The Daedalus Project: Player Life-Cycle

Player Life-Cycle

pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

The Burnout Stage

Grind Burnout

Whether for solo players or players in guilds, the gear-drop or XP grind oftentimes stops being fun. In many cases, it takes players a while to realize that the grinding is no longer enjoyable. They suddenly sit back and ask themselves, "oh - what's the point?"

After a few months at 60, frustrated with running Strat and Scholo over and over again, I was starting to lose interest in the game. [WoW, F, 37]

After getting a character to maximum level, I realized it was just a grind and promptly lost interest. [WoW, M, 30]

Whenever we were online we did dungeon runs, sometimes spending whole Sundays redoing dungeons to get the set pieces. There wasn't any fun involved anymore. [WoW, F, 23]

Social Obligations Burnout

Players in more serious guilds also burnout, but this tends to be from the social obligations and work-like consequences of raiding. What used to be fun with a group of friends has become a logistical nightmare fraught with stress and anxiety.

But by the time I was 50, the game was too focused on the 'grind' to 60- the game required 20-40 players in raids- and the elitism, and classism of the players, just made it no fun. You could not achieve anything without massive support of some player group- and if you were in such a group (guild etc) - they expected the game to be a full time job. It was a burnout. [WoW, M, 53]

The game has lost most of its luster and adventure because I only log on to raid now. I miss the 'good old days' of exploring and knowing every quest. Back then I felt as though I was personally improving myself through solo quests and group quests. It feels more like a job now that almost all I do in the game is raid. Any non-raid time is spent in mandatory quests to gain access to raid encounters. I feel like I am a couple expansions behind now. I get frustrated at the game a lot more. [EQ, F, 26]

When we became the max level, we participated in raids and joined a high end guild. The game became a job. It lost that feeling we originally played for - the raw fun, questing and exploring new areas, advancing characters. We noticed the game wasn't about that any more. It was only fueled by greedy intentions guild members possessed. [WoW, M, 18]

[Previous Page] <<

>> [Next Page]

Tags: motivations for play (25) , player life-cycle (2)

Posted on October 14, 2007 | Comments (29) | TrackBack (0)

To speed up load-times on multi-page articles, comments are now only loaded on the last page of an article.