Daily Events in Free-to-Play Games
Developers often implement daily login rewards to encourage players to return to the game daily. Some games create quest lists that are refreshed each morning with new unique tasks. Complete these five tasks to unlock a gold chest.
Players work toward obtaining common rewards, often those they would have earned by playing the game itself.
Actions related to daily routines have an element of randomness. "Complete 5 missions in story mode" does not offer much meaningful engagement for the player. It feels like you are working on an assembly line, completing tasks that have no real meaning but give you some reward for your efforts.
Events should have more meaning. To achieve this, developers should focus on incentives that encourage the player to choose actions they engage in and that provide the right rewards for that particular player.
The MCOC metagame revolves around collecting Marvel characters and strengthening them to overcome more challenging content, such as missions tied to the linear storyline or daily, weekly, or monthly events. Some of these can be done solo, but certain missions are completed in an alliance. An alliance is a social group in MCOC, similar to a guild or clan.
Daily Event in Marvel: Contest of Champions
Each day a new daily event appears in the game a new daily event appears. On Monday you collect yellow items by completing daily missions tied to the event. Yellow is the color of mutants, well-known as a subtype of Marvel characters, including the X-Men (Wolverine, Rogue, Cyclops, etc.). Yellow items can be used as upgrade currency. Of course, the game offers general upgrade currency everywhere. Nevertheless, when you use a specific type of currency (yellow upgrade currency for yellow characters), you get a 20% bonus to the character's stats gained per upgrade.
Two types of daily quests are presented here. Both give players the opportunity to upgrade items. The "Testing Grounds" provides common items, while the "Science Slaughter" provides green ones.
Daily Event Variety
A player's journey in a game like MCOC can take ten years. You start with one- or two-star champion characters and gradually move on to three- and four-star ones. As you progress, something unique happens in the game. In these daily events, the player can choose the difficulty.
If they have collected and upgraded a bunch of three-star champions, they can choose the medium-difficulty daily quest. The reward will be higher: you get more powerful upgrade items that will double the champion's upgrade compared to items obtained in the Easy daily quest.
In addition to this variety, the player gains autonomy and enjoyment from an engaging choice. The player will feel that now they can do easy and medium quests, and when they get a little stronger, perhaps in a few months, they can start doing the hard ones. Who knows, maybe in a few years they will already be playing on Expert mode.
What Does This Mean for Your Game?
The MCOC event model opens up many opportunities for conducting live operations in several types of games.
Here are a few examples of games where this model can be applied.
The Clash Royale Meta
The key to using the daily quest system is to include the types of content you are upgrading. In Clash Royale, cards are characters and spells. In Golf Clash, they are golf clubs and balls. In F1 Manager, they are drivers and car parts.
The Clash Royale metatype distinguishes its collectible content by rarity and usefulness. I believe this is not enough to create a daily quest system similar to the one in MCOC.
One way to group cards and make the choice convenient for players is to visualize a weekly event calendar where items are rewards for each day of the week, so the player can set short-term goals. On Wednesday, as an event reward, you could get the "Prince" card.
In some games, like Golf Clash, that use the Clash Royale meta, there are special subtypes of collectible items. For example, on Saturday you can get Rough Iron clubs.
The Merge Mansion Meta
When you have a merge game and you want to apply the MCOC daily quests, here's what you need to do.
Since the game does not have any particular character or item progression, and the focus is on upgrading the mansion, the events should feature items representing rooms of the mansion. Each day there will be daily merge boards, featuring a specific grid for particular types of items represented in the daily merge event.
You may ask: isn't the player already renovating the mansion in the main game? Yes, that's why you want the events to speed up progression. Completing a daily event could grant a chest with higher-level items, and the chest itself would be placed in a unique inventory of chests collected from events.
The design intent of the event: Complete the daily event, obtain valuable items, and speed up main game progression.
The Brawl Stars Meta
Brawl Stars is a MOBA game where much attention is paid to upgrading individual characters. But if you create daily events for individual characters, you will quickly find yourself on a path of an overly long daily event cycle.
Another reason daily events for individual characters won't work is that Brawl Stars characters are strongly balanced by rarity, meaning many players have all common characters. Legendary characters are only owned by a few.
To incorporate MCOC daily quests into a Brawl Stars-like game, I would consider secondary upgrade paths for characters, such as gadget upgrades.