I was speaking more about sandbox games in that regardless, like Rimworld and Factorio. The idea is that you focus too much on automation and efficiency rather than fun, and want to design your base in a "perfect" manner. Of course once you implement your design in production, you will see issues and want to optimize it more. And so on and on.

However as another commenter said, any game can become work if you want to achieve perfection. For example if you play an FPS game you can always shoot faster and more accurately - if you practice more and more. This can lead to a point where you don't find the game fun anymore.

I wound up having to quit playing Satisfactory at the final tier because no matter how I sliced it it was going to take a ton of time to accomplish.

It was either make an imperfect solution and let it run for a hundred hours, or spend a hundred hours optimizing a perfect solution and then letting that run for ten more hours, or something like that.

At that point, I just tapped out. Building my factory just stopped being fun at that point.

I had the same progression with sudoku. It's supposed to be fun. I stopped after writing a trivial solver.

I'm pretty sure it's just a feature of humans. Designing an RPG (and especially a competitive MMO) to be fun is really hard when min-maxers are involved. Once everything gets theorycrafted, everything is either optimal or trash, and anything optimal is an obligation. There's no such thing as a lucky drop, just a soul-sucking mandatory grind. Any choice (skill selection etc.) either affects the performance metric being optimized (and therefore the better-performing choice is mandatory) or it doesn't (and therefore it's pointless and why did the devs even bother).

you optimise what you have left when you have nothing else to do.

there is no exploring left in runescape, for the most part - virtually every corner and easter egg is effectively documented or reverse engineered in some way.

Yes, this. It reflects my experience of playing pokemon with friends, too.

It disappoints me. The usual result of any new game I am looking forward to is effectively first a massive private equity/VC funded pile of advertising and spam that exists to pay people to reverse engineer new games just to datamine it onto a wiki covered in advertising that is filled in by children desperately chasing the next bronze or silver contributor badge for having over 1k edits or some bs like that.

I'm now imagining an MMO game where these kids ends up on a mystic adventure to collect, deconstruct, and optimize otherworldly entities in order to collect badges and gain power. They're in a race against time to defeat a burnt out, disappointed emperor who wants to end the world. But plot twist, the final boss is a tyrannical monster symbolic of the self-destructive extrinsic desire for approval and recognition. Spoiler, the world does have to end, because there's a better one outside. The servers of the actual MMO itself are rigged to break on completion setting absolutely everyone free and leaving the lucky winner feeling like they earned a whole pile of clout but they won't be able to prove it because a deluge, thousands, of pre-planned counterfeit footage and testimonies of the game's end are disseminated IRL by the devs which will drown theirs out, and if they didn't keep records or lose them, ideally gaslight them into one day considering that maybe they didn't actually beat the game, maybe there was another ending, or something beyond it because there are some variants and truncations or extensions to the endings depicted. The devs make money by secretly recording proof of the real winner's true identity, and creates a collage of their adventure on a canvas, selling the result to a billionaire who thinks this whole thing is neat and was in the market for a unique way to launder money anyways.

And the billionaire they sold it to is the one who funded it to begin with. Money laundering complete.

I found myself doing this regardless of the game, but really wanting to enjoy the game without doing it.

Been playing MMOs since 2003 and in top raiding guilds/corps/etc since 2005, where this was highly rewarding.

Going without a computer (motherboard died) and having to quit MMOs for a while for economical reasons made me enjoy some single player games and heloed me fix this somewhat.

Any game where you try to improve past a certain plateau becomes more like work imo, it requires deliberate practice.