Pages

Thursday, November 6, 2014

The Wrong Side Of History?

This morning I read an article on Massively about Aion's new expansion, Invasion.  Among the features listed is a new system that rewards players for logging in every day.  Of course, Aion is not the only game to do this.  When I played Neverwinter, sometimes all I would do was log in, press a button, receive a reward, and then log back out.  The longer my streak of logging in every day, the greater the rewards I could obtain.

Contrast that with what occurred in the Phoebe release on Tuesday.  CCP removed the 24-hour limit on the skills queue.  That's right, CCP now believes they receive more of a benefit from not forcing players to log in frequently to update their skills queue.

So who's right?  Possibly both.  Aion and Neverwinter are both free-to-play games, which depend on their cash shops.  Those games need players to log in to have the opportunity to entice them into buying the latest shiny.  EVE, on the other hand, is a subscription game, and allowing players to only train skills with out logging in gives CCP as much money as if they play 3 hours a day.

However, I think CCP will act as an outlier in the future as more game companies will become desperate for players to simply log into its games.  Daily quests are bad enough, but at least people are playing the game.  Getting rewards for just logging in?  Been there, done it, didn't like it.

7 comments:

  1. Interesting thought. LOTRO and Rift both have the daily treat for logging in as well. WoW, on the subscription side of things, has no daily treat, just daily quests. However, those seem more like a way to meter out progress on something slowly... they are often used to increase your rep with a specific faction... to keep you playing, and thus subscribed, over a longer period of time.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Daily Quests are transparently obvious as to their goal. They reward players for having lots of free time. In terms of getting people to login? So what? People doing dailies, the way the dailies exist now, hardly qualifies as a player being social. Most of these people login, do the daily, and log out. Their social interaction with the community is minimal.


    I hardly see this type of interaction as beneficial to a gaming community.


    I also think the 24 hour skill queue is a remnant in EVE of an era where the average time to train was far less than most players are experiencing today. If you want to encourage alts, dual-character training, etc, then you have to be flexible with the skill queues. If anything, this allows CCP to make MORE money. It gives people interested in crafting a viable alt-character, the ability to do so without the tedium of logging in everyday to queue up new skills.


    For CCP this is a perfect move. Dailies? They are transparent attempts to get people to login each day. Hardly worth it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Another reason why the ACU# means less and less. I don't think I could ever play a game with "dailies" again tbh,

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dust 514 gives bonus skill points for consecutive logins

    ReplyDelete
  5. I've used R&D agents to do that before. I'm thinking about designating an alt to run 3 of them every day for the datacore boost.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Considered this myself. I am confused that drones tech2 invention require Graviton Physics datacores. Which are primary Caldari. There is only R&D L4 Gallente agent (who's in low) and one L2 Minmatar agent which offer Grav datacores. From Lore point, why would Creo-Dron traffic in Caldari components? Guess I will just raise the price of the result to make up for needing to purchase. The amusing point being is that Graviton is my only V skill in R&D - because it is a req for tech2 warp field disp on a HIC.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Eve daily is planetary interaction

    ReplyDelete