Yeah, I know I’ve gone silent for a while.
Between a seasonal cold, RL festivities preparation, lots to do in GW2, a renewal of interest in Minecraft, dabbling with the Don’t Starve Together beta, and Steam sales calling attention back to my massive backlog, -something- had to give.
Lists, though. That sounds almost doable to get back into writing shape.
I’m pretty late to the response party about the new GW2 dailies, Bhagpuss and Kill Ten Rats having gotten there first, but my main excuse is that I was busy -doing- them, rather than commenting about them.
Overall, I like ’em.
I don’t love ’em, nor do I hate them. They don’t really bother me either way.
The one thing I do miss is the unrestricted chance feeling of just having completed a daily by accident, while doing stuff one was doing anyway, but to be honest, most days I was using them in a directed fashion, adjusting my activities to get them knocked out first.
Stuff I do like:
- Log-in rewards don’t penalize missing a day with an entire reset of rewards – thanks for recognizing people have lives, unlike *cough* Neverwinter
- Log-in rewards offer a choice at the end of the month, to customize your reward towards what you need more of
- New dailies offer a more directed, Guild Wars 1-esque, Zaishen-like experience
- New dailies reward knowledge of lowbie zones as a result – knowing where lumber nodes are closely clustered in Ascalon, or forage nodes in Kryta saves you time running around in circles
- New dailies encourage but not “force” participation in PvP or WvW (for lvl 80s anyway) – strictly speaking, you can do 3 out of 4 PvE dailies and still complete, but if you’re lazy and open to venturing elsewhere, the low hanging fruit in either game mode may be more convenient to hit than a more tedious or schedule-reliant task in PvE
- New dailies give additional activity-specific rewards – it makes logical sense to get more dragonite ore hunting a world boss, more karma doing events or faster PvP track progression doing PvP. It also makes it still very tempting to complete everything on offer if one has time that day.
- Bottom line: New system gives more rewards for doing less stuff – I used to only get 5-8 old dailies done for 5-8 AP daily and the old rewards. Now I do 3 at a minimum and get 10 AP. I get the old rewards just for logging in (something I already do daily) and I get new additional rewards for continuing my semi-completionist achievement-hunting ways.
Works fine for me.
Why I Game 
I agree – the change is neither very good nor very bad, just a bit meh. My main complain is that it would have been so very easy to have made this a change that pleased almost everyone – all they needed to do was increase the number of options to six per section instead of four and make sure there were several generic ones every day.
For whatever reason, though, they clearly don’t want players running off on their own all over the place – they want them all neatly corralled in the same handful of maps each day. Makes you wonder if there’s something about the population figures they don’t want us to know…
I also get the feeling they have made a policy change to aim more directly at satisfying the ex-GW1 fanbase. It certainly seems to be longtime GW1 players who are most vocally in favor of many of the changes over the last six months – the direction of them at least if not always the implementation.
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