due directly to these trainwrecks remaining on the tracks. These people who keep letting these developers get away with keeping these gamebreaking problems really aren’t helping in the slightest.
Yes, waiting for 45 minutes without attempting to learn about the task you are trying to achieve and then complaining about it is not providing anything helpful to anybody. It is also not helpful to bias the whole daily achievement system on a single achievement.
It would also help if these people learned to break up paragraphs, if we are in the position of making assumptions and not pointing fingers.
Ad hominem much? Oh yeah I see you are well practiced at that. Carry on trying to justify terrible game design by attacking those who have valid points and concerns I’m sure your fellow white knights will thank you for it.
“Play how you want” founded on the shores of “okay, but this is the optimal way to play” a while ago now. A large part of the problem is the contingent of players who find repetitive, meditative tasks fun, which everyone else considers boring grinding. Ensuring that those people earn rewards while simultaneously ensuring both that players don’t have to do that and that they don’t put a big difficulty spike in the open world turned out to be beyond ArenaNet’s capabilities.
The break came much earlier, with the introduction of ascended crafting (ascended items turned out fine, by the way). You needed three account-bound materials, which only dropped in specific contexts. You couldn’t get all three by sticking to one playstyle – if you didn’t want to do jumping puzzles, dungeons or WvW, you weren’t making any ascended items.
Having read about the changes to the dailies in advance I was ready to fulminate about them on my blog but after the first session post-change I just couldn’t summon up the energy to be outraged. Yes, it’s a change I would prefer they had not made. No, it doesn’t make my time in GW2 more enjoyable. Yes, it does move the game a little further away from what most people seem to understand it was going to be prior to launch…
All of these things, however, are to a greater or lesser extent true of just about every change made to GW2 since the perceived failure of the first big post-launch event, the Karka Invasion. Over a couple of years the entire game has been slowly re-purposed and retrofitted to become something not all that dissimilar to the mold we all thought it was designed to break.
It’s still not a full-on gear ladder theme park but its much, much closer to being one than it ever looked likely to be back in 2012. No, you don’t need Ascended weapons and armor or infusions or the new Elite traits or any of the other various minor upgrades, not if you want to play at casual level and have fun: that much is true. They do, nevertheless, exist and while they exist they will be used as benchmarks of what the “peak” might be.
I personally preferred the game in the first few months, when not only was there no Ascended gear but Champions dropped no significant loot, World Bosses appeared semi-randomly and gave nothing but a few blues and greens, and there was no Achievement system at all. I suspect, however, that had ANet continued to cater to people with my preferences they would be vying with Carbine as NCSoft’s least-favored offspring right now.
They have very clearly gone with the money. That’s understandable. All the changes over the last 18 months or so have been squarely directed not at casual players but at invested fans. Oh, and also brand new players. People who just bought the box and people who are committed to the long haul are the two groups who spend the lion’s share of the money in the Gem shop. That’s been stated openly and unequivocally. Every change has to work for one or other of those groups.
In that respect the Dailies are puzzling, because they would seem to risk needlessly antagonizing a significant portion of the invested fan group, that which only does PvE content. Those players could easily have been kept onside by keeping two or three of the generic PvE dailies like kill count, kill variety, ambient, recycler etc. It’s been less than a week so maybe those will return.
I think, though, that part of the intention is to get players to cluster more. Every MMO learns that allowing players to spread out at will is a bad idea (for the business, not for the players). Megaservers was the big supposed solution to this problem, backed by fixed times for World Bosses. The location-specifc dailies add another strut to the scaffolding shoring up the appearance of a busy, populated game.
I’m just waiting on the expansion now. That will show us where the game is headed. I’m pretty sure it’s somewhere I’m not all that interested in going, at least as far as the gameplay is concerned.
I feel it’s like a net gain of a fraction of a step forward.
You get a front loaded laurel and friends reward, which is ultimately a net gain. Plenty of people I know feel like they HAD to do the daily because choosing not to get a laurel was the wrong decision, regardless of fun. Now, that’s not the case. The other thing is that, yes, in that F2Pish feel people might log in just to log in. Logging in is half the battle, I would guess.
The narrowing I think steps back a bit. But only a bit. It’s a lot of fun to see more activity, especially in mid-zones. This is why we play MMO’s, even soloing them, instead of single-player games. We want to /know/ there are others out there. I like that each reward gives a cherry on top now. Collect some wood in Ascalon… here’s some more wood.
I think I like it more than the daily of old. It is more Zaishen-y. I am feeling more rewarded, and I am feeling more interestingly tasked. If I don’t want to do the achievements, I miss out on 10 AP. /shrug I don’t feel that’s a big loss.
The thing is, though, given they were going to change the dailies at all, almost anyone could come up with a way to do it that pleased more people and annoyed fewer. This applies to a lot of the changes they have made over the last 18 or so months.
Since I don’t believe they are unaware of the consequences of these design decisions I believe there are other factors at play. I have felt for a very long time that someone or some group that is in a position to enforce their will has control of the direction of development. There is nothing remotely unusual about that: Carbine, Sigil, Red5… the list of MMO studios that have made odd or idiosyncratic design choices because of the “vision” of a powerful individual or cabal is long.
GW2 is an MMO that operates with a cloak of transparency skillfully wrapped around a core of secrecy. There are endless open discussions on how to proceed yet almost all changes are handed down by diktat. Developers give wide-ranging interviews while hiding behind a mantra of no speculation. I follow the news from a number of the better-known MMO houses ad ArenaNet is probably the most cryptic and frustrating of all of them to read.
The upside of this is that a single change of appointment – a promotion, a new opportunity, a retirement – could see a complete turnabout in approach. Or, more likely, NCSoft could make a few decisions that would override the current, self-destructive approach.
When I do the dailies with the new system, I’ll likely only get 1 or 2 in PvE, maybe all 3 if the stars allign, and the remainder in WvW. It is definitely a little shove, seeing how the new UI is laid out, to get more players looking at wvw and pvp. Some configurations of daily can be achieved in less time than before, the numbers for each task are less taxing, which is nice change, but I’ll be less likely to do any of the more specific pve tasks.
It only takes logging on to get laurels so there is less incentive to complete dailies than before. The logging on system instead of the monthly achievements is a improvement to me, not sad to see the last of those monthly chores, good riddance. They’ve made dailies less relevant, but are still promoting logging-on, definitely a calculated move, likely worried that it was too routine. Whether it was shaking things up just for the sake of it or a more lasting iteration it is difficult to predict, at the very least I think they will re-evaluate the more specifc pve tasks in the not too distance future.
That’s the thing. It is a F2P gimmick. At this point I feel sorry for anyone who’s still playing honestly because here’s a game in which the title went into passive mode right after launch, in which they aren’t taking it seriously and they certainly won’t be fixing anything major or gamebreaking for most of us. For example, if this is there idea of what’s needed for a solid rewards revamp it’s laughable especially since ever since they added DR to the game most players get absolutely nothing useful in their inventory for playing and the only way GW2 contributed to the MMO genre was by making possible to convert multiple good titles out there into Pay to Progress titles where apologists and white knights reinforce an already China-like billing model. Stay tuned however folks to see what other feature that doesn’t need fixing or is only fixed halffast by this team in the future because if this is any indication of where this game is going stick a fork in it it’s pretty much done at this point considering it’s age.