I doubt that. Players always complain about not having enough content or things to do. Why would they voluntarily limit what they produced? Lose players from burnout (not Blizzard's direct fault) or lose players from lack of content (more directly Blizzard's fault).

I think lack of new content is what causes burnout more than anything, actually. My guild's most enthusiastic times have been when a new content patch came out. Give people new and things to do, and they'll make time for playing WoW. I don't know anyone who stopped playing because there was too much stuff they wanted to do and not enough time for it. The first 2-3 months of Naxx were great, but lately we've had people try cutting back on their play time to only raid 2-3 nights a week for 3 hours a raid, and they STILL got burnt out and quit. To avoid losing people for whatever reason, they really just need to produce new content quicker, I think is what it boils down to.

The bolded sentences hit the nail on the head for me. The question is, when you "lose" someone to burnout, what do you mean by lose? Blizzard is going to lose me as a raider in the next few weeks here, because I am a bit burnt out on it, and I'm not able to commit the time required to raid without making personal sacrifices that I'm no longer willing to make. However, Blizzard isn't even going to notice or care, because I'm going to keep on playing casually in the expansion, and as long as I'm still paying my monthly subscription fee they can count me as a success. They know that it's better for them if I play fewer hours per week, but keep on subscribing for years, than if I raid hardcore for 3 months and then quit cold turkey. If they can make the raiding end of the game take less time per week, with fewer people getting completely fed up and quitting the game completely, but still keep the most hardcore players having fun, they will end up with more total monthly fees paid and players who might even gripe less, too.

(edit for grammar)

I wasn't sure whether this was deserving of its own topic or not so I'll post it here first:

What's in a name?
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How did everyone decide on their guild name?

Our officers decided that we've finally (tried to) run MC enough times to just stop trying to resuscitate the guild. It was either stop now or hate everything about WoW come January 16th for at least one person and the rest of us agreed, for the most part. We decided on leaving at about 2a Thursday morning, and gave the guild 5-days notice after a canceled, due to manpower, BWL run. (I think) We indicated that we'd be willing to help set up replacement officers, give as many pointers as they'd like, and even help fill in the empty slot or two in a 40m run if they need it; however, we were finished with raiding for the immediate future and were going to start a completely casual PvP guild.

We decided that the name needed to be something completely unrelated to <Risen>, or any other top 10-25 guild names that we might happen upon, and ended up deciding, after much debate, that the simplest method of choosing a name was best: we got together in a vent channel, had 10 minutes to come up with names, and someone did a /random to figure out who went first. Every person, not counting the first, got one suggestion and one veto (he got 2 suggestions b/c we needed to start SOMEWHERE); if you vetoed someone's suggestion, you had to make your own at that point (no duplicate suggestions and the whole channel could reject a name if all but two decided that it was stupid). We were either going to end up with a name that everyone liked, early on, or we'd end up with a completely random name from someone who waited patiently until the very end.

We had submissions ranging from <what> to <Anachronism> to <Sesame Street> but the end result, and second from last possible submission, from one of our warlocks was: <Bloodbath and Beyond>

It fit well, considering PvP and alt-leveling was going to be the focus for the foreseeable future, due to burnout, and everyone liked the play on words.

So, how do other guilds go about coming up with a name and what do you usually go for?

It sounds more like you are in for burnout judging by the description of your own class. ;)

That's simple for me, I'm pretty certain the original guild leader just thought it sounded cool. I'd much rather have a different guild name, because while it has many redeeming qualities, originality most definitely isn't one of them.

Ah, an easy one.

In the original closed beta we were Goon Squad. Then for retail we decided to name ourselves Hooligan Syndicate so as to not get us confused with everyone else, and because we figured GS guild chat was going to be a neverending string of nonstop spam, [Torn Furry Paw] linking, and catchphrase-of-the-day irritation (which it was). There was a guild wipe early on due to some technical fuckery, and someone stole our guild name before we could remake, so we went around for a while with a double-spaced gap in our name, i.e.

At the time, we used the same forums as Goon Squad. When we decided to start raiding Molten Core and use a points system, there was a massive shitstorm because Goon Squad's officers refused to use ANY points-based system whatsoever (yes, this is as dumb as it sounds - they really would have everyone /random on raid loot) and one day they banned all our officers from their boards, declaring loudly that they would not be let back on despite the rest of Goon Squad going "this is stupid, unban them". In particular, their webmaster Romper (a man pretending to be a girl in everything, not just in-game) called us a "bunch of elitists".

It followed naturally that we were Elitist Jerks from there, and the name stuck.

Though not liked by some of the more hardcore players, a Blizzard implemented solution versus burnout that also prevents content from being raped too fast exists. It is called timers.

For example the 2 hour Vael timer was a perfect system to ensure that Vael isn't defeated after 100 tries in 1 week by a high playtime. So it allows for extremely challenging but resonably time consuming content, letting "smart guys" with a decent but limited playtime to be competitive.

Removing some tedium could also help:
- extra fast griffons for an extra price, like 150% faster for 3 times more expensive. Many engineers chose this profession only for the "not too far from AQ" teleporter.
- a raidwide "prayer of fortitude" for 0 mana, a 5 g reagent and 1h cooldown. Same for all buffs.
- limiting the role of consumables
- ...

15,000 gold griffons would actually cause more burnout than help - how many HWL's quit this game? Like hella plus over a thousand?

I don't think those would help as such Melissande, in some ways you're removing tedium by making it so people need to spend more time doing something else which is tedious, though for different reasons.

As for the timers... While running something over and over can cause stress and indeed burnout, being stressed out by having to fit as much as possible in a short timespan doesn't help either. A lot of burnout is also caused not so much by tedium, as by stress. And having a limited timespan to complete something in definitely adds to that feeling, unless the timespan is wide enough as to make it, again, tedious and nothing to worry about. While I don't particularly enjoy going on farm run number one thousand, the things that most make me wonder why I'm doing this is when things repeatedly go wrong when they shouldn't, and that would be a lot more frustrating if it means the boss despawns and we're locked out for a day.

For the tedium, the 'real' solution wouldn't be introducing expensive things to speed stuff up, but more that the actual way of farming, say, consumables has multiple different options which all are somewhat interesting. If balanced well, of course. I've always liked the idea of having instances have certain fixed spawns of common consumable resources, but making sure that each of the ingredients is available throughout multiple instances. Being able to vary what you do is, for the most part, key. But, and this is also important, that shouldn't be the only way to do so.

Haha, I know of at least a few that quit the day after their ranks updated and they got the rank they were going for (be it 13 or 14).

Expensive griffons are kinda different though, since you can skip a week of gold farming and not have to start from scratch again. I think high gold upgrades (non necessities, like repair bills or required consumables) are actually very good and will help the game, barring the china farmer invasion, since casuals still have access to it. Even though it may take them months to accumulate 15k gold, there's always that sense of progression. Its like levelling, some people do it quick, some take months. Having to save up a good amount of gold for my first mount was fun and took me a while, especially since I had the most useless of the useless professions at the time.

It was definitely the tedium that got to me. I liked running BWL and what AQ40 we could clear; I hated running MC & ZG because of the damn trash and utterly detested waiting around for a raid to simply not get off because of attendance 'issues'.