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?
Remember that episode of Friends where Chandler wants to quit the gym so Ross goes with him as moral support, and in the end neither of them quits? Well, that reminds me a lot of video games. We constantly (as gamers) hear from our friends, blogs, and other web sites all of the nitty gritty aspects to games that makes them unappealing. Yet we keep playing them. We complain about mechanics, developers, decisions, and everything under the sun – and yet we keep at it. Of course there are reasons for continuing, it’s not all doom and gloom, but I think one of the major ones is that it’s simply habit. If you’ve been playing a particular game for five plus years it’s REALLY hard to just stop. Suddenly you’re left with ‘free time’ where that video game used to be. So you fill the gap with another game. A few months down the road and you’re back to your old game wondering why it was you ever left in the first place. Or perhaps you’re one of the stronger type who don’t ever return, finding that the grass really IS greener on the other side.
