Adventures of Taas

My recent MMO burn out has been well documented on this blog in recent months.  One of the things I’ve been considering in the three weeks since my MMO break began is how a genre I once held above all others has lost its shine for me.

I think looking back at it now one of the number one things that has pushed me to this point where I needed to disconnect myself from the genre completely is choice.  From June to November of this year I was steadily playing Warhammer Online pretty much exclusively and it was only when my interest in WAR started to drop off and I went in to tourist mode I really started to feel the effects of burn out.

It is odd to single out choice as one of the flaws with the genre as it is at the same time it’s greatest strength.  Thinking now of the time where you either played Ultima Online or Everquest is rather odd as today if you look at MMORPG.com’s game list the sheer amount of games available is awesome.  The problem is these games do require a certain amount of commitment and attention and that choice of games (that really are not all that different from each other) makes the potential for tourist-distraction/MMOADHD sinking in that much greater.

The problem is the games are all very similar – they each have those little things that make them different but the bulk of Triple-A titles today are based on the EQ->WoW model.  This really becomes an issue when you hit a bit of a rough patch with your current game – a sort of grass is greener on the other side mentality kicks in and instead of staying focused on the goals within your current game you flee to another game where similar rough patches await you.

Periods of anxiety and doubt are part of the psyche of an MMO player.  It’s not all a cake walk – unfortunately the game developers haven’t found ways to get rid of hell levels or grind points and sometimes it can be very difficult to get past these barriers.

The point of this post is to help me realign my thinking (and to help those going through the same burn out as myself).  So, what do you do about it?

My first suggestion is to use microgoals – Microgoals in my mind dates back to the FFXI Allakhazam community.  They used to put small milestones (such as ‘level cooking to to 20′ or ‘unlock bard’) in their forum signatures to show what they were working on.  By establishing goals within the bigger picture of the level treadmill of the common MMO today you can set things you can do in a single sitting or weekend of gaming.

Limit yourself to one MMO account – I have rationalized again and again (I think I’ve even blogged about it in the past) that it is possible to play more then one MMO at a time.  No.  It is not.  The time, energy and focus commitment required of an MMO just cannot be spread across two games.  There are plenty of people out there who will disagree with this but I just do not see how it is possible.  I believe you need to stay tuned to the game world you are in and stay focused on it.  I know some folks who are at end-game in their given MMO will take on a second MMO “between raids” but I would argue you just are not getting all that much out of your main game it might be time to reevaluate your subscription to what you view as your main game.  The point here is focus is required – and you just can’t focus playing two or more MMOs at once.

Be a part of the community.  Be social, join a guild, do some grouping, post on some forums.  Developing emotional attachment to the community you are a member of will help you stay focused on the game.  One potential pitfall here – many people will stay in an MMO well beyond their expiration date in that game because of people.  People can only be one of several factors you consider when deciding to stay or go from your current game of choice.  If you personally are not having fun but stay just for people the burn out will come eventually anyway and the odds are increased that your quitting the game will be permanent go up the longer you stay for bad reasons.

Maintain a list of MMOs you are “done with” and stick with it – Because of the emotional investment in these games nostalgia can be a hell of a pull.  With some games though you hit a point where you’ve just been there done that.  Even if an expansion comes and adds more content it will just be more of the same if the mechanics don’t change.  Be honest with yourself and if you have a game or list of games like this that you just will never have fun with again DO NOT go back.  During lulls in new game / expansion releases it is tempting to go back to these games but you will likely only waste your time and money.

I think by following the above advice I personally could figure out a way to enjoy these games again.  I hope by sharing it someone out there can put their own burnout in to perspective and maybe find their way back to MMOs.

Do not adjust your internets – the title of my blog actually contains the words “MMO” and “break” and yes it does actually imply exactly what you think.

I have to decided to take a break from MMOs.

MMOs require an emotional, attention and time commitment that has increasingly been difficult for me to cope with. I started playing these games while I was still in school and it was easy then to balance game time with my life demands. Since that time I have gotten married, had a baby and have been steadily climbing the corporate ladder. All of this on top of the many hobbies and other things I like to dedicate my time to.

The reality is that competition for my time has become super competitive and the one activity outside of being a husband/dad that I hadn’t cut back on was playing MMOs and things like writing, working on programming projects and the like were suffering because of it.

So I’ve made a bit of a lifestyle decision to step back from the MMO world for a few months to get caught up on things I’ve been missing out on. My hope is that I’ll get a feel for my new job, the time and energy I have available for activities outside of work and family and sort of reset with some balance in my activities.

Adventures of Taas will continue to focus on my gaming related writings – this break is going to let me catch up on a lot of gaming writing I’ve been wanting to get out including a series on Guild Leadership.

So there it is… gone for now from the MMO genre but I’ll be back when I can figure out how to balance these demanding games with the rest of my life.

I haven’t been posting much on this blog lately and its not just the hecticness of the Christmas season that is to blame.

No – I am in an MMO rut. One of those really bad MMO-depressions that hit everyone at one time or another. I’m feeling burn out in three different games and that is really making it hard to focus on any MMO or getting much of anything accomplished. I spend the time I have available to play games thinking about the three games that are haunting me and eventually I get frustrated, give up and fire up my Playstation 3.

The three games I am torn between at the moment are World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online and Everquest 2. I really want to enjoy at least one of them but splitting my energies between them is not working out for me. I’m also having specific issues with each of the games that is really preventing me from saying THIS IS THE ONE, THIS IS WHAT I AM GOING TO PLAY.

With World of Warcraft I can’t exactly place my finger on the issue. Its a lot of ‘been there done that’ (I’ve leveled so many characters from 1-50 I don’t even want to think about it) with a side of ‘everyone is bigger than me’. With WoW I have a sincere desire to hit 80. I.REALLY.WANT.TO.RAID.WOW. The journey is really killing me though. I’m an accomplishment driven gamer to a certain extent and there is very little sense of accomplishment in the early and mid game of WoW. I’m old school MMO – and WoW doesn’t offer much to my kind in the early levels. I haven’t given up on this yet but something has to give or I don’t see this happening for me.

In Warhammer Online there are a few issues. The first and foremost is that for the first two months (plus beta) of the game being out I was one of the primary people behind the 4th largest guild in Warhammer Online. And let me tell you – guild officers in guilds this large work their asses off for you – go kiss your guild leader now. It was a lot of work and I fell in to the trap of running events and attending to administration with 100% of my game time when I should have said “no, instead of leading a keep raid on Wednesday night I’m going to do something I want to do – Other Officer XYZ you run the Wednesday Keep Raid”. I genuinely love my role in Aureus Knights and I have no intention of stepping away from it to any extent but next game we start in I’ll be doing more to spread the work load around.

Warhammer Online itself is a game with flaws – that actually isn’t fair to say because what game isn’t with flaws? But with WAR there are a few things that stand out that make the game difficult to fully embrace as a main game. I find the PVE lacking. Now when most blog-commentators point out the PVE factor they say the game doesn’t have enough raiding or dungeons or whatever and I actually am not talking about that. I think the dungeons WAR does have now are great (public quests being integrated in to dungeons is truly game changing for MMOs and I expect to see it in many future titles). No when I talk about PVE in WAR I think that the questing is just damn boring. It is a fairly linear solo experience that just isn’t rewarding once you’ve done it to level 30. It just offers so little – and I’m a huge PVE gamer.

The second flaw that nags at me with WAR is that the best way to advance your character (in the widely accepted opinion of min/maxers and now the community has fully embraced it) is to scenario grind. One of WAR’s greatest strengths is that it allows you to experience several different facets to advance – this is the sphere system that Vanguard promised (but didn’t especially deliver on) on crack. In WAR you can advance your character through PVE Questing, PVE Public Questing, ORVR or Scenario RVR. Awesome, bang up job… good stuff. Right, until after the first month everyone realized you could get more XP and PVP XP (Renown) by doing nothing but scenarios and do nothing but scenarios they did. Even on some of the busier servers now the world is a ghost land as people sit in war camps queueing for scenarios.

So I don’t know – WAR is fun. There are some fun classes and the Open World RVR is amazing when the sides are balanced or are balancedish. But there really are some nagging flaws. It just won’t click with me.

That brings me to my gaming-love. Everquest 2. EQ2 is now 4 years old and I’ve been fairly dedicated to the game for around 3 of those years (having started in early beta and taking a break pretty early on and then coming back with a vengeance) and I think I’m finally hitting the end of the “primary game” cycle with EQ2. You know that point you reach after the peak of playing a game where you start to look back from the end game and think “how much longer can I beat up on the same tried and true content?”.

I can’t really point to any particular mechanic in EQ2 that is a causing my doubts about the game. Arguably The Shadow Odyssey, the expansion just released for EQ2 is a dream come true for me – it is primarily group based, it is based on the mechanics of my favorite Everquest 1 expansion (Lost Dungeons of Norrath) and it offers a tonne of highly replayable game play that is engaging and at times plain difficult. So I have no excuse here – I can only think of being at that point in the MMO life cycle where enough is enough, you just can’t do game XYZ as your primary game any more.

So I’m not sure where that leaves me. This blog post obviously didn’t help me answer any questions as I’ll be concluding here in a few lines feeling no better about where I am at. But I know many people have been here before – do you have any strategies for coping with burn out like this? I think my medium term future with gaming involves a whole lot of single player experiences on the consoles – maybe I’m just overdue for a bit of a genre break.