burnout
Latest
Officers' Quarters: Tier transition trouble
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. For many guilds, the release of a new raiding tier isn't as cut and dry as simply moving on to the new bosses and leaving the previous tier behind. These days, there are a number of reasons to continue with older content: finishing legendary grinds, completing achievements, and downing unkilled bosses on either difficulty. This week, a guild leader feels conflicted about how to approach the raiding schedule with so much unfinished business in Firelands. Hi Scott: I'm the guild leader for a medium sized guild. The guild is about 9 months old at this point, and we've had our share of raid member turnaround. Through each generation though, we've gotten stronger. Now that the team is pretty solid and showing up on schedule weekly, a problem has reared its ugly head, and its name is Dragon Soul. You see, because of the constant turnaround, we were stuck in tier 11 longer than we should have been, and are only now at the point that going 6/7 in Firelands can be done in a couple of hours. We still don't have a Rag kill under our belts. Compounded with that, our Legendary recipient is only in the second collection phase. But with the new dungeons dropping 378's and Deathwing taunting us, some members of the raid group have voiced in interest in raiding Dragon Soul. One member (who got a Rag kill with another team a couple weeks ago) said he can't wait to kill Rag so we "never have to go to Firelands again." That really REALLY aggravated me, but I kept my cool in Guild Chat.
Officers' Quarters: Walking away
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. Marriage or ... your guild -- it's a fairly straightforward decision! However, it's not an easy thing to walk away from a community you've spent so much time leading and developing, even when you're feeling burned out on the game. This week's email features a guild leader who is simply torn up about the prospect of leaving the guild to another officer. Scott, I've been putting off writing this for a long time, but I don't think I can any more ... During the days of Vanilla I came across a player (we'll call him "Dan") who helped direct me to a great guild ... The guild was small, close-knit, extremely helpful and the most at home I've felt in a gaming community in ages. Through the years I worked my way up the ranks, eventually earning a spot as one of Dan's officers. Several years later, when Real Life go the best of Dan, I was chosen as his successor. There were other officers there longer, but Dan felt I understood his vision for the guild better than anyone else. I was honored, and have done my best to carry on the guild in the foot steps he left behind. We're not the biggest guild on our server, or the most advanced raiders, or the best PvPers, but we're good, and we're well known. Our guild name has always been synonymous with quality people, and we let our members know that we value quality of character above all else. When guilds on our server fold, their members clamor to join us, and we're careful about who we let in. We've been around for over five years now, and I am damned proud of everything we've accomplished. Don't let my glowing self appraisal fool you.
The Perfect Ten: How to deal with burnout
I remember the first time I got hit hard by the powerhouse slugger known as "burnout." It was during my second stint in World of Warcraft, oddly enough, which by then had extended to a year and a half of solid play. I was clocking in three to five hours of game time on a daily basis (this was my pre-children era, obviously) and enjoying the cruise up through The Burning Crusade's content. Then one day, out of the blue, I realized I was sick of it. A cold trickle flowed down my spine as I couldn't conjure up any feelings of excitement, pleasure, or interest in this game. All of the accomplishments and achievements I had worked so hard to get became absolutely meaningless to me in the space of a couple minutes. I logged out, canceled my account, and then fell into a several-day funk when I was thrashing about as I tried to figure out how to fill this now-gaping void in my free time. Slightly pathetic, yes, but no less real for it. In retrospect, I see how I stacked the deck for such an enormous crash, and many years after it, I now have a much better handle on how to deal with burnout than I did back then. In today's Perfect Ten, I want to pass along my meager wisdom and experience about how to deal with this event... because it happens to most of us, sooner or later.
Storyboard: Ten tips to avoid drama burnout, part one
Roleplaying doesn't create drama. Sure, we all hear stories about roleplaying drama, but it'd be more fair to say that MMOs create drama. There are epic arguments that erupt over who gets a piece of armor that will be obsolete in a few months, it's not really reserved to having players sitting around and talking. The difference, of course, is that the lower the stakes, the higher the drama and the more petty politics can get. It's the sort of thing where petty politics can get so bad people step away forever, because the fun of roleplaying is just not worth the irritation. Needless to say, you don't want that. If you enjoy roleplaying, you want to keep it as unspoiled as possible for as long as possible. So for this week's column, I'm going to cover the first half of ten tips that I find help ensure that you don't wind up getting knee-deep in drama that ruins the roleplaying. It won't always prevent drama from occurring, but it can help make sure it's nothing more than a mild misunderstanding.
Burnout Crash hits home in August, was once a Wii game [update: now '2011']
Burnout Crash! will bring its top-down pileups, Kinect collisions and titular exclamation point to PSN and XBLA in August, according to an announcement on EA's UK news site. EA originally announced the downloadable auto pinball title as a "fall" release. Another revelation about Crash! was provided by Criterion creative director Alex Ward at EA's summer showcase. Ward told Giant Bomb that the project started on Wii before it became Crash!. "It was a user-created game where you drew a road with the wand, and we thought, if we made Crash Mode, you could make it all yourself." Criterion worked on that until discovering that it was "quite boring." Update: The announcement on EA's site has replaced all references to "August" (and the one out-of-place reference to "Winter") to just "2011."
Burnout Crash! spins series off to XBLA, PSN, and into traffic this fall
We first heard about "Burnout Crash" this spring through ESRB and Australian ratings, but EA has kept mum about the downloadable racer -- until now. The publisher officially announced Burnout Crash! for PSN and XBLA, coming fall 2011. The downloadable top-down racer is based on previous Burnout games' Crash Mode, and offers rewards for "causing traffic chaos by crashing into cars, triggering explosions and destroying everything in sight." 18 different "crash junctions" will challenge players' ability to wreck stuff. And should you desire a new way in which to wreck stuff (like your living room), Burnout Crash! will include a Kinect mode on XBLA, in which "two teams use gestural controls to play on one television in a party battle!"%Gallery-127936%
The Daily Grind: Do you need breaks from MMOs?
It's safe to say that if you're a regular Massively reader, you're pretty fond of MMOs on a whole. It's all but a tautology, even. Unfortunately, whether you just run the occasional mission in Guild Wars or you're in the midst of a hostile corporate takeover in EVE Online, playing MMOs can start to take a toll on you. They're demanding of your time in a way that many other video games aren't, with the constantly evolving social framework really pushing players to log in on a regular basis. Fortunately for gamers, there are usually a lot of alternatives beyond just endlessly killing the ubiquitous 10 rats. So do you need to take the occasional break from playing MMOs? Do you need to intersperse your playtime in World of Warcraft with regular single-player interludes? Or do you find that it's still just a game and you can log in or not as the mood strikes you with no real need for a specific break? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Breakfast Topic: The curious phenomenon of "reverse burnout"
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages. We all hear the stories about people who played World of Warcraft too much and as a result had to stop playing to make the game fun again. I've fallen victim to that myself back in the days of Trial of the Crusader. But lately, I've encountered something that at first makes little sense. The best thing I can call it is "reverse burnout," and it's not from playing too much -- it's from not playing at all. I admit to being a raider at heart. I love making my gear a shiny shade of purple so that I can join nine or 24 other people as we down the big, bad monsters of WoW together. It was my reason for getting to level 70, and it kept me hooked all throughout Wrath of the Lich King. But since the launch of Cataclysm, my raiding days have just ... stopped. Each guild I've joined on the promise of being able to raid either hasn't raided at all, or they've gone raiding without me. And without raiding, it feels like my motivation to play is gone. I've gotten all the gear I could get from heroic dungeons and reputation vendors (except bracers, which will never, ever drop), daily quests feel like a chore, and the friends that I have online are off in their own raiding guild that I'm on a waiting list to try out for (they're full on hunters). Pickup raids have proven to be too unreliable in terms of both time and talent as well. It's like one part of such a huge game was the glue that held everything else together for me. So what do you do when one of your favorite parts of the game becomes off-limits? How do you deal with being bored with WoW -- when you're not even really playing at all?
Report: Burnout Crash is 'action arcade style', set in Crash City
Last week, a rating appeared for the unannounced "Burnout Crash" on the Australian classification board's site. We followed up with the board to find out more about EA's mysterious "multiplatform" game, and received the following synopsis of the submitted content: "An action arcade style game set in the fictional world of Crash City. The aim of the game is to cause as much damage as possible to traffic and buildings by crashing a car into them." Essentially, it's the idea behind "Crash Mode" in previous Burnout games, or Paradise's "Showtime." And if this single mode is the sole focus of Burnout Crash, it's likely to be a smaller downloadable game. It's also likely to be a bit depressing, if the setting is a city so beset by car crashes that it has "Crash" in the name.
The Guild Counsel: Fighting the flames of burnout
Everyone, and I mean everyone, who plays MMOs will face burnout at one point or another. It doesn't matter what your playstyle is; it doesn't even matter whether you're in a guild or not. Raiders log in and find that they can't wait till the raid is called, even before it began. Soloers log in and ask themselves why they should bother doing that shard- or token-run for the billionth time. Tradeskillers log in and realize that their hatred of crafted stew has carried over to their real lives. In this week's Guild Counsel, we'll take a closer look at burnout. While it is unavoidable, we'll examine ways to get through it, for you as well as your guild.
Officers' Quarters: Burnout already?
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. In the emails that I've been receiving lately, I've noticed a disturbing trend: Many guild leaders are finding themselves burned out right now. On the surface, it doesn't make much sense. After all, the expansion is only a few months old. Many guilds are still progressing through tier 11, earning new perks every week, and looking forward to all the great new content that future patches will bring. How can so many guild leaders already be burned out? A few factors are feeding this trend. The first is the insanely long gap between the release of Icecrown Citadel in patch 3.3 and Cataclysm. The Ruby Sanctum was hardly any help to keep raiders interested during this time. Most of the guild leaders who survived that period did so by constant recruiting, merging with other guilds, or working diligently to keep players interested in raiding; all of these are high-stress situations. Then Cataclysm released, and rather than breathing a sigh of relief, these guild leaders now had a whole new ball game to contend with. They have had to ensure their raiders or PvPers were prepared for endgame content in which the gear curve was suddenly much steeper than it had been since the early days of The Burning Crusade. Raiding guilds have had to make tough choices about the size of the raids they would coordinate and how they would deal with gear in the new loot paradigm. Once those guilds made it into raid zones, they found themselves up against bosses much tougher than those in Wrath's first tier and completely unfamiliar to most players -- unlike those in the endless Icecrown runs we knew by heart.
Officers' Quarters: When a sense of obligation covers up burnout
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. Officer burnout takes many forms. Sometimes it manifests as a subtle, creeping bitterness. Sometimes it shows up suddenly, as unexpected rage. Sometimes, it's a feeling of emptiness, like the one described in this week's email. This week, I'll look at this particular form of burnout and talk about what this officer can do to cure it. Dear Officer's Quarters, I am an officer in a fairly successful 25-man raiding guild (currently #2 on our server). I've been part of the guild leadership for over a year at this point, and my tenure has been characterized by my dedication and hard work. My guildmaster has privately told me on several occasions that he feels that I'm the person in the guild that "tries the hardest." However, of late, I feel that my hard work is no longer rewarding me with anything, not even a feeling of accomplishment.
The Daily Grind: Do betas affect your enjoyment at launch?
MMO betas get a lot of press these days, and whether you feel they've devolved into pre-release marketing campaigns or are serving their original testing purposes, one thing almost everyone can agree on is that open betas (and even some late-stage closed betas) offer a pretty accurate representation of the game you'll be playing at release. This can lead to premature burnout (or at the very least, a bit of boredom once the game goes live), and this phenomenon is particularly noticeable if you play a lot of themepark games where there's a very definite character progression path and an optimum route from zone to zone. Titles like RIFT can build a lot of positive buzz by inviting tire-kickers in to "test" early and often, but the strategy could conceivably backfire if folks feel they've played their fill prior to release. What about you Massively folk? Do you scale back your beta activities so as not to spoil a game's launch, or do you go all out and play a beta as you would a live game? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Officers' Quarters: How a guild dies
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. This column is a special one for me. A reader wrote an email to the Drama Mamas, who passed it along to me as a topic that seemed more appropriate for OQ. When I read the email, it struck quite a chord, because the issue the guild leader raises is one that led directly to the collapse of my own guild. Yes, my own guild is finished, and so I can now reveal what guild I led and why it is now defunct in the hope that others can avoid the same fate. But first, the email: My girlfriend and I are the founders of a casual raiding/leveling guild. It's always been an eclectic mix of people, and it's one of my favorite parts of playing WoW. We're both friendly and empathetic, and people tend to develop bonds with us. We spend time together to the point where they feel comfortable in asking us for advice with serious real-life problems. However, the major problem is that our guild is that it's highly focused around my girlfriend and I. It feels like the only people who can lead a raid are the two of us, for example. People help in other ways, like donating to the guild bank or recruiting, but there isn't much leadership in the guild.
Next Need for Speed coming from EA Black Box, Burnout's not dead
Criterion may have swiped development duties for the upcoming installment in EA's ancient racing franchise, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, but it seems the franchise will land in familiar hands for the series' next iteration. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, EA senior vice president Patrick Soderlund responded to a question about whether Black Box would be behind the wheel of next year's Need for Speed, saying "you can assume that, yes." Later, he cheekily implied that one could safely assume that. On the off-chance that you don't need the Need for Speed, Soderlund also shared a bit about the future of EA's other flagship racing franchise: Burnout. Soderlund explained, "we haven't made a decision to whether Burnout does this or that, but it's not dead for sure, no," adding that the publisher is currently "prioritizing what we want to do." Here, allow us to help arrange those priorities: A spiritual successor to Burnout 3: Takedown A new, non-motion-controlled SSX Everything else
Officers' Quarters: Scorched by raider burnout
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. It's been more than 10 months since Blizzard introduced major endgame content to World of Warcraft, and raider burnout is at an all-time high. In times like this, hardcore players often look to casual guilds as a refuge from the demands of more serious organizations. It's not always a bad thing, as I'll discuss, but sometimes taking in these hardcore refugees can lead to major problems. This week, an anonymous officer tells his tale: Hi Scott, I'm currently an officer in a guild that started as a social/leveling guild, but toward the beginning of this past summer, we had some level-capped players who decided to take on raiding content. We were having a lot of fun at first whether or not we successfully downed bosses because we were finding a way to stay socially active in our social guild. During this period, one guildie and I became de facto raid leaders because we were always there on raid night and always the two who got the groups organized. This was when I also got promoted to an officer position. The problem I'm facing now is that we ended up recruiting a couple of new members who had burned out on hardcore progression raiding and wanted to take a more casual approach to raiding.
Burnout: Report says Chinese gamers losing interest in MMOs
Is there a point at which oversaturation, cultural prominence and old habits collapse under their own weight? According to a recent survey by Chinese market analyst Niko Partners, trends are shifting away in China from hardcore MMO gaming to more casual fare like social networking games. GamesIndustry.biz reports that self-defined "hardcore" gamers in one of the largest MMORPG markets in the world have grown tired of the thousands of carbon-copy MMOs out there and have rebelled against the monotony by taking their business elsewhere. Niko Partners' Lisa Cosmas Hanson sees a pattern to this trend: "We believe that the Chinese market has taken up SNS (social networking site) gaming in earnest, and that the hardcore gamers have shifted their preferences to include these games alongside the casual gamers who naturally appreciate them. The hardcore gamers are growing weary of the monotony of themes in the Chinese MMORPGs, and they want to extend their social interactions to games that attract a more diverse user base." By 2014, the analyst says that there will be 141 million online gamers in China, and the casual games market will grow from 23% to encompass 30% of all online revenues -- approximately $3 billion US.
Officers' Quarters: Mailbox roundup redux
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available this spring from No Starch Press. Here at Officers' Quarters, I receive a number of emails every week that don't get featured in the column for various reasons (which I explained last time I did a roundup). Once again, it's time to examine some of these shorter -- but no less interesting! -- topics. This roundup's theme is Cataclysm concerns and preparation. Just the two of us Hello, I have tried to find this info but I cannot seem to find it anywhere, or I am really terrible at finding things. Is there going to be a minimum guild size to participate in guild leveling? I started a small guild for myself and my son to play in and we are having a great time, but I hoped we could take advantage of these new features without joining a larger guild or recruiting into the existing one. Obviously we would not get any experience for raids or dungeons, but what about questing and professions, or even rated battlegrounds? Thank you for your time, Callidor
The Daily Grind: What's the longest break you've ever taken from MMOs?
Even the most die-hard among us need a break now and then from killing ten rats. I mean, those rats, they deserve it -- don't get me wrong. They killed our families, stole Christmas, tried to blot out the sun and sold us Amway. But heroic rat-slayers need vacations from MMOs, and sometimes we have to get away for a while to recharge our batteries and check out other entertainment pleasures out there. So what's the longest break you've ever taken from playing MMOs? Was it because you burnt out, crashed hard, and vowed not to go back (at least, not for a very long time)? Were you forced to leave MMOs behind due to a vacation or tour of duty overseas? Did you find a single-player title that sucked you in for a marathon gaming session? We'd love to hear about your breaks -- what took you away from MMOs, and what you learned while you were away. Did it refresh your perspective and attitude?
Behind the Mask: An anniversary well-spent
Over the last week, I've been spending a lot of time playing Champions Online's anniversary event. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it rekindled my enjoyment for the game. While I've been playing CO, here and there, I think like many players, I suffered from a little burnout. The anniversary event itself wasn't really what cured my ills. The extra things involved in the event were just little fun add-ons to the game. The main tasks in the game were still there for me: run Serpent Lantern, run NemCon, maybe level an alt, mess around on PTS, and roleplay. Even the "big bang" Destroid attacks were only a decent diversion for a half hour or so. What really got my excitement going was the increased socialization. A lot of people claimed "the zones are empty," but that couldn't be further from the truth. I logged out one night in Millenium City #7 and logged in the next afternoon to Millenium City #20, with most of the lower instances completely full. That's close to 2000 players in just MC alone. I participated in a lot of roleplaying and hung out with the CORP guys during their RP event. I added over 10 people to my friends list last week. The main reason my burnout was cured? I gained an optimistic look at where the game is headed.
