What's your mechanism to prevent burnout?

[Caerule]

I run a roleplay guild. We can make however much content we want, to enjoy with friends. Immersing ourselves in this giant world to have adventures in.

I'm also a collector of anything collectable.

Lastly, my second screen helps keep my mind occupied watching shows and youtube, during the dull things like world questing.

[apustus]

I play less when I don't feel like playing more.

[Muajin76]

I run a roleplay guild. We can make however much content we want, to enjoy with friends. Immersing ourselves in this giant world to have adventures in.

I'm also a collector of anything collectable.

friends do make game burnout much better. you focus less on the game and more time with friends/enjoy doing things together. there are players like myself that don't really have friends, even though we belong to a guild. or had friends/family members that used to play and moved on to something else etc. pretty much everyone i know has gotten married and spending time with family/creating a family.

[MoanaLisa]

I play Skyrim.

Skyrim is an amazing thing, even after a number of years.

[Sliske]

Stop playing when you finish your goal and don't immediately know what your next one is.

If your goal is 400 mounts and all you've been doing for the past 2 months is farming mounts, chances are when you finish it you aren't gonna be like "damn, now i really wanna get to 2400 in arena!" - you'd of been dabbling into that thing anyway.

Burnout occurs when you finish your goal and then continue to hang around, occupying time with things that you aren't enjoying, yet you know produce a decent reward, like logging in every week to raid despite being gear capped , max neck level and so on.

I do this a lot in Guild Wars 2 as well. That game is F2P, so quitting randomly one day is easy, you don't feel the guilt of knowing you have a month left on your subscription.

Don't hang around and get bitter about the game. Realise one simple fact - there isn't a game on the planet that you can play every day all day for 15 years. If there is one, then you're probably autistic (not an insult, i'm autistic and funnily enough i am autistic and am like this with the Dynasty Warriors franchise.)

Find yourself standing in Boralus / Dazor'alor a lot? Go on steam instead and look through the sales. Look through the B.net launcher, maybe you feel like playing Diablo or Overwatch again. Chances are you'll find something after a day or two of looking and then you won't even enter burnout stage, you'll hop from WoW right into a game you enjoy a lot.

- - - Updated - - -

Skyrim is an amazing thing, even after a number of years.

XCOM 2 and Skyrim. 2 games that you can play for a hundred hours, put down for a year then come back the next year with a completely different mod pack and play for another 100 hundreds. In that sense, modders have basically made 'season' style game out of those games, similar to PoE / Diablo or a new patch/expansion for WoW.

[Butterland]

I stick to 2 characters/specs : Arms warrior and Balance Druid.
I barely touch alts. I think my last alt was a rogue in Cata and I shelved him as soon as he hit max level.

Also : I actively avoid grindy/daily stuff... so the last retail expansion I really invested myself in was MoP.

[Sneaksies]

Do you have a "system" to prevent you from burning out mid expansion?

Basically what i do is:
Push the boundaries of "gameplay customization" for one spec in PvP and casual Mythic+ dungeons.
When i exhaust every single customization option...is time to change spec and try it all over again.
When i exhaust a class...is time to try a new class and start all over again.
Unfortunatelly for me, i only enjoy Monk, Rogue and Demon Hunter...and WoW is not exactly a good game in this department.

Season 1 of BFA was a 9/10 with un-nerfed azerite traits.
Essenses got me excited and i had tons of fun trying different ones.

Eventually burned out

take a shower dont burn 5head

no seriously, i love running old content and exploring old zones

[Trumpcat]

Simply I never do anything I don't like and I have a very active guild that's doing M+, raids and banter. I play daily yet I never play to burnout. I never farmed AP, yet I hit 70 long ago, rank 3 of all important essences, pvp as well, Nazjatar achievement, etc. If I feel like playing some class a bit I do it or collect a transmog or something else. I also play other games to the side. I know folks who'd grind daily quests and farm AP on all their characters until their brain leaks out and then quit for months. I never do that and my character is far ahead of them on achievements, rare things collected and gear.

So the way to not burnout is to not burnout, not to seek ways to prevent the burnout while you grind your face.

[Muajin76]

Skyrim is an amazing thing, even after a number of years.

How do you handle WoW burnout?

[Kokolums]

I only play 1 character and have 1-2 alts I hardly ever touch. I only play about 6-10 hours a week. There is always complaints saying people are bored or burned out. Well; If you have every class at max level and raid/pvp/m+ etc across all of them of course you will get bored/burned out. The game isn't designed to be played like it's a full time job.

You must have alts. Otherwise you are at risk of being a demonology that gets a heavy nerf mid-tier and you get benched until you level something else, especially if you are uninterested in playing the other lock specs.

[MoanaLisa]

How do you handle WoW burnout?

See several paragraphs at #27 in this thread. The context for that is that Skyrim and games like that but especially that one are good for a change of scene, especially if RPG's are your thing.

[Villager720]

I just don’t log in if I don’t have something I want to do in game.
I used to occasionally have a sense of obligation - games shouldn’t have that.

[WowIsDead64]

What requires such a long term goal for altaholic playstyle? If anything they keep making the game more and more friendly for that playstyle. Will all your alts be mythic raid ready as soon as they hit 120, no. But that is a pretty silly expectation. I love playing alts and since legion it has become so much easier to get them decently geared quickly for casual content. I dontbother with grinding everything out on every alt because it just isn't necessary. I don't raid so all catch up gear is more than enough.

Grind, RNG and time-gating are exactly such mechanics. AP grind for example. Yeah, there are catch ups now, but let's imagine it's 8.0. This is exact mechanic, that tells you "Invest all your free time into me!!!". That means you always have to choose between grinding a little more AP on your main and switching to alt to play just for fun, but losing all progress. So, if I have to choose alts, then I have to reject AP grind.

Or, for example, overtuned content, like Nazjatar. You can't just level to 120 and get to there immediately. You have to grind at least ~350-370 gear first. And it's minimum. It means doing whole WQ grind on alt, because WQ don't give you high ilvl epics immediately - they give you gear, that is just a little better, than you already have. And that's not all. This content is actually tuned...for overgear, i.e. for players, who have been playing for a long time already. It's not comfortable for something, that is lower, than 400-410. While this content itself drops 380 and maximum gear is 420. So, player is actually expected to get some gear from external sources, such as Mythic+ runs.

It's really hard to start playing on alt from scratch in such conditions. This kills all desire to start playing on alt.

[Muajin76]

See several paragraphs at #27 in this thread. The context for that is that Skyrim and games like that but especially that one are good for a change of scene, especially if RPG's are your thing.

time to whip out the ole NDS then eh? *yes..i still have an original grey bulky one*
replay an old rpg on there. or try a new one.

[Utrrabbit]

I only play if i feel like it i can skip a couple of weeks log on do hc raid or akey push when i feel like. I play the game i want not just wow

Easy.

Play classic.

Its a much more advanced version. Although it might take awhile. If you are used to bfa. Actually having to be in the world might be daunting.


No but seriously. I only play classic at.

[Beerplz]

Do you have a "system" to prevent you from burning out mid expansion?

Basically what i do is:
Push the boundaries of "gameplay customization" for one spec in PvP and casual Mythic+ dungeons.
When i exhaust every single customization option...is time to change spec and try it all over again.
When i exhaust a class...is time to try a new class and start all over again.
Unfortunatelly for me, i only enjoy Monk, Rogue and Demon Hunter...and WoW is not exactly a good game in this department.

Season 1 of BFA was a 9/10 with un-nerfed azerite traits.
Essenses got me excited and i had tons of fun trying different ones.

Eventually burned out

Play some other games for a while and just log to raid . I just finished the new Star Wars game which was awesome and now i feel the itch to do some stuff in wow again so i'm just doing that cycle

[Cosmic Janitor]

Quitting / reduce playtime to practically zero.

[Djuntas]

OP, ask yourself if you even want to play other games or do other things? For me personally I just dont really care about that many games, so wow is fine for me.

Been playing since classic, made millions of gold, 30k nerd points, plenty of mounts...But as other said, I also dont grind where I dont see meaning. Actually, I only grind things that will make me get mounts (within reason, so I dont grind MOP world bosses etc) and achievements.

1 thing I dont do, cause I also limit my self, is not to do pet achives etc...I hate pet battles etc.

[Kathranis]

Simple. I play the game when I want to play it. If I don't want to play it, I play or do something else.

[Loveliest]

I think it depends on the person a lot. I main spec a prot paladin and by "main spec" I mean it's the only spec I do anything significant on. I have like 20 alts, but I don't play them much. I level them, do professions and that's it. Maybe I'll do a dungeon one a few. Maybe. If guildies are doing regular mythics on alts or somesuch.
So for me there is no such thing as "exhausting" a spec or class.

And then there's the amount of time I play. I have days I spend a few hours in and days I don't log at all and play other games.
I also play with friends and guildies almost exclusively, so my fun comes form that rather the actual char I'm playing. My guild is heroic-only and I do Mythic sometimes after it's cross-realm with another guild.

I also like doing basically everything this game offers. Dungeons & M+, raids, pet battles, pvp (arenas and bgs), achievements, mount collecting, xmog collecting... so there's always something to do.

So... I don't burn out. It's the combo of different activities I do, not playing too much and being around friends.