As you probably know, I’m strongly against catch-up mechanisms, as they invalidate previous performance of other players. If I log in WoW now, I can make a character in a few hours that is stronger than the one played for 1000 hours, but abandoned a year ago. If you want the rewards that others worked for, work harder or smarter.
However daily quests jeopardize this idea, as logging in daily can’t be done harder or smarter. If someone gets some game tokens every day for a trivial task for 100 days, he’ll have 100 tokens that I cannot earn by playing the same hours as he did, just by waiting 100 days, but by the time I’m done, he’ll have 100 tokens more.
What can be done, besides abandoning dailies or making them irrelevant, by them giving trivial rewards? This is important, because dailies are added for a reason: to motivate players to log in every day. If they don’t log in, they don’t find that new things happened, don’t socialize with guildmates and slowly lose connection with the game.
The idea is that dailies can only be done for a limited amount of time. I mean that the game is released on Jan 1 with “Questgiver Jan” who gives a daily that you can do 31 times. If you complete it 31 times, it’s no longer provided. On Feb 1, a new “Questgiver Feb” is introduced who gives a different quest with the same reward that you can do 28 times and so on. So if you play from the start, you can do 1 quest per day. If you start playing in May, you will be greeted by 5 questgivers (Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May) and can do all 5 quests every day, until you expire them. You don’t have to do them and you cannot do them faster than 1 per day per questgiver, but if you do them, you’ll get all the rewards the early starters earned. Please note that there is no time pressure, the questgivers don’t go anywhere. If the latecomer does 2 quests a day, the most recent and one old, then 4 months later he catches up by finishing all old quests).
some time after you left eve they tried daily’s tied to bonus skill. It failed simply cause people logged did the quest (shoot the little chevron) and logged off. I liked for my skill farming toon it was nice.
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“If you want the rewards that others worked for, work harder or smarter.”
and how do you want to outsmart raid lockouts ?
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Its a catch up mechanic, specific one with focus that noone is ever less behind from top then 31 days. It is grindy one, without buffer, what means if you skip a day, you will be day behind rest of the month. If everyone got same quest, it crowded one, everone doing the same thing, what means demand for specific items, mobs, or places is for that day exeptionally high, what is easily abusable.
Problem with a lot of games, is the exponential power of gear what forces to use catch up mechanics. If tier 1 item gives 1 power and next tier will double the power, tier 10 is 1024 times more powerful then tier 1 item. No matter how rare and good item you got on any of the tier 1-9, tier 10 makes it absolete. Forcing to grind all the tiers as a newcomer is way harder then being in top tier, just because there are not many players gearing up on same tier level – lower tier ones cant do it, higher tier ones have no reason to do it. To not lose a playing player, a cheat mechanism is needed to make a player roughly equal to the current tier content. That cheat is called catch up mechanism.
I got some preferences of catch up mechanic.
1. Have a buffer, instead of 1 daily quest per day, have buffer up to 7-14 daily quest. So if you are not playing a week or 2, you have a way to do all the missing quests in 1 go.
2. Have a good reason to do every tier quests at all times, so that even newcomers can competition/help/teamup with top 1%
3. Every item in game should be useful for the top 1% players. So even newcomes can aquire and trade items what are required to do something meaningful and important. No more vendor junk.
4. Being away for a year dont allow to skip the content. You have to pass the same trials then year ago. It will be alot easier, because teammates will be better equiped and its alot cheaper to get better gear. You can advance with daily quests faster, because you can do all the 365 quests(in some order) in one after another, while on top they advance only 1 quest per day.
5. Power of player cant be exponential, even linear can be too steep in some cases. no matter what gear you or your opponent got, how much skill they got, 50 newcomers shoud easily defeat a top 1% player.
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There would need to be a visual indicator to show that a quest giver was approaching their limit, otherwise players would complain about the game being buggy.
WoW used to have a similar catch-up mechanic for PvP. There was a weekly points cap and a season cap. Anyone that fell behind would have, their weekly cap raised so the season cap was still obtainable.
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How does that, differ from a catch-up mechanic though?
More to the point, I think you are missing an important point about catch-up mechanics. IMO they exist as much to benefit the veteran, as the newbie. As the game gets older, people quit. After some time people, who started at the beginning are so far ahead that it becomes impossible to find people to play with or compeat against. Without catchup you end up either pwning noobs or quitting after some time has passed.
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Rift had what I thought was a better take on dailies. Rather than a quest that can only be done once a day, your character has a daily counter that increments daily, up to a maximum. This way regular players can do stuff every day, whilst weekend warriors can get a weeks worth done at the weekend.
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@Anon: raids have naturally limited rewards, after a few months you have all their loot and no longer need it.
@Dobablo: the quest giver could simply tell that you completed all his tasks an he can’t employ you anymore
@Anon: no, unless you have less than 1 guild of people on the same tier, you can always play with someone. Also, latecomers progress faster as they don’t have to wait for content to be completed.
@Shamus: that doesn’t help someone who start playing a year later.
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how do you make daily quests meaningful, yet not unfair?
“meaningful” if dailies beat any other activity in time:reward. but mostly dailies are just waste. usually it is better to come up with your own regular activity that makes more in the same time. sure if your schedule allows it you will go down the list of most profitable activity and dailies will show up at some point in the list. it isn’t the top of the list in any game. sure if rep grind is tied only to those quests, you will have to do them no matter your time:gold.
don’t socialize with guildmates and slowly lose connection with the game.
wait, who does that with dailies? chating takes time and while numlock/point-and-click moving my character to more input activity I don’t read chat but kvm switch over to my workstation reading or watching what ever of more interest as watching a character travelling from point A to B. if me being online counts towards “social activity” – ok .. and yes if group dailies have to be done … but group dailies are FAR down the list because of variable time of building group or if game hase something like LFG button you are at the mercy of randoms. not every game will make this a “high profitable activity”.
measure and decide.
I like your stack idea. so once a month you just binge 30 stacks of dailies in a go, making it nearly top time:reward. and M&S smelling the flowers every day can just do dailies at their own speed without thinking about it much.
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