The only thing worse than daily/weekly/etc. quests, are daily/weekly/etc quests that provide rewards uniquely achievable through this system, removing even the option to just do something else instead if one prefers not to follow a checklist every day. Some games at least have the decency of restricting rewards of dailies/etc to the same things you get by playing without them, so that at least in principle they remain optional.
The thing is, dailies/etc fulfill a couple of functions, all of which serve a rather dubious purpose:
- To throttle down the rate of progress. Without dailies, your ingame progress is essentially proportional to your time spent in the game. Whether you play 7 hours every Sunday or 1 hour every day, matters little (besides the slightly larger overhead of multiple shorter sessions), and everyone is free to spend their available gaming time when and how they please. But with dailies, the game replaces that freedom with a strict schedule where you now are supposed to play every day for a certain amount. Weeklies just shift that slightly towards a longer period (in particular to make it more friendly for players who can only play on the weekend), but it essentially means that your time spent in the game is worth less after the initial N hours in that period.
- To funnel people into otherwise unpopular or unrewarding parts of the game. Your multiplayer shooter has that one game mode no one likes? No problem, just add dailies that require them to do 5 matches in this mode and you have a steady but disgruntled population in this mode.
- To draw in players as background filler. Some types of games live and die by their player numbers and have to maintain a certain level of activity to remain viable; in particular this is the case with some types of F2P games, where the entire game is designed around milking the whales, and all other players just exist to populate the game with enough people to remain attractive for those whales.
Instead of actually
solving the underlying issue, dailies/etc mask it or shift the burden of the issue around between different types of players. Look how these examples could be solved instead; the solutions may be harder to implement, but games that do take on these problems are usually much better for the players:
- Balance rewards fairly for regular players and provide an outlet for outlier players with very large amounts of time and thus, ingame progress, assets etc.
- Improve or in extreme cases even remove bad game modes and activities so that they are actually fun.
- Quit making games and rethink your life. Whale-oriented F2P games are a plague upon gaming. Good riddance.
