How to avoid burnout?

[almostmatt1]

I can't really offer many suggestions about avoiding it but this thread got me thinking. I wonder how feelings of stagnation and burnout affect people that pretty much just tas (not that there are many of us) compared to people doing regular runs. Both are very time consuming but there's a big difference, doing regular runs you can put tens of thousands of attempts in and any one of those could be the one, but you could also get to the end of a hours-long session of attempts with no success, so you wouldn't really feel like you've gotten anywhere. Whereas with tasing, it depends on the demo and the level of optimisation you're shooting for but some degree of progress is pretty much guaranteed whenever you work on it which is cool, but that progress can also be so extremely slow that there is no kind of hope that achieving your goal might be just around the corner and the thought of the hours left is ever present, so it's mentally taxing in a different kind of way. I wonder if feelings of being burnt out on one would leave you feeling burnt out on the other, or really the extent to which it does or doesn't. I wont bug anyone with a ping but if someone good at both like 4shock or Rocky felt like sharing their thoughts on this I'd be interested to hear them.

[taedev]

5 hours ago, almostmatt1 said:

...I wonder if feelings of being burnt out on one would leave you feeling burnt out on the other, or really the extent to which it does or doesn't. I wont bug anyone with a ping but if someone good at both like 4shock or Rocky felt like sharing their thoughts on this I'd be interested to hear them.

 

I'm OK at both (not anywhere near 4shock or Rocky's level), and I would say yes in my case, but it would be different for someone who does super high quality TASes. I didn't want to redo my E3M6 stroller TAS for a while, because I thought if I spent hundreds or thousands of attempts on a TAS, those attempts may have been better spent on a successful non-TAS.  If I do a TAS and a non-TAS, the thought of doubling my work can be tiring.

 

When I have to grind hundreds/thousands of attempts on some section, I increase my TAS speed so that it's very close to game speed or at it. It feels the same as grinding a non-TAS, and grinding one would burn me out on the other. If I wanted super high quality TAS precision, doing those same attempts at slow speed would be agonizing, and a TAS might burn me out in a way that a non-TAS wouldn't.

[ClumsyDoomer]

To reduce burnout, stop for a moment. That moment could last a few hours or forever, depending on how you actually gravitate towards the activity. Contemplate the point of that activity, think if it has ever been truly satisfying, and for what exactly.

There's nothing in TASing i find particularly repulsive, but it just got me nowhere over the 10 years. The limit of thought, time and effort i was ever willing to put in it wasn't enough to produce anything i find significant, and time is kind of valuable. This is totally not a thing to force yourself into

There's a bunch of things any human needs: sense of accomplishment and social significance, self-develompment and cognition, taking risks and overcoming things, etc. If talking about just demos, see if they can give you any of that and at what cost. Feeling good from any activity requires a good amount of thinking, self-awareness, -control, -reflection, which is not always done subconsciously. You never do things for nothing, and they can be worthy or unworthy of being done

[4shockblast]

TBH, TAS burnout is worse for me I think, given that I haven't made a meaningful TAS in years. I think the ever increasing standards effect I mentioned in my post feels even harder to manage for TAS, because it feels especially difficult to pin down something I would be satisfied with in a TAS. A non-TAS run can even be slow, if it's a reasonable challenge to get at all, and even the harder-to-optimize runs tend to have a reasonable end goal. It feels more acceptable to have small mistakes in a run if it's long enough, or if it's short enough, the grind doesn't feel as long. I also feel like improvement is far more tangible, since you can easily redo older runs and get a second faster with less effort, simply because of the experience and muscle memory.

 

On the other hand, TAS has no muscle memory, and it feels like at any level, getting truly optimized stuff is practically trial and error, literally so in cases where heavy bruteforce is required. And it feels like the more you learn about it, the more you care about tiny wallruns, thingruns, etc., that can make each half second of a TAS an excruciating thing to build (don't get me started on diagonal wallruns). Either that, or I never really felt like I got good enough at finding those tiny wallruns to really get the best possible times; not sure what others did to learn how to do the really speedy micro-optimizations or what process they follow to get them to happen. To me, it always feels like what I come up with is probably something a better TASer could improve, it's really difficult to even figure out what is truly fast (can be the case in non-TAS, but I feel like that problem gets smoothed out with a lot of experience, in most cases).

 

RNG is another factor here; non-TAS RNG is sort of accepted to not necessarily be perfect, most of the time. And if you have the record, or the next second, or something, you can generally sit easy and just post it; someone else might improve it another day if it's imperfect, but that's a concern for another day. Whereas with TASes, having sub-optimal RNG just feels wrong, it seems like it should be as good as possible all the time. :D And that too can be a headache to contend with, especially since as with other micro-optimizations, it can be tricky to even know what is the fastest possible RNG you can get when navigating monsters and whatnot. For example, perdgate in large part stalled because I spent a long time trying to replicate a run by a few imps in a narrow hallway on a run that I had to improve some earlier shots in to no avail, and I just couldn't keep going, heh. The fact you can fix earlier parts of runs is another piece that makes it challenging to work with for me; I guess in some ways it's nice that TAS can let you fix the parts of a run that didn't turn out so good, but if you find something like that, the effort required to redo everything (and potentially break good RNG you worked for afterwards) is kind of excruciating tbh.

 

I think all in all, that's why I've recently done only some small TASes, and challenge runs. Stuff like Sunlust map 32 Tyson, even in TAS, doesn't feel like it really needs to be optimal, since it's just a proof of concept. But for any longer runs where optimization matters, it's really hard for me to muster motivation to make any progress. :p

[Dimon12321]

That's why I don't go for every last tic in my TASes.
"There's at least one japanese who does it better than you" rumor helps me not go all out. 

 

16 hours ago, 4shockblast said:

And it feels like the more you learn about it, the more you care about tiny wallruns, thingruns, etc., that can make each half second of a TAS an excruciating thing to build (don't get me started on diagonal wallruns

100% true.

Edited December 3, 2022 by Dimon12321