The 5 Stages of Game Burnout

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I’ve played Lord of the Rings: Online for nearly seven years now. That’s a long time to be playing any game. Back in 2011 just after the Anniversary event (the one many refer to as the Grindaversary), I experienced my first strong, true burnout from LOTRO. For a year afterwards I would log in occasionally and try to get back into the game but it was never the same. I finally started logging in again regularly with the release of Riders of Rohan. My playtime has been steadily increasing since then however with the release of Update 15 I’m beginning to feel the tell-tale signs of game burnout once again.

I know many others are feeling the same way about LOTRO and other games at the moment so I wanted to outline the stages of game burnout. These stages are especially prevalent if you are playing a time-intensive, long-term game like an MMO.

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The Sociable

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of being a guest on the LOTRO Players News podcast. I’ve never been on a podcast before and I’ve only had two previous experiences doing any kind of collaborative audio/voice recording (one of which never came to light), so it was a really interesting experience. I was quite nervous before-hand, like with most any social situation. Would I talk too much? Would I not talk enough? Those kinds of questions.

Fortunately the people at LOTRO Players are all really fun, interesting, welcoming people so my anxiety was gone pretty quickly. In fact I had so much fun doing the live podcast and chatting with them all afterwards that I’m left with a bit of a problem. It took me awhile to figure out what my feelings were exactly afterwards, but I’ve finally realized what my problem is: I miss being social in LOTRO.

 

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Saturday Update – Onward and Upward

I’ve noticed that since I began making videos my blog presence has been… well okay, it’s mostly dropped off completely (save for my own video link dumps). So I’ve decided to rectify that by doing Saturday Updates every week. I’ll talk about what games I’m playing, how video production is going, any gaming news I find interesting, stuff like that. That way this will become more like a blog again!

So welcome to my first Saturday Update! It’s actually Sunday afternoon here, but since I upload videos on a US/Western-European-centric time schedule I figured I’d stick with it here as well. Spring is full on here now – the few trees that do drop their leave in autumn are budding again and the flowers are in a lovely bloom! We got a lot of yard work done yesterday. I planted some red bell peppers (capsicum as they call them here) and an heirloom tomato plant, which I am super excited about! Hopefully it won’t die :(

Apologies for my video uploading schedule this past week – we had plumbers and electricians in this week to do some work on our kitchen. Most importantly we finally got a dishwasher, which means I don’t have to spend ages washing dishes by hand and can spend more time gaming and making videos! Woohoo! But that meant my recording schedule got a bit messed up. Promise that my next Don’t Starve – Willow episode will be up tomorrow, though!

The past few weeks I’ve been playing a lot of the Binding of Isaac. When I played it the first few times after getting it in the Steam sale it seemed okay but I would continuously die very early (we’re talking like Basement 1, for those who have played it). However after a bit more practice I’m finally getting better and can consistently make it to the 3rd or 4th level down. I’ve also been watching a lot of Northernlion’s Binding of Isaac series (Today he uploaded episode #620!!). Not only are his Isaac videos great to watch as he learns and masters the game, but he’s just a great games video maker in general. I definitely draw inspiration from his success! He is also very helpful to other Let’s Players – he frequently posts in the LetsPlay subreddit with advice on getting review copies of games, what kind of things you should worry about for you channel and what you shouldn’t, how to effectively tag your videos, all sorts of stuff.

And so I’ve been thinking of starting an Isaac series myself. I feel like now I know what I’m doing a bit more I could add in another game to upload every week on Mondays. Isaac seems like a good choice because of its near infinite re-playability (did I mention Northernlion has done 620 episodes of it so far?) and it’s fast-paced gameplay lends itself to flowing commentary. The problem with it, of course, is that lots and lots and lots of people do Binding of Isaac series and a lot of them do it very well. But I think the ‘pro’ that trumps that ‘con’ is that… I just have a really fun time playing that game! And I feel like I would be able to do some good/entertaining commentary with it. So this week I’ll try recording a few play-throughs and see how it goes.

In gaming news this week Steam made three pretty big announcements – their creation of a Steam OS, a Steam Machine and a Steam Controller. This is all very exciting! At our house we have a PC hooked up to our TV that we use as a “media PC”. It’s Windows 7 and it stores all of our TV shows and movies and we use a program called XBMC to run them/have a pretty UI on the TV. However with these Steam announcements, we could instead install this Steam OS on our current media PC and use it not only to watch our TV shows and movies but also to play games with. OR we could buy a Steam Machine that fits our requirements and do the same. And we can use the Steam Controllers as remotes/game-pads. It’s definitely a very interesting prospect and I look forward to seeing how this shapes up. I’ve entered myself in the pool for the Steam Machine beta. If I’m super lucky I’ll get picked! But I don’t have my hopes up.

That’s about it for this week. If you have any feedback on how my blog/videos are doing please feel free to let me know! I am always looking to improve. Also if you have an idea for a game you’d like to see me play and record, let me know!

Videos From This Past Week:

LOTRO Lore-master Episode 15: And His Boots Are Yellow

LOTRO Lore-master Episode 16: Lalia Must Die

Round 2 of Update 6 Outfit Creations!

I was able to log into Bullroarer today and get a look around the new areas. Stangard (the Rohirrim village) is awesome! It is so epic. You can actually go inside all of the extraneous houses that otherwise have no purpose really. Just for atmosphere I guess. And it’s brilliant. You can even go up into all the watchtowers. It’s everything I would have ever dreamed of it being. My only criticism really is the music. It’s just the skirmish theme rehashed. Oh well. I guess I’ll just mute it and play the music from the movies, which had awesome music for Rohan.

Anyway, my point is, my outfits for Cithryth matched right in with the various soldiers and spear-men walking around the village. I also got a feel for Thinglad, the area connected to Lothlorien. It’s basically a corrupted kind of Lorien. It definitely helped with my outfits for Sriracha. And hear they are…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fashion Contest Rejects

I told my self to stay away from the Fashion Contest, but I couldn’t help myself. I just spent the past few hours making two outfits for each category besides the kinship one :P I’m not going to the screenshots that I sent in (I don’t want anyone to copy me lol). But here are two entries that didn’t make my cut for sending in. Unfortunately they are both Sagewood. Not to say that Sagewood’s outfits are my least favorite, I just feel like they weren’t as strong of entries as their competition.

For the Formal wear category, I used an outfit on Cithryth and an outfit on Strumskald. For the Professionally Minded category I submitted an outfit on Cithryth and an outfit on Herefara. For the Fashion in Motion category I used Sriracha and Miniature. Hopefully I get a win in one category (or maybe an honourable mention? lol). We’ll see!

Sagewood enters Eregion – with outfits!

Later this week I’ll be making a post about the things I’ve gotten for Christmas (Some of which are Lord of the Rings related of course), but I wanted to make a post about LOTRO specifically because I’ve been playing it a lot this week since my winter break started. I got 3200 TP as a Christmas gift, which I used to buy the new Fleet-Footed Goat for Cithryth. I think it matches her outfits quite well, just like the Grey Horse.

I’ve also managed to snag a pretty cool light armour chest piece from the auction house. I believe it comes from one of the new instances, but I’m not sure. All I know is, I love it for Sagewood, and Herefara:

I’ve been mostly playing Sagewood since I’ve been home. I’ve always loved the hunter class. My first character (created exactly 4 years ago today!) was actually a male elf named Liras on the Brandywine server. I then ‘lost’ him because I switched to Windfola (LOTRO was my first MMO and I didn’t understand the concept of different servers. I also had a hard time reconciling the fact that I couldn’t pause or ‘save’ the game).

I’ve just hit 48 on Sagewood and finished up about half the quests out of Zigilgund in Forochel. I decided to move her on to Eregion since it is easily my favorite region to quest in. The flow from hub to hub is very nicely done, the quests are pleasant (a nice mix of kill x of y, gathering, and mini-boss slaying), and the scenery is gorgeous as well as easy to maneuver through. I’ve taken a few screenshots of Sagewood in her newest outfit while questing around Gwingris:

I’ve also been working on her repertoire of outfits and I think I’ve finally got a set I like. Here they are, labeled for what I plan to use them for:

We’ll see how long they last. Knowing how often I like to switch around outfits, I give it a month.

Tis the Season

… To want to do nothing but sit inside and read and play video games. But alas, I still have two papers to write, a video production to film and a French test to sit. Ah well. I thought now might be a good time to share the random things I’ve been doing across my games. Minecraft, LOTRO and Skyrim have all gotten some use recently.

Since this is a pretty image heavy post, I’m going to put most of this into the “Read more”, so read more!

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