Cynicism

Shantu

Maybe it's just me. Maybe the attrition of playing almost daily for 2 years has burned me out. Whatever the case, I find the enjoyment I used to find replaced by increasing cynicism. All the nerfs don't help and the Murkmire changes, particularly the shield, hit my enthusiasm pretty hard. Chasing meta builds is tiresome. The endless grind to get anything feels completely joyless. Creating a new character feels about exciting as the prospect of an appendectomy. While I don't completely suck, I'm certainly not an elite player and bashing up against failure in vet progression groups, pvp, and other end game content, feels unfulfilling. Often, I find myself logging in only to stare at the screen. On this forum I've even received a couple of warnings for my lousy attitude, and rightfully so. I feel like I come to these forums to blame my frustration on ZOS. They don't give a damn about players. They are constantly coming up with dumb changes nobody wants. They don't communicate. They don't fix existing bugs. They don't do this. They don't do that. On and on and on...

The thing is, I'm really not a cynical person by nature. So I'm wondering if maybe it's time to take a break. What do you guys think? Has taking a break ever helped you regain your initial enjoyment and love for the game? Or do games like this just run their course to an inevitable point where it's time to drop your subscription and walk away?

theyancey

Bye. Can I , you know . . .

Radinyn

I demand my awesomes.

DeadlyRecluse

Shantu wrote: »

Has taking a break ever helped you regain your initial enjoyment and love for the game? Or do games like this just run their course to an inevitable point where it's time to drop your subscription and walk away?

Yes, and also yes.

I take breaks from time to time. The longest was almost a year without playing.

Eventually one of the breaks will just kinda never end.

Silver_Strider

The feeling of relief after getting an appendectomy though; all that pain you were feeling, just gone, is an absolute breathe of fresh air

Umbro100

Shantu wrote: »

Maybe it's just me. Maybe the attrition of playing almost daily for 2 years has burned me out. They don't give a damn about players. They are constantly coming up with dumb changes nobody wants. They don't communicate. They don't fix existing bugs. They don't do this. They don't do that. On and on and on...

The thing is, I'm really not a cynical person by nature. So I'm wondering if maybe it's time to take a break. What do you guys think? Has taking a break ever helped you regain your initial enjoyment and love for the game? Or do games like this just run their course to an inevitable point where it's time to drop your subscription and walk away?

Yes. All of the above I experienced with gw2 and after 5 years of logging in every day ! I quit. It was a relief Now I started ESO and I enjoy it a lot. When the servers are up

And no, I do not want your things. I want to do it all by my self and have fun doing it !

JayAstrophel

I think that games are about having fun - if you're not enjoying your time in this game then it's definitely time for you to take a break/perhaps move on.

FluffyKitten

Shantu wrote: »

Has taking a break ever helped you regain your initial enjoyment and love for the game? Or do games like this just run their course to an inevitable point where it's time to drop your subscription and walk away?

I competed in FPS games with my nerd peak as ranked 5th in the world in Quake 1, needless to say I had put a ton of hours into it.
In the end i burned myself out and couldn't stand playing any fps for several years, my suggestion is to take a couple weeks off before you are too burned out of this game, or focus on another aspect of it if you find any of them still enjoyable.
ESO is a great game but even the best games can become repetitive and boring if you do it enough times, Elsweyr though.

geonsocal

are there any other games which interest you?

personally - it's really tough for me to imagine walking out for good on some characters that i've spent three plus years developing...breaks, or, decreased play time help a bunch with inevitable burn out that comes from doing anything a bunch...

logarifmik

Shantu wrote: »

Maybe it's just me. Maybe the attrition of playing almost daily for 2 years has burned me out. Whatever the case, I find the enjoyment I used to find replaced by increasing cynicism. All the nerfs don't help and the Murkmire changes, particularly the shield, hit my enthusiasm pretty hard. Chasing meta builds is tiresome. The endless grind to get anything feels completely joyless. Creating a new character feels about exciting as the prospect of an appendectomy. While I don't completely suck, I'm certainly not an elite player and bashing up against failure in vet progression groups, pvp, and other end game content, feels unfulfilling. Often, I find myself logging in only to stare at the screen. On this forum I've even received a couple of warnings for my lousy attitude, and rightfully so. I feel like I come to these forums to blame my frustration on ZOS. They don't give a damn about players. They are constantly coming up with dumb changes nobody wants. They don't communicate. They don't fix existing bugs. They don't do this. They don't do that. On and on and on...

The thing is, I'm really not a cynical person by nature. So I'm wondering if maybe it's time to take a break. What do you guys think? Has taking a break ever helped you regain your initial enjoyment and love for the game? Or do games like this just run their course to an inevitable point where it's time to drop your subscription and walk away?

I took a break and still don't have any good enough reasons to go back. Though, I can feel your pain, my reasons were a bit different. I don't like how they proceed with the story of the game. There are other reasons of course, like bad models they don't want to fix (Nocturnal, you look silly), "funny" bugs (nobody should run on top of the mount!) they don't want to fix, real bugs they can't fix for a long time, etc. But the last drop was completely idiotic Murkmire prologue. The man who wrote it done a great job, I'll not buy this crap, thank you.

StormChaser3000

Yes, take a break. Immediately. This a typical burnout. And when you came back try not to optimize everything and stop trying to become "elite".

After I stopped crazy gear/progress racing in games I stopped getting burnouts. I try to take ESO as easy as possible. I'm slowly trying different builds, trying PvP here and there, not rushing through quests, avoiding overly hardcore content. After a year of playing I still have Morrowind and Summerset main storylines to go through + a bunch of mini quests in various zones that I look forward to go through.

I'm far from being an elite player, but I'm happy about my ingame experience which is incomparably more important. Casualism for life

Tommy_The_Gun

I agree with you OP. I play this game since launch date (2014) and I have a good picture of what has become of this game.
Sure, you can say that at some point when you know the game better and have achieved certain in game stuff then you look at things differently. But I would say that it is like 10 - 30% of the problem. The rest lays on ZOS's end and certain weird decision they are making (although those decision may look normal to them as they are not the players, but game developers).

My advise: wait for the next update (PTS changes are not final yet and there will be at least 2 more rounds of PTS) and see if you like the changes. If you don't, then at least keep collecting your daily login rewards.

eklhaftb16_ESO

Clean your mailbox and guild store, say goodbye to your guild, put your sub on hold and get yourself some offline games, preferably some that are entirely different from ESO (games like Terraria, Zomboid, Cities: Skylines, Sunless Sea or Endless Legend worked best for me in the past; your mileage may vary). When it's the right time to return to ESO and enjoy it once again, you will know.

Why offline games? Well, for one, switching one MMO for another MMO doesn't really solve your problem. And for two, if you go play another MMO, there's a good chance you won't return.

dovakiin5574

I take a few months off here and there when I feel burned out

dovakiin5574

eklhaftb16_ESO wrote: »

Clean your mailbox and guild store, say goodbye to your guild, put your sub on hold and get yourself some offline games, preferably some that are entirely different from ESO (games like Terraria, Zomboid, Cities: Skylines, Sunless Sea or Endless Legend worked best for me in the past; your mileage may vary). When it's the right time to return to ESO and enjoy it once again, you will know.

Why offline games? Well, for one, switching one MMO for another MMO doesn't really solve your problem. And for two, if you go play another MMO, there's a good chance you won't return.

Idk I like WoW but I never got into it the way I got into ESO (played WoW after ESO)

Bhaal5

Shantu wrote: »

Maybe it's just me. Maybe the attrition of playing almost daily for 2 years has burned me out. Whatever the case, I find the enjoyment I used to find replaced by increasing cynicism. All the nerfs don't help and the Murkmire changes, particularly the shield, hit my enthusiasm pretty hard. Chasing meta builds is tiresome. The endless grind to get anything feels completely joyless. Creating a new character feels about exciting as the prospect of an appendectomy. While I don't completely suck, I'm certainly not an elite player and bashing up against failure in vet progression groups, pvp, and other end game content, feels unfulfilling. Often, I find myself logging in only to stare at the screen. On this forum I've even received a couple of warnings for my lousy attitude, and rightfully so. I feel like I come to these forums to blame my frustration on ZOS. They don't give a damn about players. They are constantly coming up with dumb changes nobody wants. They don't communicate. They don't fix existing bugs. They don't do this. They don't do that. On and on and on...

The thing is, I'm really not a cynical person by nature. So I'm wondering if maybe it's time to take a break. What do you guys think? Has taking a break ever helped you regain your initial enjoyment and love for the game? Or do games like this just run their course to an inevitable point where it's time to drop your subscription and walk away?

I did the 'drop the subscription and walked away' an nicer been happier. Eso's development model, or what ever you call it, is pretty rubbish an overtime soul breaking. As you watch your favourite class fade out because of the 'one class meta' ideal zos has.
Not to mention the games actual performance over the years have gone from sub par to early access indie dev terrible (tbh indie devs atleast have an excuse, zos has zero). You will not be the first to walk away, many have before you. There is no value in eso, an there are far superior mmos out there where you one spend a 4th of what you do in eso to receive 10 times more product.

Red_Feather

Same thing happened to me and guild wars 2. I just came to the forums to criticize the game. Best thing I did was leave and find a new game. But sometimes I get in a mood and feel like I'm doing the same thing in the new game.

eso_nya

Its not just u. The others might be right and u r running into a burnout tho.
For me, eso started of in 2014 as the most amazing game i ever played. Some aspects, like the art (even the loadscreen pics) started of great and improved every single dlc.

But than, there r day one "improvement suggestions" that turned into complains, and never got adressed or became even worse.
"the game is to grindy/rng sucks" hot topic in the forums since beta. five years later, we look at: 2014, 9 blue motifbooks, one book = full style; follow up: 50 more motif books ripped into 14 pages ea, quality goes up to purple for lower dropchance. And when u thought glass style was a bad idea, they top that with welkynar. wtf is wrong with u? there was a time when we complained that we got argonian for the 5th time and couldnt find khajiit.
ppl complained crafting is to grindy; ppl raged when the "answer" is charging 10 times the mats for vr16 stuff and than they make jewelry crafting. really? what part of "too grindy" do u not understand?
how do u manage to have one meta in a game with billions of set and trait combinations?
where did "massive (fluent) pvp battles with thousands of players in the same map" go? murkmire stutters and rubberbands when theres 20 ppl on a worldboss.
there is still no rewards system (2x nfg1 == vMHK hm, for real??). there is still no endgame or progression;
the complaint wasnt against itemprogression, but that its pointless to regrind the _same_ sets on a different level every few month. is the concept of "bring new, more powerful sets on a higher level" so hard to grasp?
mechanics .... guess the bossfight: "dont stand in red, stack and burn, kill it before mechanics happen". and the correct answer is: all of them! xD the old dungeons had cool mechanics, but u need below 10k grp dps to actuallly see them

Once the game had the potential to dethrone WoW. but somehow they managed to make the pain points worse and only improved on the things they already did better than the competition.
You become a soulless vestige when reading to many elder scrolls disappointing patch notes.

Mr_Walker

The resistance to chase the meta, esp when that meta becomes a different class becomes easier if you're cynical enough to think that it's purely done to keep people playing. As for gear metas, most of the difrerences made are barely rounding errors in a dummy parse. Meh.

Once you give up on chasing the dangly shiny worthless trinkets, you can simply have some fun in the game. Which is how it's supposed to be, and something a lot of people forget.

klowdy1

Play multiple games. I usually keep one sub game rolling (WoW, ESO, FF14, SWtOR), even changing from month to month, and also play stuff like GW2, BDO, Neverwinter, and single player games like God of War ( newest), Darksiders 2 (probably going to get 3 when it goes on sale), FF15, and older games like FF7-12 (not 11 for obvious reasons), Legend of Dragoon, and Earthbound on my phone.

I also limit myself to only playing an hour or so each day, maybe more on the weekends. It is good to not get too involved in a single game, as it can start to affect your daily life. Having bad drops, or group luck in that one game you play? Haven't talked to hardly anyone outside of the random jerks you've unluckily come in contact with today? You're probably going to notice it in your general attitude that day.

Sylvermynx

If you aren't having fun, then yes it's time to do something else. I don't have any recommends for you as I don't know you.

As for breaks.... personally I don't do them. Games are fun for me - until they aren't. I played WoW and RIFT for YEARS each. When they quit being fun, I left. That's my personal bottom line: if I'm not having fun, it's time to do something else.

I hope you find that something else.

Lifemocker

Take a break and play something where you can relax. I’ve had a couple of ”breaks” where I only got on to do a trial with my team twice a week. The rest of the time I replayed something else like Dragon Age and Halo campaigns.

Shantu

Thanks for the feedback. Sometimes it's hard to walk away from something you've invested so much time and effort it. But if it ain't fun...

And no, you can't have my gear.

Bam_Bam

Shantu wrote: »

Maybe it's just me. Maybe the attrition of playing almost daily for 2 years has burned me out. Whatever the case, I find the enjoyment I used to find replaced by increasing cynicism. All the nerfs don't help and the Murkmire changes, particularly the shield, hit my enthusiasm pretty hard. Chasing meta builds is tiresome. The endless grind to get anything feels completely joyless. Creating a new character feels about exciting as the prospect of an appendectomy. While I don't completely suck, I'm certainly not an elite player and bashing up against failure in vet progression groups, pvp, and other end game content, feels unfulfilling. Often, I find myself logging in only to stare at the screen. On this forum I've even received a couple of warnings for my lousy attitude, and rightfully so. I feel like I come to these forums to blame my frustration on ZOS. They don't give a damn about players. They are constantly coming up with dumb changes nobody wants. They don't communicate. They don't fix existing bugs. They don't do this. They don't do that. On and on and on...

The thing is, I'm really not a cynical person by nature. So I'm wondering if maybe it's time to take a break. What do you guys think? Has taking a break ever helped you regain your initial enjoyment and love for the game? Or do games like this just run their course to an inevitable point where it's time to drop your subscription and walk away?

At 45, I'm a miserable [snip] at the best of times. But as for ESO, I find it's all about waves/cycles.

I played the game almost religiously for just over a year. I was getting infuriated at little things - bugs and glitches would make me lose my ***. I'd get really angry with guildmates mmessing up in PvP.

Then someone in my family died and I quit the game. I was genuinely worried that my anger, cynicism and a annoyance were going to start to bleed into my real life. I had a bit of a nervous breakdown when they died and quit for about a year.

I did a lot of thinking and mourning and I decided to return. In the game, things had improved - sure, there were still bugs but at least I know longer fell through the steps everyone I visited the fighters guild in Auridon.

One of the things I found away from the game was a real appreciation for time. Time and life is short. So I threw myself back into the game. This time I made/make sure that I take time away from the game. I keep subs ACTIVE on 2 accounts. But real life must always come first.

I kinda kick off on here a lot, but most of the time it's in jest. Life's too short to take it too seriously.

[edited for profanity bypass]

Nisekev

Can I have your gold?

jainiadral

Shantu wrote: »

Maybe it's just me. Maybe the attrition of playing almost daily for 2 years has burned me out. Whatever the case, I find the enjoyment I used to find replaced by increasing cynicism. All the nerfs don't help and the Murkmire changes, particularly the shield, hit my enthusiasm pretty hard. Chasing meta builds is tiresome. The endless grind to get anything feels completely joyless. Creating a new character feels about exciting as the prospect of an appendectomy. While I don't completely suck, I'm certainly not an elite player and bashing up against failure in vet progression groups, pvp, and other end game content, feels unfulfilling. Often, I find myself logging in only to stare at the screen. On this forum I've even received a couple of warnings for my lousy attitude, and rightfully so. I feel like I come to these forums to blame my frustration on ZOS. They don't give a damn about players. They are constantly coming up with dumb changes nobody wants. They don't communicate. They don't fix existing bugs. They don't do this. They don't do that. On and on and on...

The thing is, I'm really not a cynical person by nature. So I'm wondering if maybe it's time to take a break. What do you guys think? Has taking a break ever helped you regain your initial enjoyment and love for the game? Or do games like this just run their course to an inevitable point where it's time to drop your subscription and walk away?

FWIW, nothing your saying about ZOS is technically untrue. They are coming up with dumb changes that no one wants. Bugs still exist and haven't been fixed. They don't really engage much on the forums. Things are getting grindier and for some players, that isn't fun.

Cynicism is fronting that you don't care about the truth, even though you're actually taking it personally. I know it well-- I'm a cynic by nature. It's my shield against my dying idealism, to keep that softer part of me at bay so that maybe I can keep a sliver of it alive in my soul. It keeps me from engaging too deeply so that I don't burn out. It also keeps me from seeing impersonal decisions like ZOS' as a personal attack.

Burnout takes cynicism past its usefulness, unfortunately. If I were you, I'd be completely burned out on this game. Two years is a long time to play anything every day. Take a break. Play a game that's completely different, whether it's scifi MMO or a single player game. Variety is good, and change is necessary.

Protossyder

Dude, you need to get yourself some other games as well. I have a few round based shooters that I love to play together with my friends (some of them are also my ESO mates).
Although it will obviously be healthier to completely get off gaming and do something else instead of just playing different games, it's still a fun and refreshing (and lazy) alternative.
And maybe try not to care too much about upcoming changes, you can't do anything about them anyways.



PS: Are you playing alone by the way? I would've quit a long time ago if that was the case.

Ohtimbar

My advice is to take a break. If you come back later, great, if not, then you've obviously found something you enjoy more than ESO. There's plenty else to choose from in gaming and beyond. There's so much that annoys me about this game; the lack of critical fixes, the lack of direction, the poor excuse for balance, the slimy monetization, etc, but there's still enough left for me to stick around. That said, my interest in the game does seem to be winding down. Nothing lasts forever, and that's ok.

jainiadral

Protossyder wrote: »

Dude, you need to get yourself some other games as well. I have a few round based shooters that I love to play together with my friends (some of them are also my ESO mates).
Although it will obviously be healthier to completely get off gaming and do something else instead of just playing different games, it's still a fun and refreshing (and lazy) alternative.
And maybe try not to care too much about upcoming changes, you can't do anything about them anyways.



PS: Are you playing alone by the way? I would've quit a long time ago if that was the case.

That dude seriously needs some Ivory soap

Shantu

Protossyder wrote: »

PS: Are you playing alone by the way? I would've quit a long time ago if that was the case.

Nope. I'm a member of 4 guilds. 2 for normal and vet trials, 1 for PVP, and 1 where I'm a founding officer and run lead in normal trials for novice players.

I've been a gamer to some extent ever since the original Zelda came out back in 1986. I have dozens of other games on my PC. But nothing has ever captured my passion for gaming like ESO. But I hear the choir singing "Take a break!". When I feel the cynicism rising, more and more these days, I'm just logging out and doing something else. Cant seem to shake this damned little ESO devil sitting on my shoulder whispering in my ear though.

Thanks again for all the feedback.