Daily quests, or dailies for short, is not a new concept in the MMORPG genre. It’s prominence was mostly depicted in WoW, where the quests had significantly better rewards than repeatable quests. According to WoWwiki,  dailies are repeatable quests that can be acquired and completed once per day.

I’ve been recently playing Hearthstone and HotS, and the dailies certainly played a huge role in my commitment to play the game at least once each day. ‘I got to clear my dailies at least!’ is always my cry when I squeeze in the last 30 minutes of gaming just before sleeping at 2am before waking up for school the next day.

But dailies has not been a new concept. In fact, probably the most prominent feature from dailies come from the renowned game called Neopets.

Everybody who played Neopets when they were a kid remembered saying ‘I got to get my daily omelette, jelly, etc.!’ This was daily quests in its greatest peak back then with dial-up Internet. And they didn’t even patent the idea yet.

Fast forward to today, where many games these days have dailies. Archeage, WoW, even the mobile game Spiderman Unlimited which I’m totally addicted to.

So why are daily quests such a great aspect in a game?

Continued Patronage

Let’s face it: The biggest win of dailies is that they compel you play at least once everyday. If you are sufficiently committed to the game, the rewards from the daily quests are enough to keep bring you back. Again and again. A game that you would play once in 2 days would make you play it once everyday.

The backlog of quests, especially games with daily quests that refresh itself everyday (the epitome of evil) forces you to log in at least once a day.

The Feeling of Accomplishment

The feeling when you accomplish anything is great, be it big or small. With dailies, the game satisfies our compulsive need to accomplish something everyday. The feeling of logging in and then subsequently gaining something that can be used makes you feel good, and you will then want to do it everyday. It’s simple psychology, really.

Does this mean anything for us? Not really. If games still make daily quests a feature, its quite hard to stop playing. It’s like Satan tempting us with fried chicken everyday (provided you love fried chicken).