Play Every Day

A Yin-Yang Bomb of Anti-Poopsocking and Just One More Level, this is when a game encourages you to play every day.

This is the case with pretty much any browser-based persistent world. As well as daily rewards to encourage regular play, you get punished for being offline too long in any of the following ways:

• You accumulate turns, adventures, action points, Loot Boxes, or whatever the game calls them, which cap once they reach a certain value.
• You accumulate resources over time; by allowing them to build up, you're making yourself a juicy target for attack
• In addition to either of the above, other people are progressing while you're not.

Examples of Play Every Day include:

• Pokémon has been doing this since Gold and Silver, mainly with the lotto.
  • Berry farming upped the ante on this, and the Global Link put even more pressure to play every day on.
• This is the Tamagotchi's main shtick, as not attending to the creature's needs on a daily basis will eventually result in its death.
• FarmVille: The crops take a few hours to a couple of days to grow, and if you don't harvest them in the time that it took for them to grow, they die. The only way to avoid this trope is to (literally) buy time. This is how Zynga makes its money - they call this "Appointment Gaming", and quite a few Facebook games have taken this mechanic and run with it. (Farmville is the Genre Popularizer and Trope Codifier for the Facebook Casual Game.)
  • Cranked Up to Eleven by The Sims Social, which refills your Spiral Knights-style energy bar every 45 minutes. Now you can Play Every Hour.
• Halo Reach offers extra credits for completing challenges of varying difficulty each day, and one per week as well
• Tom Nook's shop in Animal Crossing restocks every day. He might have that spaceship you want, and if you don't check, who knows when it'll be in stock again? More mundanely, the game rewards loyal players with more loyalty from the local resident animals that manifests in them being less likely to move out and more likely to give the player presents. Miss more than a couple of days, though, and you'll get teased and scolded for being gone so long. Further, the town itself requires a little near-daily maintenance: saplings and flowers need watering, weeds need pulling, etc.
  • And in Wild World for the DS, you sometimes get a random letter that gives you little tidbits of wisdom, one of which is "avoid boredom by playing an hour a day".
• Brain Age gives you a stamp for the first brain-training game you play each day. It also makes the stamp larger if you play three games in a day.
• NieR uses this with the 'cultivation' section - though it isn't really very obvious about it, so it might take you a bit of time to even realize it.^[1]
• The World Ends With You, at a certain point early in the game, gives you the ability to level up your pins by not playing the game. The PP earned this way starts diminishing after 24 hours, though, so if you really need that SDPP, you'll want to load up your file every day. Also, the food system. 24 bytes per day (sort of). Until you get the Hollow Leg, then you can eat as much as you want.
• Dissidia will reward you for checking your Mognet every day for 15 days.
  • There's also a reward for getting 200 messages via Mognet. The most you can get is two per day (and you only get the second one if you haven't been playing for more than three days) so checking every day is the best way to do it.
• In Kingdom of Loathing, players receive a minimum of forty adventures per day, with a Cap of 200. Players can gain extra adventures by consuming food, booze and... uh... spleen damaging items. There is a maximum amount of these you can consume each day, and every day you don't fill up is wasted turns. Given that a player with decent resources can obtain around 150 turns in a day after food, this means that you can only skip one day (Assuming you log on long enough to eat on the off day) before he starts losing turns.
  • Also, there are many one per day, use it or lose it things, like the 4k free meat from the Organic Grocery, or the use of the He-Boulder's yellow ray (One-Hit Kill that leaves all of the things a monster Randomly Drops). You find yourself logging in daily just for these things. Note that most of them are things that you have paid good money for.
• Wii Fit's anthropomorphic Balance Board tries to guilt-trip you if you don't do the body test every day.
  • Or, per Adventures In Responsibility:

Well, what the adverts didn't mention is that it's like an abusive partner that you dare not leave for either fear of what it might do, or the fact that it's ground your confidence so far into the ground, you couldn't if you wanted to.

• Everything related to boat/train parts at the end of recent The Legend of Zelda games.
• The Sonic the Hedgehog Gems Collection unlocks demos of Sonic's various Genesis games in the "museum" if you play every day for X days... Of course, before you can do that, you have to unlock the museum page they appear on.
• Virtual Villagers. The game is real good at having your villagers starve to death if you don't check in on them every day.
• Webkinz does this in some fashion.
• World of Warcraft offers daily quests, which provide you with gold. There are also daily random heroic dungeons, and a weekly raid boss kill which provides you with gold and Frost emblems, a hard to get currency used to buy high level gear. If you don't do the daily heroic every day, you'll miss out on some very nice gear.
  • Technically, you can still get Frost Emblem gear without doing a daily random heroic or the weekly. However this requires that you get involved in raiding, which many people opt not to do.
• EVE Online doesn't let you queue skills for more than 24 hours, and your planetary harvesting will give almost no yield unless you restart it daily.
• In Dragon Quest IX, the online store changes its inventory every (realtime) day.
• Browser game Legends of Zork gives a player 30 action points to use for exploring a day. Once they run out, there is nothing else they can do for the day.
• Mega Man 9 has the "Daily Dose" achievement, for completing the game once per day for three days in a row.
• World of Tanks gives players double experience for the first winning match in each tank every day.
• The Earth 2025 browser-based game give you bonus turns the longer you go without logging in, but after a day or two you'll hit your maximum amount, with diminishing returns in the process, leading to the player playing once a day as the optimum amount.
• Spiral Knights likes this trope:
  • Everything important you can do in Spiral Knights is linked to Energy. Crystal Energy is bought (from players using in-game currency or with real world cash), while Mist Energy slowly recharges itself over time; both are interchangeable and the game will prioritize the use of Mist Energy when it's available. Your Mist Energy takes twenty-two hours to recharge fully, and is capped at 100, so if you don't play every day that free energy goes to waste.
  • Further encouraging frequent play is the fact that the dungeons are semi-randomly generated according to player actions, and the seven dungeon gates rotate every two days, with the one at the bottom of the queue disappearing to make room for a new gate. If one dungeon gate leads to a stratum you're particularly fond of, you've got a maximum of two weeks to reap as many rewards from it as possible.
  • There are several shops in town and between dungeons with rotating inventories, refreshed daily. Though several low-level items will always be available to you, higher-level items are only available randomly and in limited quantity.
• League of Legends offers a bonus 150 influence points for your first win of the day. Winning this sets a 22 hour countdown until it becomes available again.
• The DLC Lair Of The Shadow Broker for Mass Effect 2 offers free resources (and sometimes upgrades) every day, encouraging players to go back and accumulate them. It can be tricked by manipulating your system clock and restarting the game.
  • Mass Effect 3 also has this... kinda. In the single-player campaign, your task is to accumulate War Asset points which represent the sum of galactic armies. However, their effective number is multiplied by the Galactic Readiness level, which defaults to 50% (so you only get to use half of what you earn). Winning multiplayer matches raises the Galactic Readiness but it becomes gradually reduced by a small amount every day (down to 50% again) unless you play again (and you can't go over 100%).

1. ↑ Basically, you can plant various crops on a field next to your home, but unlike everything else in the game, these crops grow in 'real time', which means that the best way to get a quick harvest is to plant, go to sleep, and return to your field the next day. On the other hand, if you leave your crops standing for more than a day or two, they'll wither - causing you to lose whatever seeds and fertilizer you put into the project, without any harvest to show for it. ...on the bright side, this means that you can greatly accelerate any cultivation-project you might have by moving the console's clock forwards in steps. You can even use it to make fast money... and, if you DO end up leaving your crops around long enough to wither, you can turn back time and harvest them anyway.