Burnout and the Cycle of Player Involvment

Games have to deal with this type of cycle.

1. Starting out. Everything is new and exciting.
2. Ramping up. You know the basics, now you’re setting more long term goals.
3. Mastery. This includes being settled in a social group for endgame as well as mastering your character, for whatever type of endgame you decide to do.
4. Burnout.
5. Casual/ Recovery.
6. Bored/ Distracted by new game or hobby

This is a fairly well documented cycle, c.f. The Daedalus Project or Spinksville

the longer that a player spends in a grind cycle, the quicker the burnout.

tricks to making a grind cycle work better for players involve things like incremental rewards inside the grind, or access to new content/enemies during the grind, or specific story elements gated via the grind.

As a game developer however, you really have no choice. Your goal is to keep players in the game, and you have to use either step two and three over and over, or give step five some significant sinks that people find worthwhile. You want to minimize the time that the player stays in step four, while avoiding the heat death of step six.

one of the biggest issues that I have with the most recent things to be coming out of Everquest 2 has been the creation of longer cycles without use of incremental rewards in the ramping up/mastery sections, vis-a-vis the grind required for Epic 2.0, or the solo -> heroic -> expert -> raid -> expert raids, or the ramp up of spell levels to grand mastery....

obviously, all games at some point are going to be a grind of some sort, the key factor is making the sections more enjoyable.

What lessons have been learnt to keep the grind as pleasant as possible?

1. Fast Travel as easy and trivial as possible.
2. Remove barriers to grouping, to actually becoming involved in the events/game play.
3. Remove barriers to communications between and among groups.
4. Make incremental steps as simple to achieve as possible, going as far as to make solo play possible.
5. Allow multiple types of game play given in your game to achieve ends that are intrinsically valued by the players (i.e. Bartle Taxonomy)

eh.

just spouting out endless crap today.

 

I see this a lot with games like Diablo 3: Play, hit max level, grind for gear, grind for better gear, push records, earn achievements and bonuses, then stop playing until the next cycle (season) hits.

It's a bit trickier with games like EQ2, with multiple types of valid playstyles, but it still applies: the game needs to offer something to keep people playing and paying. I feel like EQ2 management is suffering right now from the mindset of "more hours required = people playing longer = money" and while not untrue, it's a short-term thing. Too much grind and repetition leads to boredom, frustration, and leaving. Even a temporary absence of paying customers can affect a game with limited resources.

Fast travel helps. Bonus events help. Switching out the way good gear is rewarded could help; instead of grinding endlessly for tokens, go back to dropped gear that is then exchangeable for tokens so you can buy what you need. As you said, continue to support and encourage the multiple playstyles and levels of player.

The key thing is to make the player feel valued and provide entertainment. Most don't mind putting in effort for rewards, but there is a point where that effort outweighs the enjoyment. The cycle of "play/peak/rest/repeat" is inevitable, so listening to your players about what is bringing on the burnout is necessary to hasten the "repeat" step.

 

I am not the strongest pve player. I wouldn't know how to min-max with written instructions. However with my chosen class(es) I can generally sort out what 'works for me' in the games I play.

Except EQ2, at least in recent years (this wasn't always the case). I run into a dense wall of vague assertions based on assumptions by the number crunching players (not actual game documentation) coupled with an AA system that the bulk of which, for most classes, is largely meaningless.

And these numbers and assertions change with every expansion, and sometimes mid-expansion with Game Updates.

Because of this, I have given up what small inclination I had to group, except with close friends as a tag along. I don't want to be a drag, and I don't want to hear some random stranger tell me what a scrub I am.

Whereas in other games I play/have played, I can mouse over various stats or abilities and get a very clear idea of what they do and what I need to focus on. And while I still don't lead raids (I got raiding out of my system circa 2002), I am often the one getting small dungeon groups together and leading the charge.

I agree, the grind is unavoidable, but there are ways to make it less mind numbing and more rewarding. The team seems to have lost sight of that, for whatever reason. And this isn't just a DBG thing, either, it started before that.

 

And herein lies the problem DBG has created for itself.

I gave up raiding years ago because I don't like the 2nd job nature of it.

So, when I had gotten my one or two main characters to where they were optimized against heroic content, I'd hop on an alt or go into deco mode, or in the old days, knock out some hq's or go achievement hunting, or go looking for those little random quests hidden somewhere unexpected.

The beginning of the end for me where those stupid key quests; a mindless repeatable grind for a miniscule rng prob of bis items. They are pure time sink.

Then when I gave KA a shot, and saw even more time sink, bugs galore, class homoginization, and a game design that was more pay wall than even p2w, well, that was enough for me.

 

I actually enjoyed reading that and the links. I burned out the worst after the guild I was in finally died out. I was the kind of guild officer who was always like "oh, you have a hangnail? I'll be right there with a first aid kit!" Seriously took it too seriously. Was my first time, whatever. So it took a few years to get over the reality of being left alone now. The other officers had quit a while back for various reasons, mostly to go raid elsewhere. I enjoyed chatting with some "malcontents" who I liked because they always refused offers of help, yet stayed around to chat. Then even those wandered off. I pissed off a few people. Lesson learned. So in the end it was me and my husband. And we were tired of being a nanny to everyone anyway. Plus the game turned into an endgame heavy thing. And we weren't happy with raiding (we'd tried it too over the years), so we didn't leave.

So it took a couple of years to say, ok we're just going to solo/duo/pug and we'll come back. The world brought us back. We missed the sound of birds and music in Kelethin, the dark humor of Neriak, the dugeons, the history, the events. We basically wanted to see what's next, but without so much invested in the social aspect because we got so burned out while "putting our time in." He went so far as to recreate a couple of characters and level them from scratch because there was too much unpleasant history in his old characters. I kept mine, I figured if some people missed me they'd contact me (and they have), and if they didn't like me, they could just avoid me better by knowing who it is. Also I craft about 80% more than him, so for me to recreate them would be really lengthy.

I'm not sure why a friend of mine burned out. I got a definite whiff of frustration and anger when he came to visit one day, a former co-officer. But he's a man of few words, so he stopped before he ranted. I would've wanted to know what he issue was, but I knew not to ask. If I am to guess, it would be something about things becoming too easy, too trivial. People like him who know all the buffs, and all the extras in each craft tend to get annoyed when those are no longer necessary because the process is now trivial.

I remember wondering how it was he could do rush orders in 2 minutes. By the time I figured it out, partly with hints and partly by myself, it was already trivial. I felt kind of let down that my new knowledge would no longer be required. But it must have been a shadow of how he felt. TBH, I was sorry that I was such a bad student sometimes. Looking back I often didn't know why he was telling me something. And I can see that he didn't want to say "because you get THIS benefit" as that would turn it into a transaction, not a discovery.

True role players like that are the hardest audience I think. I think the TLE server is a stopgap to losing those players. But the psychology is pretty clear.

On the subject of communication: I'm not sure what barrier there is, except in PG's. We already have people running game shows, hide and seek, quiz shows, reciting poetry, or mantras or whatever in general chat. Then another group attempting to flame them into silence, another discussing free speech as a result, and another group turning off general chat (again!) until the fuss is over. LOL Same as in every other game.

On the subject of incremental steps: I think everything in KA is achievable, but there is this hidden incremental step. People will tell you how to be ready for heroics, but how to be ready for experts is a whole other ballgame. And there aren't many tip sheets out there about that. Mind the gap! It's too easy to fall into mediocrity, and then get criticized in groups, and then decide to stay a solo player.

One thing I think is missing from the "cycle" above is the step where you play another character for the sole purpose of running some places on-level that you never ran before. Such as when I played a character I later deleted, just so I could do the "neighborhood" quests around Freeport. The bruiser storyline in there is actually pretty good. Finding the secret, forgotten places, that's a stage of play that I think is missing from the above description. A game as big as EQ2 has a lot of underplayed areas. I still haven't found everything in the Overrealm. This is possibly my favorite boredom killer. I'm an explorer.

Sometimes I wonder if the grinds are a stopper for the multiboxers. I wonder if we're being made to grind so that they don't get 6 characters all set up as easily as before. Personally my chances of multiboxing are infinitesimal. I never say never, but it's really not something I'd enjoy. I felt this way back when PvP was causing rule changes in the PvE game. But I really can't say this time if it's the multiboxers, or just the use of contract programmers that's causing this mind numbing aspect.

I haven't upgraded a lot of my PG adorns. When I consider the time it will take, my mind shrivels and hides in a corner. It's definitely an excellent reward, but it's (shudders) beyond my ability to deal with. It's not the time, it's the actions during that time.

It's turning into one of those childish "dares" - I dare you to do (something outrageous or disgusting) and I'll give you (some prize). The first few times, it was interesting, and there is the possibility of a story there too (the NPC's talk about pocket universes which would dovetail with PoP coming out), but right now it isn't developed into anything interesting yet. I hope it does become more deep though, because think of the time we have to spend on it. Make it nicer.