GW2 - A daily achievement system I can enjoy

I Ain't Doin No Damn Dailies!

My love-hate relationship with Blizzard's World of Warcraft blames them for the proliferation of daily quests in MMOs.  I mean really, you want me to pay a subscription to log in every day and repeat quest content?  I see, repeating instances isn't enough repetition.  You've got to be out of your damn mind.  I REFUSED to do daily quests when they were introduced in WOW and ticked as just one more reason I was done and moved on to other games. 

I cringed when Warhammer Online listed daily quests as a part of their feature development.  However, Paul Barnett promised us it wasn't going to be the same run of the mill.  I was appeased by their concept of implicit quest objective completion.  Meaning, if you have to kill your way through a throng of bears to reach a quest-giver whose request was going to be to kill some bears, they'd acknowledge the fact that you'd just killed a slew of bears getting there!!  WAR tried to implement the idea but the in-game realization was far and too few.

I knew Guild Wars 2 was going to have achievements, including the dreaded daily quests.  I paid it no attention.  I don't do dailies.  Even in a no subscription game, I'm not running back and forth to the same flippin' NPCs every day to do the same crap.  Ain't no way!  Color me very surprised when my first Daily Achievement completion flashed up on my screen with it's jiggling-caching treasue chest animation.  I still didn't bother to figure out what I'd done to complete it since I wasn't going to intentionally repeat the steps again.  I finally succumbed to curiosity when I managed to complete a daily quest almost every day without knowing how or why.

GW2 Flavor of Dailies

You can read more about the full achievement system here on the wiki.  The run down on daily achievement specificially, is here.  The most significant difference about GW2 daily quests is that they're not done for any particular NPC or for specific items, areas, etc.  They are completed by finishing catergories of activity that are relavent to every zone such as killing x number of different mob types, completing x number of events, harvesting x number of resources, etc., all of which are a normal part of completing GW2 content.  You're not going out of your way to finish these objectives and if you happen to do them all within a 24 hour period of time (reset is 5PM server time), you're reward with Daily Achievements completion.  It's easy.  It's effortless.  It's seamless to my game-play.

On the weekends, when I've been playing for embarassingly long periods of time, I've been rewarded twice. Sometimes I'm churning through the content so fast that ding the daily for one day's session and am still around when it resets and finish it up again.  Sad actually, that I've had a couple of days where I've played that much GW2.  In my defense they're not continuous sessions.  I do log back into real life in between.  *smile*

Don't be fooled by the examples I listed.  Not all of the objectives are PVE focused.  People doing PVP and WvW have equal opportunity to complete them too.  I'm a fan of GW2's implementation of Daily Achievements.  It's hard not to be a fan.  Who doesn't like "free" rewards!

Comments

[BigMikeyOcho]

I agree. I was never a fan of dailys, and doing them almost made the game feel like a job. Like "I'm off to work honey, time to slaughter me 20 boars, pick crops, and stop the same invading army, same as I do everyday." It's also why I was never into the dungeon treadmill either. "So you want me to kill the same guy 50 times, just to be able to go kill that other guy 50 times?"

However, I do feel very compelled to play GW2's version. Simply because in doing so, you're not doing the same things. Different zones, different events, it all counts. :)

I did find the reset time to be interesting, but then realized it's based on UTC at global midnight. Same time for everyone worldwide (I think... not sure about EU servers...).

[Alysianah aka Saylah]

Totally agree. The only time I engaged in dailies before GW2 was my last go-round with WOW. I did the crafting dailies for the rare components and I'm a enjoy cooking and fishing.

GW2's implementation makes it easy to complete the achievements. Even if you don't play enough to complete dailies there's a wide variety, including monthly.