Altoholicism: An Addiction

Been busy, blah blah, blog’s been slow, blah blah, filler post is filler, blah blah blah, so on and so on. Alright on to something a bit more

Addiction to Alts
In case you don’t know, haven’t noticed, or haven’t followed the blog for long, I’m an alt leveling junkie. It’s sort of become my personal motto that “I play to level, not to raid”. I have 80s, I play them, I raid with them, I enjoy them, but they aren’t the reason why I play. Instead I play to roll up a level 1, get them up to whatever level I feel like getting them up to and then either abandon or delete them.

Everyone has their own scale for judging whether or not they are an altoholic. Some say that if they have more than two or three toons that they’re “focusing” on then they’re an altoholic, others say you achieve that label once you’ve gotten the message that you already have 50 toons and cannot roll another, and other still will say it’s once you’ve got four or more toons leveled up to 80.

For me it’s more a matter of what you do with your alts and how much time you spend on them compared to your main, or how often you’re playing on a variety of toons as opposed to a single one. Using “alt” is sort of misleading for someone like me because everyone is an alt to me, even my main. When people ask me to get on my main I know they’re asking me to relog over to my 80 Mage, but to me my main is whatever character I’m logged into and playing at the moment.

People who claim to not be altoholics often say things like “I just can’t ignore my main that long, I have to focus on him”. I understand where they’re coming from, I just look at it through a different window. When I log into a toon it becomes the main and my focus is there, right up until I get a desire to do something on a different toon, at which point they become the main.

Finding Accomplishment
People often wonder when they hear me talking about things like this how I ever feel any sense of accomplishment or how I can stand jumping around all the time. The main thing you need to understand if you really want to comprehend my meaning in that is that when I get a character to the level cap the character is done, they’ve beaten then game. I don’t need to kill raid bosses or get great gear, I don’t need anything to feel accomplished except for that experience bar to stop moving.

I jump around on different toons so much because I love leveling, but I hate seeing the end draw near. I get to Northrend and I do a few quests, max my professions, do a little farming, and then set the character aside for an undetermined amount of time. Having a toon reach Northrend is like being on vacation for a couple of weeks and then two days before you have to come home realizing that it’s all about to end. Leveling is my vacation, and Northrend is the last couple of days before it’s time to pack up and head back home.

I find accomplishment in things other than bosses and gear. I find it in leveling itself, I find it in capping my professions, I find it in forcing myself into a situation with a character that I stand almost no chance of winning and then fighting my way through it, I find it in changing specs and trying new things, I find it soloing content that I shouldn’t be able to solo with my given level or gear level, and I find it in helping other people remember that this game has so many avenues for enjoyment and that not all of them consist entirely of repeated runs through end game raids.

Character Slot Issues
The first problem any altoholic runs into is going to be character slots. It’s usually too many toons on your current server to start with, but eventually it gets to the point that you’ve already got the maximum 50 toons per account.

I couldn’t even venture a guess as to how many times I’ve filled up my server slots. I know on my current main server of Durotan right now that I’ve hit it at least twelve different times and I’ve done the same thing on at least four other “main” servers in the past as well.

The most unfathomable thing (to non-altoholics) that someone like me does is deleting toons. I can delete any character at any time. I don’t care what level they are, how much time I’ve played them, what their professions are, what achievements they have, or anything else. Level 80? /delete. Has 450 in two crafting professions? /delete. Only level 30 but has every PvP achievement from both WSG and AB? /delete.

If I want to roll a new toon on a server that’s already full then I don’t bother finding a new server, I just go through spring cleaning instead. I go down the list of toons and ask myself: Have I played this toon at all recently? Do I have any intention of playing them in the near future? Did I hate leveling him so much that I refuse to go through those levels again? If all the answers are “no” then I log in, sell/mail everything on the toon, log out, and then delete them. Nothing fancy, no special goodbyes, no messages to anyone, just a plain and simple clean out and delete.

When I do manage to reach the account limit I do a mass cleaning and go to every server I haven’t been on in a while, do spring cleaning on every character sending all the gold to a single toon, and then I’ll either give the gold away to the first person I see below level 20 or I’ll just leave the one toon there with everything I’ve got in case I start over fresh on the server at a later date.

Altoholism In Action
To give you a better idea of what my version of an altoholic is and show you some of what I’ve talked about here in action, we’ll look at the last week in Psynister’s WoW.

During the week I rolled two new toons, a Draenei Priest and a Dwarf Warrior. That’s right, the two classes I despise leveling above all others and I rolled them both in the same week. The Priest I got up to around 13 or so and the Warrior sits right now at level 15. Surprisingly, both of these toons are still “alive”. Unsurprisingly, the Priest is getting deleted tonight. Surprisingly, the Warrior will be sticking around for a while. In addition to leveling those two fresh I also leveled up my Shaman to 33, my Hunter to 25, my Druid to 45, and my Warlock to 71.

Over the weekend I rolled a Tauren Warrior, an Undead Mage, and an Undead Rogue. After playing each of them for a short while I decided they weren’t catching my attention much so they got sent to the chopping block shortly (prior to level 10) after being rolled. I also rolled a female BElf Fire Mage named Lyrysyn that made it to level 22 and is still kicking strong by burninating the country side, and a male BElf Paladin named Limpwrists (have you ever watched a male BElf jump?? o.O) that made it to level 10 but he may be replaced with an Orc Warrior within the next couple of days. I’m going to try to keep the Paladin at least until he gets his DPS Seal and then make a call from there. If I keep the Paladin then I might delete my Dwarf Warrior and replace him with an Orc Warrior so that we have another tank on Horde side just in case. I rolled another toon as well, but…well, he’s a secret.

All but one of those new toons was on my current main server which was already full. All in all I had 6 toons created during the weekend and about 20 toons deleted from spring cleaning across all servers.