120892-countering-burnout-what-can-wildstar-do-to-help-keep-players-playing

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I mentioned in today's Morning Coffee thread that yesterday was sort of a bittersweet day for my guild.  While we had great success in the vet dungeon runs we did last night and we feel like we're on track to start raiding pretty soon, we also had two members tell us they were leaving the game because they were feeling burned out.
 
This of course led several of us to have a discussion about why people who truly enjoy Wildstar and its content burn out on the game, and things that other games have done that helped prevent that kind of burnout from happening as quickly.
 
To be very clear here:  This isn't a complaint thread or a doom and gloom thread.  It's really meant to be a "How can Wildstar become even better" thread.  I'd like to ask everyone when they reply to focus on things that could be added to Wildstar (or features that could be added to) rather than talking about how core parts of the game as it works today should be changed.  There's already threads about attunement or dungeon difficulty or PvP, so we don't really need to rehash those topics here.
 
Anyway, here is what we came up with last night within the Black Dagger Society when we talked about the problem of players burning out.
 
Why do people burn out?
- They hit 50 and complete the available content, and feel like the only thing really left to do for them is raiding, but they're not able to commit to what they perceive to be required, or their guilds/communities aren't ready for it yet.
++ Not everyone is interested in PvP, RP, or housing - or interested enough for it to keep them playing while they wait for their friends to catch up to them or for their guild to grow to the right size.
- They get frustrated by the above and then little things that they used to be able to let slide start to bother them more and more.
 
 
What could Wildstar do to help prevent this?
- Periodically updating quests and content paths in lower-level areas so that the experience of playing up a new character is different from the first character you played.
- Adding some "meta" elements where players have guild-wide goals other than raiding to work on even after they've hit cap (for example, collecting materials to build a special guild hall or guild ship or something.
- Adding personal goals and special quests that open up at 50 - unique mounts, neat drops like the Golden Sun Essence, "epic" quests that send you back to places you saw while leveling up to complete new challenges, etc.
- Ongoing "living world" story events that alter areas of the world either temporarily or permanently - Exile/Dominion/Pirate/Osun invasions, Strain infestations, festivals, etc.
- More collectibles like the TALES keys/posters, things to find that give unique/cool rewards when you collect them all.
 
 
What do the rest of you think about this topic?  What types of things could Wildstar add to the game to help prevent people from burning out after they get to level 50?	
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Not really sure if my guild is going through burnout or they just have nothing left to do.
Everything is maxed so people only log in to raid.  If I don't get into the DS group, I raid 1 day a week maybe 2. 
 
Carbine really needs to go back and look at the new content they added and its replay ability.
Blighthaven has 3 repeatable quests that take 30 min to complete. The entire nursery quest chain should of been a daily quest for rep.
The Defile was done way better but still only takes a few 15 min for the solo quests and 30 for the LS event.
Having only 4 dungeons created dungeon burnout quickly and now we really don't even queue for fun.
 
I did start an alt and had a blast going through the zones again. I have a lvl 6 stalker all ready to go in for when drop 4 hits.
The Rep grind in Crimson and Northern needs to be addressed. I will max defile a month before i max either of the daily zones. 
Rep grind creates burnout for me on my alt, don't remove it just increase it by 150%
 
I have not been running many dungeons with my 50 for gear because I'm waiting for drop 4 and the re itemization to check out the progression from new 50 to raid ready. 
 I attuned myself in 2 days for a GA raid over the weekend and had a blast. The Attunement quest was easy enough I used the dungeon finder on all the adventures, joined the LFG chan for the world bosses and me and some friends knocked out all the dungeons in a few hours(Bronze on SC blah).
 
What could help prevent burnout.
1. DUNGEONS
Every new zone you add to the game make sure there is a dungeon to go along with the lore of that zone.
 
2. Myself I like to kill humanoid mobs inside some type of fortified area. Castle, Cave or spaceship.
The last 2 new zones really didn't have any area's like this. Grimvault was awesome, it had the entire phage labs and the window maker.
Blighthaven looks like you randomly blasted mobs on the map with little thought, these are not fun zones to adventure in.
Give us some really cool area's to explorer and kill in that isn't based off a 1 time quest chain.
 
3. fix the currency vendors (I believe drop 4 has some)
I have 800k renown what am i suppose to buy with this? Sunglasses and hats would be cool. 
 
4. Achievement system is worthless.
Not sure what you can do with this but add some type of vanity \housing reward for completing all achievements in a zone or at milestones of points.	
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			People burn out because they refuse to do all the options available to them. You can't really say "Wildstar, you need to give me more to do" when you ignore half of the end-game content. Yeah, I am not big on housing and I don't enjoy PVPing, but if I'm sitting around because I happened to have a particularly long play session and I've managed to do all my daily list of stuff I do, and I still have time, then I turn to those.	
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If all your interested in is 5 man group content then your time in wildstar is limited to a couple months. 
 
Likewise if all your interested in is raiding then once you have cleared the raid and obtained your loot, your time is done.
 
If you're interested in designing the perfect house, achieving 2k+ pvp rating, killing the last boss in DS... Well you'll be playing for a year +
 
you choose whether or not to be interested in something. The 2 burnouts in your guild chose not to be interested in anything other than the 5 man content which sadly can finish quite quickly.
 
With the exception of their first mmo, my guess is those members never stuck around any mmo for a long period of time	
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Not sure what they are doin- but i rarely log in -only to raid with my guild, and if they stopped id probably wouldnt log in at all. iam hopeful that drop4 will keep my interest, but as it stands the content updates are way too far inbetween.
 
tbh i dont think carbine has the staff to actually produce these changes thats why they are taking a long time for these drops and smoke screen them as 'testing phases' on ptr. we've seen this kind of production pattern in warhammer online.
 
Carbine stated the have a years worth of content- and ive actually only seen 2 months of content in the past year...
 
i have 2 alts lvl1 waiting for drop4- we'll see how that plays out.
 
 
iam actually playing Rift atm, they have alot of content events in that game and population is pretty sweet.	
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I would say that would would help the most in my opinion is:
 
Giving the quests and dailies more variety. I know you don't have to do ALL the quests, but they're all kind of "go kill X" and that's fine...it's a standard form thatI don't mind in and of itself. However Wildstar has quite a few mechanics that have been shown throughout the game that seem few and far inbetween that don't seem to take advantage of itself. As example one of my favourite quests in blighthaven was the bombing run quest, I enjoyed the dogfight on farside, putting out the fires in whatever the hell that beginning mordesh/aurin zone was.	When I got to 50 I was hoping to have stuff like that mixed in doing my dailies, but...it's just all kill this, click that quests. Which get very boring...Give me a jumping puzzle, a bombing run, something interactive and fun to break up the routine...	I know this is being addressed(though slowly), but PvP queues need work. For me personally I like to PvP on the side to break up PvE, but as it is now I'm lucky to see even one match during my play sessions.	Reputation vendors having more than just easily replaceable gear and AMP/Ability points.	One of the things that kept me doing dailies in other games like WoW is that they offered stuff like mounts and other nifty things besides "tier transition" gear that peaked my interest. They did this with Blighthaven strain outfit, why not do it with others? Give wilderrun the Torine Sisters outfit, give Bloodfire the draken gear, Ellevar some fancy cassian swag, etc...	
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I'm not discounting your opinions here, but this does boil down to a pretty basic set of points:
 
-Wildstar has, and will always have, a limited amount of content.  People will eventually consume all of it.
 
-Carbine can temporary alleviate this by adding more content, and have done so.  They've added more for casual consumers than any other group of players since launch, and they have the most content of any group in the game.
 
-Carbine has a finite amount of staff with which to accomplish these goals and a very broad range of players for whom they need to generate new content.
 
-Given all of these, it is not feasible to do more than they're doing at the rate they are doing it unless more income is available to Carbine.
 
Honestly, Wildstar's only cure for some of these ills is time.  There are, of course, new 5 man dungeons coming and new content for casuals coming down the pipeline.  Honestly, PVP is going to need some kind of love, and Carbine's on the record stating that they are thinking of introducing a raid that is actually a tier .5, not a tier above DS, until far in the future when DS is on reliable farm by several reputable raid teams.  However, given that since launch Carbine has added one BG, no raids, two story areas, a solo dungeon, and the next drop is promising a raft of veteran shiphands, new 5 mans, et al, I'd say casuals have the least to complain about in terms of content acquisition.  Raiders have gotten nothing, PVPers have at least gotten one drop centered on them, and casual PVE players have gotten the rest.  If what has come down the pipe to them thus far is completely insufficient, I don't even think Blizzard pumps out content at a higher rate than that during expansion patch pushes.
 
Still, there ARE things Carbine can do.  What you have to do is think outside the box.  Carbine needs a way to add multiplicative content, giving people perhaps not new content, but new ways to play that content that hopefully require less work than directly building new dungeons.  I've brought up a few ways in some of my posts.  A few suggestions:
 
-Add "challenge modes" to dungeons.  I brought this up with questions of removing the timer as the standard for medal accomplishment in dungeons, but the upshot of it was a way to essentially give endless variation to dungeons already being made by altering the game mechanics of instances.  One example was that the friction could be turned off, meaning that rolling forward suddenly requires you to turn around and run the other direction to stop, and you constantly end up ice-skating around the dungeon.  Now, this option is suddenly applied across all of the dungeons ever made.  If there are four dungeons, adding this and its corresponding medals means you have added an option for 5 man completionists to be completed four times through.  Thus, it's multiplicative.  You add ten challenge modes for four dungeons, you have 40 possible runs to master.  Add another dungeon, and you add ten more runs, bringing the total to 50.  And this relies on a system that modifies the core mechanics of the game, but doesn't necessarily require addition to the dungeon code itself.  If it can be programmed universally enough to require very little extra work per dungeon to code (and I would not be so imperious to think that I know it would, but it is possible) then every challenge mode added and every dungeon added adds orders of magnitude of content to complete.
 
-To this end, I also recently brought up an idea of "veteran world bosses".  Whether this was accomplished by turning the world boss itself into a veteran version with an item for one attempt or creating a sort of simulation arena that calls up harder versions of them (I also brought up the idea of just making everyone fighting a regular world boss forced to mentor, but in the context of this conversation, the other two would be better ideas), you could create, essentially, arena versions of bosses.  And why just world bosses?  Why not every dungeon bosses?  Why not even being able to dial up enemies that don't exist anywhere else?  Imagine if they have a boss idea, it's working out, but the idea doesn't make the cut in a dungeon or adventure.  What would otherwise be wasted content can just be plugged in as a boss-in-a-box.  It's a lot easier to just make boss fights in boxes than to make whole new dungeons.  Add to that the aformentioned challenge idea (because this could also be applied to the instanced arena version of this) and you could generate a metric ton of content with less actual work.
 
-Also, in the interest of leveling alts (the best way to do it), it's difficult to completely code alternate leveling paths.  Questing zones are huge, intricate monsters of resource hogs that don't necessarily hold players' attention for very long.  However, you can add "veteran alt leveling" to make things interesting, tuning down your alt until you hit 50 for greater rewards later for all your characters.  At least the mechanical process won't be the same, they can scale the game harder for you and give you a reason to want to do it.
 
-Finally, I know people tend to look to WoW for solutions, but I think one of Blizz's other behemoths teaches us a lot of lessons.  Namely, if you can create a "random level generator" with random rooms, textures, items, and, of course, enemy configurations, people will play it forever.  Nephalem rift-style mechanics don't work in a lot of other games.  Nexus, being so heavily based around testing and artificial reality, is one of the few games where this isn't out of the question.  You could have anything from a neverending holdout that randomly throws everything from gobs of scaling enemies to world bosses at you in timed waves to completely random-generated dungeons that might not have a bottom (hey, with those aforementioned challenges!)
 
Sure, people may say some of these things are cheats to get more mileage out of your content, but if anything's been proven by game design lately, it's that these kinds of things work.  Players function best when they don't know what's coming or, when they do, that they have to do the Type A, Phase B version of Dungeon D to check achievements off a list.  It works.  Some of these might take a lot of coding work to implement the first time through, but is it more than a new dungeon that players will play for a month or so and be bored of on its own?  Can some of these stretch content not even made yet?
 
Just some suggestions instead of asking Carbine for things they're already getting to.	
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Personally I don't understand burnout. But, it seems to me that players mindsets have changed a bit since I first started playing Mmo's too. It feels more to me that players rush through the content, like locusts, devouring it as quickly as possible, then sit back and are like.. "ZOMG IM BORED THIS GAME SUXORS." 
 
Now, I am not raiding, I've been picking away at my atumenment, decorating all my houses, RPing and having a blast. Bored? Nope. Not at all. Honestly, i don't believe a game company is capable of keeping up with the way people currently play MMO's. 
It's like creating a beautiful meal for people to enjoy and they devour it, burp and expect dessert that you slaved away for an hour making, also do be devoured in minutes. 	
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			People are llops always looking for new shinies.	
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People are llops always looking for new shinies.
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Personally I don't understand burnout. But, it seems to me that players mindsets have changed a bit since I first started playing Mmo's too. It feels more to me that players rush through the content, like locusts, devouring it as quickly as possible, then sit back and are like.. "ZOMG IM BORED THIS GAME SUXORS." 
 
Now, I am not raiding, I've been picking away at my atumenment, decorating all my houses, RPing and having a blast. Bored? Nope. Not at all. Honestly, i don't believe a game company is capable of keeping up with the way people currently play MMO's. 
It's like creating a beautiful meal for people to enjoy and they devour it, burp and expect dessert that you slaved away for an hour making, also do be devoured in minutes. 
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I'm not discounting your opinions here, but this does boil down to a pretty basic set of points:
 
-Wildstar has, and will always have, a limited amount of content. People will eventually consume all of it.
 
-Carbine can temporary alleviate this by adding more content, and have done so. They've added more for casual consumers than any other group of players since launch, and they have the most content of any group in the game.
 
-Carbine has a finite amount of staff with which to accomplish these goals and a very broad range of players for whom they need to generate new content.
 
-Given all of these, it is not feasible to do more than they're doing at the rate they are doing it unless more income is available to Carbine.
 
Honestly, Wildstar's only cure for some of these ills is time. There are, of course, new 5 man dungeons coming and new content for casuals coming down the pipeline. Honestly, PVP is going to need some kind of love, and Carbine's on the record stating that they are thinking of introducing a raid that is actually a tier .5, not a tier above DS, until far in the future when DS is on reliable farm by several reputable raid teams. However, given that since launch Carbine has added one BG, no raids, two story areas, a solo dungeon, and the next drop is promising a raft of veteran shiphands, new 5 mans, et al, I'd say casuals have the least to complain about in terms of content acquisition. Raiders have gotten nothing, PVPers have at least gotten one drop centered on them, and casual PVE players have gotten the rest. If what has come down the pipe to them thus far is completely insufficient, I don't even think Blizzard pumps out content at a higher rate than that during expansion patch pushes.
 
Still, there ARE things Carbine can do. What you have to do is think outside the box. Carbine needs a way to add multiplicative content, giving people perhaps not new content, but new ways to play that content that hopefully require less work than directly building new dungeons. I've brought up a few ways in some of my posts. A few suggestions:
 
-Add "challenge modes" to dungeons. I brought this up with questions of removing the timer as the standard for medal accomplishment in dungeons, but the upshot of it was a way to essentially give endless variation to dungeons already being made by altering the game mechanics of instances. One example was that the friction could be turned off, meaning that rolling forward suddenly requires you to turn around and run the other direction to stop, and you constantly end up ice-skating around the dungeon. Now, this option is suddenly applied across all of the dungeons ever made. If there are four dungeons, adding this and its corresponding medals means you have added an option for 5 man completionists to be completed four times through. Thus, it's multiplicative. You add ten challenge modes for four dungeons, you have 40 possible runs to master. Add another dungeon, and you add ten more runs, bringing the total to 50. And this relies on a system that modifies the core mechanics of the game, but doesn't necessarily require addition to the dungeon code itself. If it can be programmed universally enough to require very little extra work per dungeon to code (and I would not be so imperious to think that I know it would, but it is possible) then every challenge mode added and every dungeon added adds orders of magnitude of content to complete.
 
-To this end, I also recently brought up an idea of "veteran world bosses". Whether this was accomplished by turning the world boss itself into a veteran version with an item for one attempt or creating a sort of simulation arena that calls up harder versions of them (I also brought up the idea of just making everyone fighting a regular world boss forced to mentor, but in the context of this conversation, the other two would be better ideas), you could create, essentially, arena versions of bosses. And why just world bosses? Why not every dungeon bosses? Why not even being able to dial up enemies that don't exist anywhere else? Imagine if they have a boss idea, it's working out, but the idea doesn't make the cut in a dungeon or adventure. What would otherwise be wasted content can just be plugged in as a boss-in-a-box. It's a lot easier to just make boss fights in boxes than to make whole new dungeons. Add to that the aformentioned challenge idea (because this could also be applied to the instanced arena version of this) and you could generate a metric ton of content with less actual work.
 
-Also, in the interest of leveling alts (the best way to do it), it's difficult to completely code alternate leveling paths. Questing zones are huge, intricate monsters of resource hogs that don't necessarily hold players' attention for very long. However, you can add "veteran alt leveling" to make things interesting, tuning down your alt until you hit 50 for greater rewards later for all your characters. At least the mechanical process won't be the same, they can scale the game harder for you and give you a reason to want to do it.
 
-Finally, I know people tend to look to WoW for solutions, but I think one of Blizz's other behemoths teaches us a lot of lessons. Namely, if you can create a "random level generator" with random rooms, textures, items, and, of course, enemy configurations, people will play it forever. Nephalem rift-style mechanics don't work in a lot of other games. Nexus, being so heavily based around testing and artificial reality, is one of the few games where this isn't out of the question. You could have anything from a neverending holdout that randomly throws everything from gobs of scaling enemies to world bosses at you in timed waves to completely random-generated dungeons that might not have a bottom (hey, with those aforementioned challenges!)
 
Sure, people may say some of these things are cheats to get more mileage out of your content, but if anything's been proven by game design lately, it's that these kinds of things work. Players function best when they don't know what's coming or, when they do, that they have to do the Type A, Phase B version of Dungeon D to check achievements off a list. It works. Some of these might take a lot of coding work to implement the first time through, but is it more than a new dungeon that players will play for a month or so and be bored of on its own? Can some of these stretch content not even made yet?
 
Just some suggestions instead of asking Carbine for things they're already getting to.
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-Finally, I know people tend to look to WoW for solutions, but I think one of Blizz's other behemoths teaches us a lot of lessons.  Namely, if you can create a "random level generator" with random rooms, textures, items, and, of course, enemy configurations, people will play it forever.  Nephalem rift-style mechanics don't work in a lot of other games.  Nexus, being so heavily based around testing and artificial reality, is one of the few games where this isn't out of the question.  You could have anything from a neverending holdout that randomly throws everything from gobs of scaling enemies to world bosses at you in timed waves to completely random-generated dungeons that might not have a bottom (hey, with those aforementioned challenges!)
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I love this idea.
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#1) Stop doing what's burning you out. Raiding, running dungeons, even dailies will bore you after the umpteenth time.  If it's hurting you, STOP.
#2) Do something different that you're not used to doing. Maybe work on housing, craft, even get a new costume for your toon.
#3) Go back and do things you missed. There's maps to finish, challenges to do, Datacubes to collect.
#4) Read the Galactic archives. And then go RP out something you found there. RP is a great way to extend content.	
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Housing and Warplots. There is so much Carbine could do with relative ease to turn these two things into an engine for endless player created content that would keep people around for a long time. 
 
First they could provide players with basic tools for player created content (a la Landmark or Disney infinity) on their housing plot. Nothing major, plugs that spawn mobs or bosses, reward chests to place at the top of player created jumping puzzles, settings to toggle PvP rule sets on and off for player made arenas. 
 
Then they could turn Warplots into something that could be owned and operated by a single player and used to make almost anything. You could make a 10v10 BG, a 5man dungeon, a dangerous jumping puzzle, whatever. Then provide a UI for people to advertise their plot, or a generic LFG tool that could be used for this or anything else in game. 
 
Carbine has limits on their resources, but if they could take the time to create the tools that would allow players to create content with the already existing housing and Warplot there would be tons for people to do in between drops. It's basically already built in, it would just need a few changes to become reality.	
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Housing and Warplots. There is so much Carbine could do with relative ease to turn these two things into an engine for endless player created content that would keep people around for a long time.
 
First they could provide players with basic tools for player created content (a la Landmark or Disney infinity) on their housing plot. Nothing major, plugs that spawn mobs or bosses, reward chests to place at the top of player created jumping puzzles, settings to toggle PvP rule sets on and off for player made arenas.
 
Then they could turn Warplots into something that could be owned and operated by a single player and used to make almost anything. You could make a 10v10 BG, a 5man dungeon, a dangerous jumping puzzle, whatever. Then provide a UI for people to advertise their plot, or a generic LFG tool that could be used for this or anything else in game.
 
Carbine has limits on their resources, but if they could take the time to create the tools that would allow players to create content with the already existing housing and Warplot there would be tons for people to do in between drops. It's basically already built in, it would just need a few changes to become reality.
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#4) Read the Galactic archives. And then go RP out something you found there. RP is a great way to extend content.
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There are certainly vastly more players than developers, and I like the idea of being able to put spawns in your housing plot and turn them into "build it yourself" instances. Nice way to get people who like PvE into housing as well. I like this idea a lot. 
 
However, having seen the Architect system in CoX basically eradicate open-world play, player-created content of this type would need to be set up very carefully to avoid letting players design content for the express purpose of mowing down spawns to suck up loot faster than they could do by playing the game, and then giving them their own private "report-free" instance to do it in.
 
I would caution that the point of that content should be to make some custom content that friends can enjoy, not as a means of obtaining plat or phat lewt.
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I doubt Carbine will ever give us the ability of making "custom battlegrounds" in Housing, because that would defeat the purpose of Warplots. Even though I don't think those see much action, but that's all hearsay on my part.
 
I also have doubts over allowing players to use their own loot to create a loot table. While it would stop player content from making the rest of the game irrelevant, you still have the problem that a player could make the silliest of instances where you kill one skeech and get a pile of their raiding leftovers (or whatever). Carbine would have to make a system to balance the placed enemies with the loot the player wants to give. And if the creator needs to restock with different pieces of loot (assuming we are not giving out copies instead of the original item the player got), the enemy-loot ratio of any given player instance would move all over the place. 
And if we allow them to replicate the loot or have automated loot, Carbine will have to make sure it's the worst PvE loot available in the game. Otherwise players will do what happened in CoX and find ways to legally abuse the system to get the loot and ignore whatever is lower than that.
 
Anyway:
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 What could Wildstar do to help prevent this?
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-Something to do at level 50 that isn't group content, so that people who are waiting for their friends to log in have something to do.
-A better casual use of Elder Gems. Right now, there's barely anything you can do with it unless you are doing veterans or raids.
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Or there's no reason that players couldn't add their own loot from their own stocks.  We've heard of raid guilds running out of content, why not maintain and run each others' raids?  Or, after defeating a boss, like in Warplots, you can chain it down and make a boss-in-a-box complete with its own scenery?  That might work some wonders, if not give people some training time with real raid bosses.  Spitballing ideas here.
 
Housing is a very fragmenting force in Wildstar, for all its positives.  It might be best if Carbine really works on that neighborhood system they mentioned earlier.  If they go the route of player-built content (which also has a very strong positive tradition in video games, particularly in old FPS games that came with their own level editing engines and RTS games where player levels became de facto standards) it is very important that they implement some sort of system where, instead of the randomized method of visiting public plots now, we would see possible instances on the housing zone, possible raids, possible PVP arenas, etc.
 
It's a good idea, though.  However they do it, giving players the option of making their own content is the gift that keeps on giving.  The best part is that, potentially, nobody would be happier than PVPers if they could design and build their own BGs.  That might give Wildstar a vast edge over other MMORPG competition in the PVP department, given the housing system's comparatively advanced possibilities.
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I haven't had the chance to read every single reply yet, but I've seen some really great suggestions here!
 
I think the main key for preventing burn out is to simply have more variety in the game. Granted, WildStar does have a lot to do for the most part: PvP, dungeons, adventures, alt leveling, dailies, achievements, challenges, housing, the list goes on...
Personally for me, a filthy casual playing 14 hours ahead on the timezone, I rarely have time to run more than 2 dungeons (unless it's STL) while my son naps, and queues are non-existent during my primetime at night (because it's early morning in the states). Again, this is a personal issue for me, but the thing that kept me from burning out is simply by doing different things - Including playing different games and other MMOs. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. WildStar will still remain my "main" MMO.
I'm looking forward to move to the states though and be able to run more grouped content but here's what I'd like to see:
 
- Shorter, but challenging dungeons (same difficulty as current dungeons). I think the main reason, (at least, for me) that people don't queue for dungeons is that they take way too long. I think SSM could have been separated in 2-3 wings (Like Scarlet Monastery for an example). 
 
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1. DUNGEONS
Every new zone you add to the game make sure there is a dungeon to go along with the lore of that zone.
 
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There are many things to avoid the burnout. Some must indeed come from Carbine, but many others must come from the players themselves.
 
A big part of the problem is the game being designed with many ideas and wishes from the gamers, be it over the years, or during beta. All the "it would be cool if they did it this way, if they did that". The result is a game that has tons of video-gamy features that people were not used to in previous MMOs, a lot of those features were asked for or heavily applauded as they made their ways in dev speaks, forum answers by devs from feedback, interviews, etc... And now people are either overwhelmed by them, OR, and in this case the player MUST make an effort, totally or partially forgotten features.
 
Here's an example that goes both ways, both in the sense that I think Carbine should tweak this a bit AND I think it has to be a big player effort to help "themselves", let's ask this as a question :
 
How many people doing dailies, and also complaining from their repeat feel, do actually pair those dailies with the relevant challenge ?
 
In other words, when you're in Northern Wastes, how many of you do actually open their challenge tab to start the corresponding challenge to kill moodies or kill skeeches when they're on that same daily ? Because what it does, of course you understand that, is give you a little more danger as well as a little more rewards, and hopefully a bit more fun ?
 
So with the above example, which is one of many, we've seen, and I hope we can all agree, that players could and should spice up their dailies by playing in layers, like the game was meant to be played... I'm certain most don't and I can tell you I don't always either, but to my defense  :P I'll come up with what I think should be an effort from Carbine on that matter :
 
Why is it, when we approach a daily that is paired to a challenge, why is it that we have to :
 
1) open the challenge window,
2) remember the name, or the sub part of where the relevant challenge is,
3) scroll down to the challenge
4) start it AND
5) as we begin killing stuff left and right : have to ALSO close down the darn window...
 
Why don't we have challenges auto-starting like they did the first time we discovered them ?
 
There is an answer to that : because not everyone does want to repeat them all the time and thus don't want to have to close the challenge window every 5 minutes. And that is understandable. Some days you only feel like you want to do your dailies and that's it, some other days you feel a bit more adventurous and go wild.
 
But right now we only have the cozy option (don't do the challenges) and those who are feeling more adventurous only have the BURNOUT option of having to juggle with the challenge window... So let me re-phrase my previous question  ;) :
 
Why isn't there in the option menu, somewhere in the game option, a box to check that would say (when checked) :
 
AUTO-START CHALLENGES when appropriate.
 
So that when I kill a moodie in northern wastes : BAM the challenge starts. So that when I'm hunting for the evil spiders in Crimson Island : BAM the crates around are lit to remind me I need to pick them up, and so on and so forth... ("remind me" bolded because it's also what it's all about, because I don't necessarily remember there is a challenge here or there when I revisit that place)
 
And all this post was just about one example, that both can lead to either contribute to the burnout of the adventurous because he has so many windows to take care of, or the burnout of the guy who does his dailies but hates them but "forgot" to make the effort to remember that the game is so much more enjoyable when played in layers. And on this example, Carbine has a little to do BUT the players as well.
 
And I'm sure I or many others can find more examples, but we have to remember that not all of the burnout is due to the game design or the company or whatever isn't in our hands, it also comes from us.	
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Yattish would not appreciate you misspelling the name of his people!
 
 
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			So it's about the ENDGAME.Not sure if it works, but put in this way, everyone has a job in the real world and people play games because they want entertainment.The logic is simple, a game should be fun enough for serving its only purpose - entertaining us.Not everyone like grinding games because it feels like more of a JOB rather than ENTERTAINMENT.By its very definition, job is about getting rewards after completing something tough, which is quite the feeling of raiding (especially the appearance of 'hardcore' raiding).So maybe more casual content would give players an opportunities to be relaxed.	
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Some great replies, though I haven't yet made it through all of them. I haven't seen this mentioned (if it was, I'm sorry I missed it. I've already been up two hours and I'm at work), and it's something I've poked at on Morning Coffee before, but, one thing I think that huge MMO did really well was to have vanity rewards attached to achievements.
 
Do you know how long I played that game way past my normal "burnout" phase so I could get that silly mount I wanted, or that mini-pet? Collectors want that stuff. Titles. Mini-pets (please? not just plushies?). Mounts. And not just from achievements. I will go grind the crap out of rare reps to get a mount from Lopps (KURG! I totally want a Kurg!) or that hunter group out in Wilderrun. 
 
Not that I myself have come close to anywhere near burnout--I've been trying to get 100% completion in each zone for both the maps and acheivements--but rewards like that would help elongate my playtime like woah.  	
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I think just getting some placeable monster spawn options that generate a small amount of renown upon kills, rather than anything immediately abuseable like plat or gear, would be a nice first step. Let's not ask them to put in a huge number of things that just make the whole idea implausible and unlikely to happen any time soon..
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Not really sure if my guild is going through burnout or they just have nothing left to do.
Everything is maxed so people only log in to raid.  If I don't get into the DS group, I raid 1 day a week maybe 2. 
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Dailies can do it for me, I cringe at the thought. An aside; whoever first came up with the concept of dailies was lazy and uncreative! Ok needed to get out.
 
I would love to be able to grind rep or do dailies via pvp (there's a way to get more people q'ing up for bgs), at least it won't be monotonous and repetitive like doing the exact same quests in the same zones. At least there's the chance for some variety.
 
But at the end of the day, gaming is meant to be fun. The minute I realize a video game is upsetting me even a tad, it's time for a break. The break can be 5 mins, a few hours, a few days to however long I feel I need before the game is fun again. Anyone feeling burn out, this is an effective solution. I'm still loving WS and I'm happy to know I can make myself take a break. When I return everything is still here. 
 
No game is worth getting burned out on.	
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Are you REALLY maxed out? Or are you just done with the part of the game that you initially wanted to do? Most of the time when people say "I'm maxed out!" they mean that they're geared, have all their amps and ability points, and only log on to try to beat either Genetic Archives or Datascape. That's not even close to finishing all the content in the game. That's finishing one tiny portion of it.
 
Do you ever PvP? How is your Rating? Regardless of rating, are you actually any good at PvP, could you afford to get better? How does your house look? Is it just a pile of trash or do you actually have an awesome crib? How does your costume look? Do you even have one? How many Datacubes do you have? How many TALES keys do you have? All of them? None? Have you finished all your Path missions? Have you maxed out your crafting? Have you gotten a Gold medal in all the dungeons and adventures? Have you won all the achievements in Genetic Archives?
 
There's tons to do. You just have to have an open mind. I mean I've spend entire days just Lore hunting. Some of my friends spend entire days in housing. I can play PBGs for hours and not get bored. There's tons to do on non-raid days.
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In all honesty, I think the loot table is probably the easiest thing to actually program.  I'm sure that, if this becomes a way forward for Carbine, it's not coming in for months, and it's mostly going to be based around systems like how you can start the instance from outside the gate, how you can place and path enemies, and other ways to make the tools accessible to us, since we won't have the ability to directly code around problems.  The biggest time sink is going to be making sure that the architecture is relatively idiot-proof, and that would make everything else trivialities in comparison.  Granted, trivialities that can wait for later; the community can somewhat self organize after the basic elements are in place until they can later add some more interconnectivity to it.
 
But yeah, it's not happening anytime soon.  The upside is that, though it would take a long time to implement, it would pay dividends by essentially meaning we could make our own content instead of complaining that Carbine can't make enough fast enough (and never will).  It's the gift that keeps on giving when your own community is doing some of the most time-consuming part of your job on its own.
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With player-created content, I'd be far more concerned about making it abuse-proof over making it idiot-proof. The Architect system didn't pay enough attention to that and CoX suffered badly as a result of it because players could make content that was far more rewarding than actually playing the rest of the game.
 
This type of new development really should be about customizable instancing for fun/practice/creativity, not farming and not phat lewt.
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I can play PBGs for hours and not get bored.
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I'm not talking about what they're more concerned about or not, just what's going to take the most time for them to do.  Whether the dungeon creator can be made exploit proof without making it completely non-useful or not, it will absolutely take them longer to make sure it works in game without us breaking it.
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Are you REALLY maxed out? Or are you just done with the part of the game that you initially wanted to do? Most of the time when people say "I'm maxed out!" they mean that they're geared, have all their amps and ability points, and only log on to try to beat either Genetic Archives or Datascape. That's not even close to finishing all the content in the game. That's finishing one tiny portion of it.
 
Do you ever PvP? How is your Rating? Regardless of rating, are you actually any good at PvP, could you afford to get better? How does your house look? Is it just a pile of trash or do you actually have an awesome crib? How does your costume look? Do you even have one? How many Datacubes do you have? How many TALES keys do you have? All of them? None? Have you finished all your Path missions? Have you maxed out your crafting? Have you gotten a Gold medal in all the dungeons and adventures? Have you won all the achievements in Genetic Archives?
 
There's tons to do. You just have to have an open mind. I mean I've spend entire days just Lore hunting. Some of my friends spend entire days in housing. I can play PBGs for hours and not get bored. There's tons to do on non-raid days.
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"Useful"? Housing isn't intended to BE useful. It's intended to be fun. And there's an easy way to make sure it works in game without us breaking it, don't let people use it to farm phat lewt.
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"Useful"? Housing isn't intended to BE useful. It's intended to be fun. And there's an easy way to make sure it works in game without us breaking it, don't let people use it to farm phat lewt.
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I think just getting some placeable monster spawn options that generate a small amount of renown upon kills, rather than anything immediately abuseable like plat or gear, would be a nice first step. Let's not ask them to put in a huge number of things that just make the whole idea implausible and unlikely to happen any time soon..
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[...] (same faction PvP, please, this game needs it) [...]
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