CCP have released a small daily activity reward feature on Singularly. If all goes well, the feature will hit Tranquillity sometime just after the upcoming Citadel Release. In its current form, it consists of a simple task – killing one hostile NPC for a 10,000 skill point reward. This can be claimed once every 22 hours for one character per account. The first character to achieve the task on that day obtains the reward. This equals to approximately four million skill points per year. It can be found in your Opportinities window as a recurring opportunity.
Daily opportunities in their current state
The idea behind this feature is to promote and reward frequent player activity. When 24 hour skill training queue limitations were removed, there were no game-play reasons for players to log in regularly. Once players log on, it tends to lead into in-game activity.
There have been mixed responses to this new feature. The vast majority feel that this needs much more development and consideration of risk versus reward. Using skill points as a motivation is also under extensive discussion.
CCP Rise has responded to player concerns on the forum. Some of these responses are listed below.
Why Dailies?
So first let’s talk a little history. EVE had a daily logon incentive for most of it’s existence: the 24 hour skill queue limit. Back in Phoebe, we removed those limitations. Now, at the time, we were of two minds internally. We didn’t like the experience around being punished for not logging in to update your queue, but also knew that some of those logins might be leading to meaningful gameplay and we shouldn’t lightly let go of them. We leaned to the side of a better experience and removed the limitations, hoping that the logins we were generating were fairly empty, rarely leading to more actual activity in the universe. Well, it turns out we were wrong about that. Now, with before and after data we can see that making it into the client is a huge step towards real activity, even if the reason for logging in in the first place seems artificial. So this leads us to where we are now, attempting to find ways to create more logins that also don’t feel like such a punishment as the skill queue limitations did. This may not turn out to be the perfect alternative but that’s what we’re looking for.
Why Skillpoints?
There’s been a lot of feedback here that this kind of feature would be acceptable if the rewards were more monetary, either LP or ISK or something similar. There’s a few reasons that doesn’t really work and we feel pulled towards SP. I think the biggest one is that many people simply won’t be motivated by LP or ISK, especially in the amounts we would be restricted to giving. SP simply has higher demand across more playstyles and player ages and that just makes it a more powerful incentive. Second big reason that we actually tried designs using item and ISK rewards and it quickly creates a lot of economic imbalances. Any time we are giving something away without much activity cost we are heavily sabotaging someone’s gameplay. Whether it’s because of devaluing LP, causing major inflation, or crashing item markets, it’s all bad for you guys so we would rather avoid it.
Why so lazy?
Lots of feedback about the feature having such a minimalist implementation. First, let me clear up some confusion by saying that this feature has no relationship with the ‘Tribute’ system that was described last year at EVE Vegas. That feature has actually gone down a path more focused on goal setting and long term engagement than daily activity and so the daily part was broken off and given to our team separately. With that in mind, we are trying to find the right mix of activity and accessibility. We want you to be able to collect this reward during a lunch break or a 10 minute period where your kids are in timeout but also want to make sure there’s some real gameplay associated with it. We think getting to a belt or gate for an NPC is about the right mix and that’s why we’ve landed with this. That said, we’ve also deliberately tried to keep it simple so that we can deploy fast and adjust based on how it gets used. We are absolutely open to expanding the list of activities in the future and imagined that as one of the most likely first iterations. Small sidenote on activities: many of you mentioned PVP, remember that this is always problematic because the most effective way to PVP for rewards is just kill your own alt, which isn’t very fun or interesting.
Like it? Don’t like it? Got better ideas on how to increase daily player activity? We would love to hear your opinions.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Cerussite.
