I made a suggestion on the forums that World of Warcraft should change the vast majority of key dailies into weekly quests. I felt that the problem at the moment is that you lose too much by not completing every single daily if you do not login for a day. For a lot of casual players (like myself), it’s a very punishing system. Some people have suggested that people can switch to alternative methods for gearing like doing heroics, but even those aren’t worth doing with the risk of playing with bad PUG groups. So if you’re attempting to max out your VP, then dailies are the way to go.
My theory is that certain quest hubs need to splintered from the daily routine into weeklies. Those are the Golden Lotus, Shado-Pan, CAs (or whatever) and Klaxxi. The other groups like Tillers, Anglers and mount group really are fine as is because there’s no reward outside of some vanity or professional reward. Also, those quest hubs are pretty small so you don’t feel as overwhelmed compared to the main ones.
The way I would change the main ones is get rid of the VP reward per quest and move them into the end of the quest chain for the week. But also I would boost that reward a bit so that completing all the factions can get you to 500 when maxed out.
However, the key in this design is that people can choose when to do these quests. So you can do part of the quest line on say Monday, skip a few days, then resume them on say a Friday. Kinda like the way VP was designed in Cataclysm, which I thought worked out pretty well.
It feels that the problem is in the math that Blizzard has done. Part of it feels as though they’re attempting to prolong content by doing constant grinds. Others have mentioned that this forces people into the world and gets them so involved that it prohibits them from playing other games. I think these are tragic design flaws. If the main intent are the first two, then my idea still works. You still get people into the world and Blizzard can calculate the length of time by having progression done on a weekly basis.
Prohibiting players from doing other games is just silly. Why not just prohibit them from being alive at that point? I mean, you’re going to be paying $15/month regardless of one spending one minute or every second in the game. So that’s just stupid (both as a possible design and theory).
The other side effect is just better resource management. The dailies add a huge irritation factor in the competitive resource aspect. Too many kill stealing, resource grabbing, etc. Even if the spawn rate increases, it’s just horribly frustrating. That prolongs finishing already annoying quests. And add the respawn of ninja mobs that have high hit points just makes dailies a huge turn off in my book.
But moving that to weeklies would probably get most of the hard core players to do them all at the beginning of the week. That should free up resource based quests so that there isn’t as many ninja grabs.
What about grouping? My design sounds like it doesn’t enforce the grouping idea because there will be less people questing with less quests being abundant. Honestly, I’ve grouped up twice, once with a friend and once through an invite. The only time I ever group up is whenever the Sha of Anger is around. I think most people prefer doing quests solo anyway.
Overall, I think my idea is very good, it seems like a simple change with a lot of positives that are a win for everyone. Blizzard should really consider this game design change immediately because I think that too many people are very unhappy with the daily design. I know one of my friends who is more hard core than me is planning to play another game once he finishes gearing his main. But he’s definitely going to stop progressing on dailies.
For myself, I’m just going to protest by not doing them. I refuse. And with patch 5.1 releasing more dailies, I’m just going to continue sticking with Diablo 3 and the occasional LFR run until the daily thing is completely ironed out.