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Burn Out. You know it is real because either you or someone you know has experienced it. But Burn Out does not have a Wikipedia page and even the so-called experts can not agree on what burnout actually is. For our purposes, we shall define burnout as “when the thought of doing something that once gave pleasure now brings up despair.” I know it is not a perfect definition. One can enjoy their job but hate some aspect of it. One can love a person but detest a certain trait. One can love learning but hate taking tests. But for us, we love Guild Wars 2 (GW2) but now the thought of playing GW2 feels like a chore, like a job. We do not see a reason to play. That is burn out.

Why does burn out happen? There are lots of reasons and ideas for this. The daily grind. The pressure to keep up with the pace. The need to get achievements. Peer pressure – real or imagined – to get gear or shinies or participate in activities which no longer yield “good” rewards.

One can also look towards the developers. MMO’s are businesses first and games second. So management is going to prioritize a new skin for the cash store instead of fixing a long-standing and annoying bug. Optimizing the player’s game experience becomes secondary. One can counter the general decline in MMO population by creating a grind which keeps players logging into the game. In my experience, when Heart of Thorns came out, I was able to get most achievements by the 5^th play-through of my 9 characters. Now, I can run all 9 characters through a Living Story episode and maybe half of the achievements will have been completed.

It’s not just the number of achievements or even the types of achievements. It’s the sheer volume of otherwise useless things. Instead of taking out the helicopter 5 times, it is now 25, 50 or even 100. Why does this really need to be there? Why did we need to feed the hermit 50 times instead of 10?

This frustration leads to player resentment and turns what should be a playing a game into a chore or a part-time job.

How does one counter this burnout? Goals. One should always have goals – be it in life, career or game playing. When one does not have a goal – one drifts, coasts and just enters survival mode – simply existing versus being active and thriving. Herein thou, this is the problem. While goals should be achieved, one should get another one as soon as reasonably possible – to counter this tendency to drift, stagnate and fight this malaise. For example, as soon as you get that promotion to assistant manager, you should immediately have a goal to become manager and then district manager and so on.

The problem with MMO’s is that goal setting is precisely that – what are goals in MMO’s? By definition, a player should never feel that they “completed” the game. (If a player does, the player will leave the game and may never return because “it was finished”).

The most common goal is max level gear. In GW2 these are legendaries and creating Exordium is what started my burnout. The problem with any max-gear goal is then what do you use this on? By definition one wants to use this max level gear and feel relatively unstoppable. Problem is – where is this max-level only content?

Other goals include some sort of achievement or obtaining some shiny. Reaching achievements can feel like an accomplishment but those are fleeting. Showing off a new shiny can boost one’s ego yet that should only be short-lived.

So what can be used to counter burn out? Fresh content. In GW2, that typically can be a chapter for Living Story but not necessarily restricted to that. The skimmer gaining the ability to swim or leveling the chef to level 500 was fresh content.

But content takes time for creative to dream up, programmers to code and beta-testers to debug – all for content that can be completed in a short time. So developers throw in achievements to keep the player base engaged. The artists create a new set of gear to obtain and the cycle continues.