Hello community and devs,
Seeing what other mmo's have done, either as a long-standing framework for the game, or injected as a way to maintain playership over the long-term.  I have a proposal for Daily Assignments as a way to combat PVE-content fatigue (aka boredom) and stir up some pvp(!).

So with the current assignment system, there exists the possibility to spawn a selection of randomized NPC's, in random locations, with particular loot settings, certain orders of objectives, and all the landscape elements and hard-points deployed about most of the islands in game. 
There also exists legacy "special missions" that have several waves, move around islands, and have a variety of tricky things to do.  But unfortunately this is static per faction.

I think the assignment template system is under-utilized, and can be used to implement Daily Assignments (or of some other infrequent interval).

Why not combine the two?  And only allow them to be run maybe every 12hrs ("daily") or every 5 days ("weekly") or whatever intervals you like.  Importantly you can do many, daily, weekly, monthly, maybe even... special one-off events triggered at times determined by devs?! (holiday events, etc)

By restricting the amount these things can be run, their difficulty (should also be very high*), and their reward (also very high*) will incentivize players to return for these infrequent, but regular, events.  Special events can then plug into this system, have parameters tweaked and inject some nic or new modules into the economy.

On difficulty and reward: these should be done with a minimal squad of 5+ (of a certain level of reputation*).  NPC's should have at least some observers, maybe at later stages in the event, but certainly that amount of combat difficulty is necessary.  Even an indy component, mining w/ npc spawns that attack the miner!.  Imagine any regular indy mission that spawns npcs, but doesn't require specifically that you need to kill the npcs!  I think something like this can provide content for logi pilots, combat, and indy, and requires such a squad to be formed and work cooperatively to achieve this assignment.

*Note on difficult throttling
I see an issue here by making them extremely difficult as a static level of difficulty, which will make this a "vet only" feature.  As a way to amend this, I suggest that the assignment-taker's reputation with the governing faction sets the difficulty.  So this way a group of 5+ new players can do a daily that is scaled for them.  And 5+ vets can run a level 6 difficulty, automatically as a process of taking the assignment. 

Now, about how to add pvp into this:
Any Daily mission taken at Alpha-2's or greater will require the participants to accomplish a non-trivial task on the neighboring beta.  Naturally the beta's will require the same, and might force players to go to a random other beta (assuming gamma or no other island type will be introduced with assignment-feature integration).  The difficulty of the mission will not affect this, only where the assignment is taken from.  I leave it to you to discuss if daily assignments are randomly placed at different terminals, or if players can choose where to run them.

TL;DR
They should provide reward that is unique, and proportional in amount to the risk and difficulty of the assignment.
The assignments should cover a broad set of activities and require a high degree of participation among many different specialties/bots/fits.
The assignments perhaps can, and should involve inter-island travel.  Alpha-2 daily's should send players to betas at least for one step.
They should only be available to be run by an individual character at some infrequent interval. 

PS.
I really like the idea of indy missions with npc spawns outside of this 'daily' thing.  This might also be a new category of template missions with higher rewards   Might need to be another thread..