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Back After A Break (Or: When The Game Stops Being Fun)

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It’s been a while since I posted last, mostly because there hasn’t been a lot I really feel like saying. It turns out it helps me to take a break from posting every so often to clear my head. I hadn’t really considered this previously, because my breaks from this have coincided with fairly major life events, so it’s seemed reasonable to just stop posting for a while. This time, it was more burnout than anything.

Back After A Break (Or: When The Game Stops Being Fun)

While not posting, especially when I’ve had an unbroken string of posts for a while, there’s this weight of obligation, this feeling like I need to post something, need to write something, just to fill up space. It’s the same sense of feeling obligated to log into an MMO every day, just to “check in”. I hadn’t really connected the two before now.

Something I see a lot, and have talked to a lot of people about over the years, is burnout. It’s a huge issue in game development, and it’s a constant cycle in MMO raiding, two spheres where I’ve spent a lot of time. There’s a pervasive sense that you need to keep going, keep doing the Fun Thing, because if it’s not a Fun Thing, why did you spend so much time in it? It’s often compared to the business semi-equivalent, the concept of sunk costs, but I feel like it’s a poor comparison. Just because I’m not having fun with something *now* doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun *before*. We change, situations change, and it’s not (always) the game’s fault.

I haven’t logged into FFXIV in months now. I haven’t stopped liking that game; it’s still one of my favorite games, I just don’t feel like playing it right now. The most fun I have, the most invested I get in that game, is when there’s a nice big backlog of content to go through and get a bunch of story all at once. Getting the story in drips and drabs just gets me to lose the thread, especially when they come months apart. I’m excited about the next big thing they’re putting together, their procedurally-generated dungeon, and I’ll wait to play until that’s out and I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on.

Starting to post here again is kind of the same thing. I feel like I have things to say and comments to make, and I’ve played enough games in the interim to have more food for thought.

Mothers Day Prep

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Searching for Thing

Yesterday was a strange day, in that we got up and ate breakfast like normal… but upon finishing my wife went off to work.  She spent the entire day either working in her room or later proctoring a mock AP exam.  This meant that I was largely left to fend for myself, which is admittedly a happy place for me.  I grew up an only child, and instead of going places I didn’t want to I often begged to stay home alone.  So even today I am pretty happy just chilling by myself for long periods of time.  Yesterday however there was a mission, and that was to acquire a Mothers Day gift for my mother in law.  Now early in the season we had figured out what we were going to get her, but did not honestly have a great place to store it.  So yesterday after eating breakfast and showering I got out and cleaned my vehicle so that I could set down the seats and haul said item.

The only gotcha was that when I got to the store, the huge stack of said item that was there several times during this season…  somehow vanished.  I spent awhile poking around in the store and looking for the item, and even harassed several employees that lead me through a sequence of departments I had already checked.  So I sent the obligatory “We Might be Screwed” text to my wife and as it was getting to be lunch time I figured I would get some take out and call various stores to see if anyone had some.  I am purposefully being vague here, because while I know that my mother in law doesn’t read my blog… it still feels weird to talk about a gift I have yet to deliver.  My brilliant wife suggested that I go onto the stores website to see if it shows any in stock near by, which is great because I hate making phone calls.  The funny thing is…  the store in question shows that they have 20 available and in stock at my local store.  Aka the store I just went to that told me they didn’t even know what I was looking for.

Inventory Black Hole

On a whim I figured it was worth a shot… the worst thing that would happen is that they would have to refund the purchase.  So I added two of the item I was looking for into my shopping cart on the website…  somehow expecting at any moment for the site to come to its senses and realize that the store didn’t have the product.  I added in my credit card information and hit purchase, verifying that it was in fact available for pick up that day before finalizing the order.  I got a confirmation email saying that the store would call me when the item was ready for pickup.  Then I began waiting…  and in my boredom, anxiety and frustration I noticed that Audacity was open in the background.  Maybe this is a bad thing for me to have open in the background because I apparently recorded this.  Firstly I am horribly sorry for the thing you are about to listen to…  but it made me giggle so I decided to share it.

Sure enough about an hour and a half later I get the phone call from the store telling me that they have two ready for pick up, and asking when I will be there.  I hop in the my vehicle and head straight there, where they have two of said item loaded on a flat bed trailer thingy ready to go.  I have to show my ID and sign a piece of paperwork and almost too good to be true I am walking out to the parking lot with said items.  Funny story…  while moving the items on the cart began to jostle and next thing I notice they are sliding off the back end of the cart.  This is the point at which I learn about physics and how if you have an item that naturally moves on its own… you apparently should orient it in such a way as to NOT cause that movement to happen.  Thankfully nothing was damaged and I got them loaded into the back of my vehicle, and even had a nice person who really wanted my flatbed cart so I didn’t have to push that back up to the store.

 

Crusadering

Mothers Day Prep

What was left of the day I spent playing Diablo 3 and pushing my way towards some of the conquest achievements.  I was happy that I didn’t have to end up running all over hells have acre yesterday trying to find the thing on short notice.  I still feel like having my Mothers gift drop shipped more than a week ahead of time was the way to go, but that doesn’t always work out.  Yesterday was honestly oddly stressful because the moment my wife got home from work, we had to get right back on the road and head to dinner.  We do this once a month dinner thing with her siblings, and because reasons… it somehow got shifted from Friday night to Saturday night.  Which meant we had to watch the clock and make sure we were out of the restaurant in time for us to drive the roughly hour home so I could be here for the podcast.

Today we are doing something similar, with the moment my wife gets out of church we are heading to her mothers to deliver the gift, and then that afternoon seeing my mother.  I am actually super glad that I have both Monday and Tuesday off because otherwise this would have been a crazy weekend.  This is also probably one of the strangest posts I have made in awhile, because it is like 99% real life and 1% gaming.  Hopefully you all will take it in stride because it is what happened to come out once my fingers started moving this morning.

 

Toasty on MMORPGs

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The Decline

One of the more interesting trends that I have picked up on, has to do with my own blog.  It feels like the more I talk about Destiny, the lower my reader numbers dip.  I guess it makes sense, as I started this blog out with World of Warcraft and moved towards other MMORPGs as well.  Destiny has a slightly different audience and not necessarily the sort of one that really reads blogs.  The Destiny community is largely contained within a combination of Reddit, Twitch and YouTube.  I don’t have a lot to say about this, but I just found it interesting.  On one hand I hate that I am alienating a bunch of readers, and on the other hand in order for me to keep doing this daily blogging thing… I have to be writing about what is interesting me.  At this very moment that is Destiny and Diablo, and nothing much in the traditional MMO camp.  Now I have logged into a bunch of MMOs in the last few months, but none of them really seemed to hold my attention past that initial login.  Each time there was something that would ultimately cause me to log out.  It might be that my bags were a mess, or that I couldn’t remember what I was last doing.  Ultimately I found a ready excuse and used it to “nope” the hell out of the game.  The problem however I think is somewhere in me.

Right now I am finding myself enjoying games that shower me in loot, and games that allow me to have engaging solo experiences.  Granted I have been spending a lot of time mooching off of folks as they run high end content in Diablo 3, but when I log into that game I can go off and do something by myself that feels like I am moving towards some goal.  In Destiny no matter what I do I can always be working on getting that next faction package, or even spending time in the crucible hoping for that next 335 item.  These two games specifically play extremely well by myself or with friends, and that is just something that I can’t say for MMORPGs right now.  In most cases the only real way to get good gear is through raiding, and that takes a time commitment I am just not willing to do right now.  There is no path for me to piddle my way to victory, and at the moment I don’t want to commit to much more than that.  Raiding in Destiny has felt far more “à la carte” and I think the small six player raid size helps that.  It seems easy to pull together a raid group, and even easier to pull together a three player team.  For example we spent last night doing Challenge of Elders and it honestly felt just as engaging and rewarding as doing an MMORPG raid group.

Burnt Out Genre

For awhile now I have kept thinking that sooner or later I will get over this funk.  That I will get that drive to go off and play an MMORPG.  For example I really want to have the desire to play Final Fantasy XIV and to “get the band back together”.  However there is just some wall keeping me from getting back into it and enjoying it.  I’ve patched up the client a few times, but I know when I do log in… someone is going to do the “Bels Back!” thing and I will feel guilty when I log out a few minutes later because I and confused as to what to do.  It is not a time issue, because I still have the same amount of time I ever did… it seems to be an attention span issue.  Diablo 3 and Destiny both reward me for spending ANY time with them…  and there is always an explosion of shiny colored loot just waiting on me around the corner.  The grind of an MMO is a much more slow burn, with large gaps of time between those moments of excitement.  For years I played MMORPGs as a way to hang out with friends, but thanks to tools like Slack, Discord, and Band… I can take my group of friends with me wherever I happen to go.  I no longer need to rely on the MMO as a chat client, and when that happened I guess the games lost a part of their hold on me.

I guess it hit me last night when technically I was scheduled to be raiding in World of Warcraft, and I didn’t even remember that it was a thing I was supposed to be doing.  The leader said over chat that I was just burnt out on WoW, which is a bit true…  but its more than that.  I feel like I am burnt out on MMOs in general.  I’ve been rabidly playing this one genre since 2000, and I feel like maybe I just need other types of games in my life.  The parts of the MMO that I really liked, which were the acquisition of new stuff and the feeling of constantly evolving your persistent character…  those things have been exported to pretty much every single genre out there.  I guess I realized this was happening when nothing that was coming out, that actually excited me… was an MMO.  There are plenty of things to be excited for out there, and I think Black Desert is one of those games that I would have loved…  were I not over-saturated on MMORPGs.  I am not really sure if I have a point this morning.  It sucks that I am driving away readers, but I just don’t think I can write with the same love and excitement that I used to about MMORPGs right now.  I keep hoping at some point I will climb out of this hole, and be able to log into Final Fantasy XIV and be excited again for story and world building,  However in the meantime… you are probably going to see a lot more talk of Diablo 3 and Destiny because that is where my attention and excitement has landed.

Lucky Banana

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Strange Dream

Lucky Banana

This morning I am opting to make a more traditional blog post rather than an other DAW post because…  well the DAW posts take a lot out of me.  It takes a lot of effort to summon up this hardcore reminiscing, and after doing four of them, I need to take a day off.  I am sure I will return tomorrow with another segment.  Though it seems like not that many people are joining in, and it was a little disheartening the other day when a friend of mine called it a marketing gimmick.  In truth we forgot about it this year, and I felt that it was bad that we forgot about it.  Normally speaking this thing is supposed to happen during the last week of March, but instead I rescheduled it to happen the last week of April because I didn’t want a year to go by without this thing happening.  I feel it is important for us as players to remember that the games we often complain about… are made by actual human beings who just want to do a good job.  So it only seems fitting to spread a little love around during a single week in the year.  I don’t really get anything out of doing it, and I am certain Scarybooster didn’t when he first started doing the event back in 2010.  So if it is a marketing gimmick it is a piss poor design.

I’ve been pretty sick over the last few days, a combination of allergies and asthma, so last night I decided that I really needed to turn in early and get a full nights sleep.  I had a really strange dream as a result and I can only assume it is due to me not exactly being all here right now.  So I had this dream that I was being thrown a birthday party, but instead it was all of my internet friends.  There is a lot of the dream I am already forgetting but there were some really strange moments.  For example my friend Tam that I record AggroChat with, had this circa 1980s Lisa Frank folder with a rainbow colored tiger on it… and inside he had written on big chief notepad paper…  these summaries of different pen and paper character archetypes.  For some reason Markiplier was there, which I found odd because I only really know of him from various Pax panels.  He ended up getting me a gift called a “Cat Tether” which is supposed to be I guess like a cat leash?  The box looked like it came from the as seen on television aisle at Walgreens.  The rest of the dream is pretty fuzzy but I thought it was strange enough that it was worth writing about.  In any case I feel more rested this morning and feeling a little less horrible, so I guess it worked?

Iron Banana

Lucky Banana

The other reason why I wanted to take a day off from DAW is that I want to talk about the current Iron Banner.  Largely I want to talk about it… while there is still enough time to people to get into Destiny and participate.  In the past loot from Iron Banner felt like it was few and far between, but it seems like Bungie cranked the switch up to 11.  On average it felt like every three to four matches I was getting a piece of legendary gear.  This week the items up for grabs are boots, class items, Tormod’s Bellows Rocket Launcher, and Haakon’s Hatchet a bullet hose type Auto Rifle.  The loot that you get as drops seems to be limited to these four items that are available.  From the moment you hit rank 1, aka after your first match/bounty turn in you seem to be able to get either the Class Armor or Boots.  When you hit rank 3 the weapons start dropping, and I got my first Hatchet from that next match after hitting the rank.  The rank 3 package sadly is only a 320 artifact, which isn’t all that good for infusion, however all of the items that you end up getting are.  For most of the matches I have been sitting between 327-330 depending on my weapon loadout, and all of my gear so far has been 332-334 with sadly no 335s as of yet.

Lucky Banana

Over the course of my matches so far I have managed to get four Auto Rifles, six boots, six titan marks, and a single rocket launcher.  Now the dropped variants have wildly differing rolls, but I managed to latch onto one that wasn’t too horrible and have been using it for most of the banner.  Hip Fire sadly is useless on an Auto Rifle, but the other stats on this one are pretty great.  Right now I am a little over half of the way to Rank 5, and the goal is to buy the vendor roll which is phenomenal and infuse this 334 into it.  The vendor rolls for pretty much everything are really good this time a round, and if I actually cared about rocket launchers I might consider picking that one up.  If I ever use a rocket launcher I am going to use Truth for the tracking ability, because I suck at using rocket launchers.  Other things I have figured out, is that 330 seems to be the current cap for faction packages, because during the course of the last few weeks I have turned in a ton of Future War Cult, Vanguard and Crucible packages… and essentially everything I have gotten stopped at 330.  The funniest thing is that the last three Crucible packages have all rewarded me the exact same primary scout rifle The Saterienne Rapier, one of which was worth holding onto because it had hidden hand and explosive rounds… however the bulk have served as infusion fodder allowing me to bring up weapons I will actually use more often.  As far as Scout Rifles go… I am most likely to use my brand new Hand of Judgement that I pulled out of Challenge of Elders this week.