Perhaps I'm Burned Out

[Oldirtbeard.9834]

I've been griping a lot lately, I'm thinking about stepping away for a couple weeks, give people a shot at finishing the story, and Commanders a chance to figure out the best ways we can utilize these maps for Open World fun. I typically play off hours but man was I disappointed trying to play a few hours ago, I've seen more action on Season 3 maps, more events, more people in the middle of the night.

Perhaps I'm in the wrong genre of gaming if I work nights, I'll be back but for now I'll be walking away from a game early in an expansion for the first time basically ever.

I'm sure it's just burn out.

[TheOrlyFactor.8341]

I try to do the same when I'm not having fun with GW2. I've done it several times and the benefit of a game like GW2 is that there ain't a sub fee so I can take a break and come back without missing too much.

Hope you do come back though. c:

[Maulclaw.4365]

PoF maps do tend to feel a little... empty. I still see a lot more action in HoT.

[GrubySzymek.1362]

I have yet to experience crowded map that's not a bounty train in PoF. This expansion is literally single player experience. I don't think it's a bad thing but it got boring faster than I expected.

If you feel burnt out take a week or two off. It helped me enjoy GW2 much more after come back. One thing to really lose that feeling of burning out is to stay away from forums, reddit, facebook groups etc aswell as from the game.

[Ashgar.3024]

At the risk of sounding like captain obvious, you tried using the LFG tool? Because yesterday, at 2AM i had no trouble finding and joining a Bounty train for example, or the other day completing a map meta-event thanks to it.

[SummerRayne.4672]

A break can sometimes be good and maybe you are burnt out. If a game starts to cause more frustration and stress than enjoyment, taking a break is good in my opinion. Trying to force enjoyment and trying desperately to enjoy a game never has worked from my experience. Burn out happens.

I played this game from the first closed beta until partway into Season 2. I still loved the game when I quit but I had lost that desire to play so I took a step back from the game. For a long while actually. I had just burnt myself out with the game. I just returned a few months ago and I am having a ton of fun. I had forgotten how much fun this game was and how much I loved it. I haven't even bought either expansion yet. I have been having fun finishing up old content before moving on to the other content. The cool thing about this game is you can take a break and kind of pick back up where you left off without feeling that need to rush to catch back up to everyone. I am a casual player pretty much these days and I am personally having a blast going at my own pace working towards map completion and other things.

The game being free to play makes it easy to jump back in when you want. I would just log in to unlock the new upcoming episodes of season 4 when those come out so they will be free when you do return.

[notebene.3190]

I think that's part of the problem. There are lots of LFGs on the maps, but they are all for very specific things, and they end up on maps that aren't the default map when you zone in. If they are on that map, they are all clustered together doing that thing the LFG formed for.

When you want to do that specific thing, it's awesome, but when you are just loitering around and map killing and doing some DEs, it's kinda rough. I have no idea what the solution is.

[zealex.9410]

This expac is far more single player fanservice than mmo. I personally didnt like that but eh idk ppl asked for it so they gave them that.

[Vavume.8065]

I played PoF for 3 days then stopped logging in, currently I'm taking a break until they add some real content, this expac is a real let down, maps are dead, no real map meta's, mounts are clunky, specializations are meh, bountys are boring, just nothing to get excited about...

[Game of Bones.8975]

I have a single delete character that I can use to enjoy earning XP and leveling all over.It helps if I get bored with characters.

[Sylvari.2953]

I felt the same but then I went back to HoT and SW to have fun with open world events. Unfortunately, PoF feels like a single-player game.

[Myrdreth.6829]

At the moment I level my alts and try to make some gold. And then I still need to complete a lot of achievements and collect all those skins...there's still so much to do I think. But I know how you feel. I take a break sometimes too :)

[rozer.8042]

me too ... i lost all my hype in this game .... sigh :(

[Dashingsteel.3410]

This expac just might not be your cup of tea. I know HoT made me lose interest in the game and I took two long breaks from the game. Hope it's just burnout though.

[MoarChaos.8320]

Most people so far are just doing bounty trains, which makes full maps that are impossible to stumble into. Makes it so you only see people basically map completing / doing story in the overflow maps that you don't know are overflows. Plus the thing you said of commanders not knowing which events to do just yet.

[raul.7859]

yea everything is empty, really turns me away because that's what i want in a MMO, social interaction, i see all these events happening around me and im all alone to do them, this happened in all the maps btw, not just one, ANet if i were you i would fix megaservers and put like 200 hundred cap on these huge maps, the previous scale does not work anymore imo

[raul.7859]

not being toxic, but i just though "if i wanted to play a single player game, i would play a single player game" so i left and proceed to do just that, taking a break from gw

[Nikal.4921]

I wanted to like like this expansion, but think I'm getting burned out, too- something that hasn't happened to me before with this game. PoF maps feel empty, any events I come across, I have to solo most of the time, I die all the time due to the incessant mob aggro & getting knocked off my mount. I can't get map completion in Desolation because I get murdered when trying to enter Ruptured Heart. There seems to be no event to clear it out- and if there were, not sure anyone would be around to do it.

I can't stand the HoT maps, but at least there are people around, and I can glide in combat to get away to a safe space, of which there are none in PoF. I loved the idea of exploring wide open expanses, but every few feet there's a mob or several ready to take me down. Can't even take a few seconds to check the map- I have to do that while running on my mount. I can't relax at all in PoF, see the sights, explore. It's just not fun. I find myself logging off after after a bit of playing on those maps- something I didn't even do in HoT zones.

Very discouraging. I didn't expect it to be like this.

[etsubmariner.4690]

I put two characters through PoF, and even during the 1st character, I could readily see that player count was down one week later. They had gone back to all the other maps for better rewards or more consistent rewards, back to PvP and WvW and Fractals and such. The normalization of the PoF maps has begun and now because the GW universe was five more maps larger, players naturally filtered back to all the other content. If you were in PoF the last two weeks, I bet you found the majority bounty hunting. That's it.

Oh, yes, the content is there. There are achievements and cool things to do all over the maps. Newness wearing off isn't the problem. The problem is entirely about efficiency. Every system seeks efficiency, even if the system is in total collapse; efficiency makes the world go around and the system automatically tries for it. PoF has a metric ton of content, but the mounts' ability to get you through it significantly impacts content completion. To test this hypothesis (the proper term btw, not "theory"), I stopped using the mounts except where it was necessary to pass through the intended barrier to the content. The maps opened up as massive content to be done. I found nooks and crannies and other stuff to do as well as I expect on all maps.

Mounts are great. I wouldn't NOT want them. However, like dragons and their specific weaknesses, mounts are both the Great and the Weakness. Simply designing mounts to bypass/interact with content isn't the answer. Mounts need their own maps, and by that I mean maps that spread the otherwise contained content out into larger spreads; no more enemies just magically hanging around outside the main living quarter never really attacking per se, just "content"/density. The maps themselves need to be part of the player's problem much like the Brandstorm. The mounts need to be there to get you from one end of the map, otherwise you would take forever to get across them by walking. I posted what I wanted from a map in another thread--a massive sand dune map 95% entirely of sand dunes with small pockets of oasis like rock formations-turned-housing, etc. The dunes were hellish, constant dehydration mechanics, constant heat or cold mechanics. Mounts would not work here in the way they are now. Learning how to survive in this hellish waste at all, let alone for longer periods so you could get to the more distant oasis was the primary activity. One can only hope.

When Anet said these were the biggest maps they'd ever done, I knew what that meant was typical GW ultra-density and many small biomes contained in a large space. I wanted a massive sand dune map. I got the same old GW maps (just bigger, and definitely much more visually interesting). I am also done I think until the next update. I just can't bring myself to redo 80 levels of content and HoT/PoF again anytime soon.

[DebraKadabra.5278]

I knew this was going to happen once the zerglings powered through the content. I'm still happily exploring and haven't started Act 2 of the story yet.

But more to the point--I'd taken a few months away from the game back in February and when I got back into the game in mid July I felt much more focused about what I really wanted to accomplish and achieve. I'd say take a break if you feel that you need one. They really help sometimes.

[Khisanth.2948]

Large maps full of mostly nothing to give mounts a reason for existing ...

[castlemanic.3198]

Once I finished the griffon masteries and spent a bit of time doing events after that, I think i'm also burnt out because I somewhat rushed through things to get every mount and every mastery done (and the things that did with my anxiety). I'm gonna take a short break too, and when I get back to gw2, I think i'll be revitalised enough to meander through the path of fire maps.

It's great because I KNOW there's so much content i havent completed or explored yet and that I want to do that content as well.

[DeceiverX.8361]

Way fewer people also purchased PoF in general than HoT.There is a substantial group of players which will not make purchases until ANet fixes their first expansion.

[TheOrlyFactor.8341]

@DeceiverX.8361 said:Way fewer people also purchased PoF in general than HoT.

Got evidence of this? Like, actual sales numbers?

[Wonderz ZX.7943]

I can say that after playing the game almost religiously since PoF launch, grinding away at masteries, stories, and HP hunting to max out some new specializations, it has taken a lot out of me and I feel like I've already done everything 5 times over. That being said I do notice the drop off in players during the night and probably the reason is that people just play nonstop during the day and then call it quits at night meaning that there is a lull period where it's just the few of us who are mostly solo trying to see if we can gather enough stragglers, and other solos to join in bigger events, which typically doesn't happen unless these few people want the same things. Plus with the maps being so large now it can feel like you go an hour and maybe only see one or two people just passing by as they hunt down Map Achievements. A break is probably good to let people reach their new equilibrium after the initial spike from launch.