This week's article for The Scrying Pool is all about optional Daily Achievements.

So why haven’t we already seen daily achievements for these? Well with jumping puzzles not everyone likes them, which goes back to feeling forced to do stuff you don’t like, but now they would be optional. Personal story is kind of the opposite. Players should do the personal story because they want to, not rushing through it to finish the daily. And just for clarification, I don’t mean finish the whole personal story, just a single mission of it, like completing Fury of the Dead. This also helps those players short on time finish the story when they previously were spending all their time hunting down events. Lastly hearts have not been in there because we already had the rewards for 100% everything, which meant they didn’t need any more reason to rush through them. Still, it will probably require completing more than one heart to complete that daily. Vistas could work similarly, though would be nice if there was a way that progress on the daily only occurred if players watched the entire cutscene and not skip it like most players currently do.

Lastly is new game mechanics for dailies. We already have dodging and reviving, so adding dailies based around interrupting and blocking would also work. These require using specific skills, which could mean requiring players to use different weapons or skills than what they would normally use. Dodging and reviving is available to everyone regardless of weapons or skills, which made them good candidates when players had to complete everything.

Since sPvP has its own set of Daily and Monthly achievements, the only thing left would be WvW. The only thing I could see being used as a daily here is supply usage. Since WvW is opposing player dependent, anything that could work as a daily could as be used to the detriment of a team. For example, completing a defending event would be a good daily since it would give a simple reason for players to defend and possibly even show players that defending is an option. However, if the Jarimor server is just too awesome maybe the Mattsta server decides to take the day off so that the Jarimor server cannot complete its defend daily (Beam that up Scotty!). Granted, this probably wouldn’t be too big a problem (that one player who didn’t get the memo and smacks the door of some tower), but with the way players are setting out to game the dailies and complete them as fast as possible any daily could potentially have a negative effect on the way WvW is played.

And that’s it. There are also some things that I considered and don’t think would work. Reflect for example. Not every class has it and some only have it with specific elites or traited skills. That and since it doesn’t pop up ‘Block’, ‘Dodge’ or ‘Interrupt’ it could be similar to what we saw with combo kills where it is a little wonky and not easily communicated of whether you failed or the achievement is borked. Points of Interest are already smash and grab affairs and a daily for them wouldn’t improve it. And lastly, specific killing (like killing x many Flame Legion or x many Skritt) would start down the path of just being grinding.

Matt “Mattsta” Adams can be found on the Blackgate server, probably leveling one of his many alts.

Q: Matt, what are you most looking forward to in the February patch?

A: New PvP Map! You can read about it in the preview write-up here on ZAM.