Krystalle made an interesting point to me a few days ago about EVE Online – the PI (planetary interaction) that I had been doing on a daily basis is the games way of keeping me logging in every day. I hadn’t even made the connection until she said something, but she’s absolutely right. I set my extractors once a day so that they’re mining on 24 hour rotations. It’s easier then checking every few hours (another option) or every three days (the longest option). Sure, I also have to log in to update my training queue but that could be anywhere from a one day update to a 25+ day update. It doesn’t require you to log in every single day. If I want to take advantage of PI (which I do, the money is just too good to pass up) I need to make sure I’m constantly working on it.
Typically I am not a fan of daily events. I dislike being ‘forced’ to play a game every day when I am perhaps not in the mood for it. WoW has these quests in spades with a limit of 25 ‘daily’ quests that you can complete (per day). EQ2 also has daily quests for mission zones (which require a group) as well as weekly and daily crafting quests. LotRO has daily faction quests (specifically crafting factions). These little things that pull players into the games on a regular basis can some times be so small that we barely even notice ourselves doing it, but they’re there.
What I’d like to see is more inventive ways of (for lack of a better term) coercing your players to log in every day. Sure, daily quests are great but they’re starting to get very old. Being obligated to log in is not how you want your players to view your game. You want them to be excited. On the flip side I do think that these daily quests work because I feel bad if I miss a day and I try to make sure I get my ’rounds’ done and if they didn’t work I doubt we’d see so many of them. Festivals are another method of grabbing the attention of players and enticing them to log in, as well as live events. If you add too many of these they become meaningless and players will just ignore the festivals.
Does anyone else have other suggestions or ideas of how games can entice players to log in on a daily basis without it feeling like an obligation?
Why do we care if players log in every day? Better coercion is still coercion, and will still burn players out. You don’t *want* players to feel obligated to play your game, you want them to have fun doing so, even if they do it at their own pace. (This is at the root of one of my major objections to the subscription model; I feel obligated to play to get the most out of my money since I’m paying for time, not content. I *hate* that feeling, and have actively avoided subscription games as a result.)
Well, there’s the old “make the game so fun that people want to log in every day just becuz” thing.
Implementing that is hardest of all, though.
For me, I’m supposed to be logging in to EVE daily for PI for my corp, but I did that for a couple of months and got so burned out on it that I haven’t logged in to EVE much at all in the past month or so. . . . . Since the PI is for my corp, it costs me money, not makes it, so there’s not really much incentive for me to log in to do it. Especially since it was so we could build a station, but the next alliance over got booted from the area and we got their old space and thus have now obtained a station exactly like the one we were gonna build and therefore don’t need to build one anymore and. . . . . I need to look at the ops list and log in for those more instead. I’m supposed to be a warfighter not an industry guy anyway.