To preface, I truly appreciate all the work you guys put into this game. With everything going on at the moment, I respect your dedication to the community. A majority of these changes are features I've wanted for a while, and I'm genuinely excited for their implications on the game going forward. But this Daily change really feels like a swing and a miss.
I myself don't spend that much time with dailies anymore, besides the occasional Master here and there, but slashing canopy gain to this extent doesn't sit right with me. Even with 3 tickets a day, players will be forced to prioritize focusing on one character over another, or Holodeck over Character Dailies, which just doesn't feel good as a player. The Prize Fight rework worked out fine because you ultimately gained the same, or a very similar, set of rewards regardless of what tier you chose. Unless you were going out of your way for a specific key or variant or tier, you weren't missing out. With the more varied Daily structure, you have essentially 3-4 different sets of rewards at any given time: Holodeck and Character Dailies being the main two sets, with further division between the different featured characters. With the ticket system, you are missing out on something.
The rationale is also hard to wrap my head around. The update notes cite a "substantial amount of commitment" as, ostensibly, the central problem with the Daily system, which is only partly true (more on that in a bit). While grinding each difficulty to scrape as many resources as possible a day was miserable, the crux of the issue was unambiguously the mind-numbingly boring and repetitive Daily template. People weren't constantly asking for a Dailies rework simply because they were sinking too much time into it, but because Character Dailies are utterly unengaging and tedious. If you really wanted to, you could auto through Dailies at a reasonable pace without wasting that much time at all - the barrier was how one-note and unvaried the process was, and how the mere act of completing them felt like burning time.
Point is, I don't think this is addressing the right issue. As I understand it, the impetus behind the implementation of the Daily ticket system was to curb excessive grinding, (which is, if I remember correctly, the same philosophy that informed the Prize Fight rework) but this misses the mark. Punishing those who commit more time than deemed "healthy" is not the right approach. If someone wants to spend an entire day grinding for one move with specific stats, so be it. It should be up to players to set their own boundaries as to how much time they want to commit.
At the very least, if this update is final (Goddesses forbid) and was to continue as such regardless of any player feedback, its placement in the queue of upcoming QoL changes is, in my estimation, sorely miscalculated. From an economical standpoint, what this update ultimately does is level the canopy gain to a flat ceiling, cutting the amount of coinage available to the player at any given time. This might be fine if the rest of the economy shifted with it, but that isn't the case. For instance, a huge reason players would indeed pursue a "substantial amount of commitment" to SGM is the aggravating move system. I know y'all know this, but a maxed gold move costs more than an actual gold fighter. Moves as they were already had an insane price, and given the importance of stats and maxed move effects on select moves, (Drill Tempered, Upper Khat, Catastrophe Cannon Omega, Egret Call, Canopy Bounce) this really is a punch in the gut to anyone trying for character builds. In the current state of the game, this change only serves to hinder growth.
The playing field is now effectively leveled, which in theory is good, but with how hilariously slow progression looks to be compared to the old Daily system, resource and collection disparities don't close in, they just solidify as they are. There is little to no room for upward mobility concerning resources. It might not bother casual players, but for literally any rifter this is gutting.
This change feels like a half-hazard band-aid to a more underlying problem. Even with the advent of the ticket system, Daily grinding - replaying a node over and over to squeeze out extra skill points and moves - is still a viable strategy, and it won't stop with this update. Why? Because that's the only consistent source of moves. If you want a good build and don't want to wait upwards of months for a single perfect, well-rolled move, this is what you have to do. Especially with random rolls and the lack of move agency, people are forced into the grind. The Daily system wasn't the only factor contributing to distaste. It was the poor move system, and the fact that Dailies are the only reliable source of canopy and moves. The way I see it, this change is a unilateral fix to a multifaceted problem that does nothing but hurt players in the end.
On a side-tangent, this change personally feels questionable from a game design perspective. Skipping through Dailies is cool and all, but as mentioned before, this doesn't change the fact that the Daily system remains the main source of a variety of resources, which results in even minute changes having a disproportionate amount of influence (see the ticket debacle). I'll admit this is pure conjecture, but to me, Character Dailies don't seem like they were meant as an income source, at least primarily; I mean they feature characters for a reason. But they are, and they're not being treated with quite the care the main fuel of progression should receive. This whole situation feels like a microcosm of the Daily system as a whole. In my opinion, it's bloated and relied on for far too much than one system should, and limiting the entirety of it with tickets is the opposite direction we need to go. How exactly diversifying resource collection should go about I don't know; that's not necessarily my area of expertise. But this feels like doubling down on a flawed system, and it really doesn't do much for engaging gameplay. I digress.
Do I think this is a tacit move of corporate greed to move sales? No, I'm not that cynical. But I do think this is a huge misstep, and the game really seems to be drifting towards P2W.
At the end of the day, these are just my knee-jerk reactions to the update. I understand the perspective of waiting it out to see how things go. Hell, everything I said here could very well hold untrue in a month or two. The way I see it, though, even in concept, this approach doesn't feel like the best way to go about things - not for the game's future, and certainly not for overall user experience.
