Alts and the players who love them

I spent many of my formative years chasing letters of the alphabet around the screen with a disembodied at symbol. Yup, I was a teenage Angband freak! I still maintain it was one of the best games ever written; heck, without Angband and the other rogue-likes, MMOs as we know them might never have existed. And it was through Angband that I first discovered the joy of alting. Couldn’t decide between that human fighter that just zoomed up the levels or the high-elf mage who could see invisible and throw fireballs (and start with 18/50 int) but levelled like a slug? No problem, play one of each! Just … not at the same time.

So in a sense, I solved the tank-mage problem very early on in my gaming life. Maybe these annoying devs wouldn’t let me play that uber character who had no weaknesses but I could try alts that had a bit of each aspect, as long as I didn’t mind repeating the game. And that’s a key point with alts, you have to repeat the game right from the beginning. Which is pretty much a definition of replayability. With Angband, each level is generated randomly so I never felt as though I was sleep walking through a dungeon I had already played. Comparing this with WoW where I could pretty much memorise every pull in most of the 5-man instances, you can see how Angband had infinitely more replayability.

Anyhow, replayability is a good thing for online games where the punter is playing by the month. It keeps the alt-loving players busy and without having to generate a whole lot of new content. So it isn’t really surprising that most MMOs give players several ’slots’ for alts. You get 10 slots in WAR which is, conveniently, enough for one of each class in either Order or Destruction. Alt players rejoice!

But why do we alt?

There are lots of reasons why some of us love our alts. Maybe we have friends we like to play with who are online less frequently? No problem, just make an alt and keep it aside for levelling with that friend. Maybe we are terminally indecisive and like lots of different character class types and roles? Now these come down to player choice issues and show how alts are a great way to solve some of these issues.

Maybe we’re just addicted to the levelling and gearing up phase of the game and get bored of an old character once it’s been ‘finished’? Also, a lot of players enjoy trying new content or learning new things in games (this is the Bartle Explorer archetype) and learning how to play a new character class with different mechanics and a different role is a big part of the appeal of MMOs for them. Some people roll lots of alts of the exact same class and/or spec. I never could figure this latter one out but a lot of people love that ‘new character smell’.

Maybe the game designers just failed to make that one perfect class for our tastes, but there are a couple of others that we kind of like? Or maybe we like to play tanks or healers but also want to be able to solo well, and having a separate alt for that is our favoured solution? These are game design issues, and alts are one way to solve them, but maybe not the ideal one. This is pretty much where I sit in the spectrum, although I do tend towards an Explorer type gaming persona also. But it works for me.

So I can have my tank/healer that is beloved in groups and lets me play the support role that I enjoy. And I can have an asskicking dps class that may be ten a penny but will be fun and a nice change of pace when I’m not in a mood for whack-a-mole healing. There is a drawback to this which is that if people know you have a healing alt, they will whine at you to log it on a lot. The answer to this is to learn to say no if you aren’t in the mood, and hang out with people who will respect that. (Pay attention to this: it can save a lot of drama.)

Disadvantages of Alting

Very few games have strongly discouraged alting. The only one I can think of off-hand is Star Wars Galaxies, which at the beginning only allowed one character slot per server. Since I never played it myself, I can’t say what effect that had on the community.

But it is easier for players to relate to each other if each person is represented by one (and only one) persona. We see this a lot on online games where people will often refer to each other by the names of their main characters, regardless of what they are currently playing. People often also put much more emotional investment into their mains, it’s the character which others associate them with. It’s the character and name you associate yourself with! I find that switching alts a lot can be confusing for other people.

This comes down to expectations. When people are involved in a virtual world, they tend to respond to other toons as they might in the real world. If Bob is a real life friend then you know what he looks like and you know his name. In a virtual world, knowing that Bobbette and Bobbo are actually two different alts of the same player (whose name you may or may not know) is guaranteed to throw you straight out of immersion. There’s nothing like that in the real world to relate to. Unless you know any superheroes or other professionals with separate identities.

The other big disadvantage of alting is that MMOs are all about character progression. If you are dividing your time between two or more alts, you won’t be able to progress them as much as a player who was more single-minded. So in a sense, the games penalise your progress for alting. If you want to play in the most optimal way, you need to pick a single character and stick to it.

So what makes a game alt-friendly?

The main thing that makes a game alt-friendly is an easy and fast levelling curve, and an endgame that isn’t too stratified by gear. So even though Bob has been playing his Ironbreaker for 6 months since it hit 40, I can still bring my newly levelled Archmage alt into a group with him and (when she’s finished writing shakespearian sonnets to complain about the smell of beer) we can go do stuff without me holding him back.

But this isn’t the only way for games to be alt friendly. If I could benefit my less played alts while playing the more group friendly ones, I’d be a happy player too. Now this would need more account-wide goals to play for, and less emphasis on precisely which alt a player picks to complete a specific achievement. Being able to post gold and items between alts has been a huge step in this direction. You can earn gold on one alt … and let another one benefit. No longer do you have to find a friendly player and hope that they are trustworthy to do these trades. WoW was the first game that I saw allow this, but most of the following MMOs have copied it as well. Alt happy players adore this feature.

But what if I could earn xp for my alts too while playing my main? Final Fantasy Tactics A2 lets me do that, and it’s great! Probably you would also want to turn this feature off, to avoid levelling past any content you particularly wanted to do. How about unlocking attunements on an account-wide basis, not just a character one? Guild Wars lets you unlock new abilities for all characters on your account, not just the one which did the quest for them. And it’s great. This does affect replayability, sure it does. But looking at my WoW account, which has a couple of weeks left until it runs out, I can see that I earned reputation on three different alts in this expansion. That’s a lot of grinding, and a lot of running the same instances until I was so bored that I quit the game. Somewhere in the replayability, the game just lost its fun for me.

Although we won’t know what the WAR levelling curve is like until release, I think the intention is that it shouldn’t be too onerous, and the game doesn’t sound as though it will be heavily gear dependent either. So I’m good to go with my army of alts. But I would love to see a game that put more effort into account-wide achievements, so that alt players really would lose their slow progression stigma …