Alt-Itis: Difference between revisions

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*** And with many that do have re-morts.

** A great many [[MUCK|MUCKs]] and [[MUSH|MUSHes]] as well.

** ''ThunderDome'' MUDs were designed for multi-play with the use of client-scripted bots. There's no policy against making as many alts as you like, but logging on more than 3 at a time is one of the ways to attract 'attitude mobs' -- NPC's that hunt and loot players. Some of those can be rewarding if you're ready for them, but some of them also cause permanent damage, eat corpses, and require a party of 20 even before equipping some hapless player's best gear.

* A strain of alt-itis develops in single-player games as well; [[RPG|RPGs]] like ''[[The Elder Scrolls|Morrowind]]'' or ''[[Neverwinter Nights]]'', for instance. Or ''[[Avernum]]'' or ''[[Fallout]]'' or ''[[The Elder Scrolls|Oblivion]]'' or...

** On the official Morrowind/Oblivion forums, this trope strain is usually called Restartitus.

** Games with plugins or mod packages are particularly prone to this. Install a few nifty new mods, roll a new character so you can experience all the mod content. Then, repeat forever and never finish the main plot.

* ''[[Rohan Online]]'', ''[[Shaiya]]'', and most other Korean-made [[MMORPG|MMORPGs]].

** This became a pandemic within ''[[Ragnarok Online]]'', which allows 9 characters per server (3 servers for the International variant) by default. This was not enough characters, so you got to seeing players with two, three or more accounts - many of which would be running at the same time, ''on one computer.'' Efforts to fix the 'multi-boxing on one comp' problem were quickly shelved when the playerbase nearly rioted.

** Similarly, multi-logging has becomer permissable (instead of against the rules, but ignored) in ''[[Fly FF]]''. This has led to a situation where one of the most common pieces of advice given to newbies is to make a second account with an FS assist on it, so the assist's buffs can help them level.

* ''[[Retro Mud]]'' has a reincarnation system, which allows people to start over with a whole new race and class (there are 1400+ combinations, though not all of them are really viable, and that's not even taking into account secondary groups), as well as several people having alts as well.

* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' caused [[Penny Arcade]] to coin the term ''altoholism''. With ten classes, ten playable races (twelve in ''Cataclysm'') split across two factions, three customization paths per class, and <s>ten</s> [[Up to Eleven|eleven]] primary professions (of which any character can have two), many players have hit the limit of 10 characters per realm (or worse, 50 per account). Some players never get a character to max level, preferring to constantly reroll instead. And then there are the players who own two, three, five, or sometimes even more accounts... and play them at the same time.

** The inventory system encourages this as well, as it's cheaper to make alts to store excess gear than to invest in the largest bags in the game. Before the latest expansion, nearly every serious player had at least one if not more "bank alts"; the addition of guild banks in ''Wrath of the Lich King'' merely encouraged players to replace multiple bank alts with a single alt who is in a guild by him/herself.

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** It really doesn't help that player's only get 2 characters per server that translates too a lot of deleting restarting. and then there's permadeath which is glorified alt suicide...

** If you don't want to pay for the game. People paying and playing since March '06 have 10 free characters minimum. People newer then Monks and Favored Souls will only have 8. And you can easily get more by spending the free points you get.

* ''[[~~Ever Quest~~|EverQuest 2]]'' actually changed the game for the sake of people with alt-itis. Initially, choosing your character class was spread over 18 levels. You started as your race (lvl 1 human), then chose your base class (fighter, priest, rogue, wizard) a few levels after that, then a specialization after that (a priest could become a cleric, shaman, or druid), and at level 18, you picked between good and evil, and the good/evil versions of a class had somewhat (and sometimes extremely) different abilities. Anyway, this whole system was thrown out, allowing characters to start as their final class from level 1. The reaction was generally negative, as many players actually liked doing the class choosing quests.

* ''[[EverQuest|EverQuest 2]]'' actually changed the game for the sake of people with alt-itis. Initially, choosing your character class was spread over 18 levels. You started as your race (lvl 1 human), then chose your base class (fighter, priest, rogue, wizard) a few levels after that, then a specialization after that (a priest could become a cleric, shaman, or druid), and at level 18, you picked between good and evil, and the good/evil versions of a class had somewhat (and sometimes extremely) different abilities. Anyway, this whole system was thrown out, allowing characters to start as their final class from level 1. The reaction was generally negative, as many players actually liked doing the class choosing quests.

* Alts are an essential component to ''[[Eve Online]]'''s vast and foreboding metagame. Trade alts, hauler alts, cap alts, logistics alts, forum alts, scam alts, the list goes on.

** What's really funny is that the game disposes of most of the traditional alt needs - there's no class system or skill cap, so one character can do everything(eventually), and there's no storage cap, so no mules necessary. And yet, most serious players have at least two paid accounts, with numbers as high as half a dozen not being unheard of. Eve players really are altaholics.

*** Part of the reason for multiple accounts is that, although an EVE account can have three characters, only one can be in-game or training at any one time.

** A character who gets into a supercapital in EVE can't ever dock that ship and can't use the game's stargates, pretty much necessitating at least one cynoalt for moving the supercap around.

* This happens a lot with ''[[Runescape]]''. This is odd, since ''RuneScape'' doesn't have a class system (I.E. you don't ''have'' to be a mage/archer/what-have-you, so if someone says they are then they are a [[Munchkin|"pure"]]).

** This happened a lot more in the earliest days of the game, when you could only carry thirty items at a time and banks didn't store items. "Mules" for item storage purposes were generally accepted even with rules prohibiting item transfer between two characters owned by the same person.

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** Since the vast bulk of ''[[Dragon Age|Dragon Age: Origins]]'' is the same in every runthrough of the game (barring party interactions between your active party) it's common for people to replay the origin stories repeatedly.

** Many players of ''[[Mass Effect]]'' suffer from this, with 6 different classes, multiple [[Romance Sidequest|love interests]] (3 in the first game, 8 {{spoiler|/9, including hidden character Morinth}} in the sequel), multiple endings ({{spoiler|Well, technically multiple ways your party members can die}}), multiple ways actions in one game can affect events in the next game and a [[Karma Meter]].

* Many Forum-Based, or Livejournal-style based RPG games can lead to Alt-tis if the game allows for multiple characters. The average is said to be five, some have managed to get up to fifteen semi-active characters in games without a character-per-player cap.

* A form of alt-itis can even occur in non-MMO games... witness players of [[Wrestling Game|Wrestling Games]], who often build up huge rosters of Create-A-Wrestlers.

* Altaholism is rampant in ''[[Guild Wars]]'', where due to the large number of free character slots (8, if all the campaigns are purchased) and low level cap (20, easily attainable within or shortly after the starter area) many players have multiple characters. Having a character of each class is the norm, and many players reserve a slot to create "disposable" [[PvP]]-only characters of whatever class they're needed as by their team. Players with multiple accounts are fairly frequent, and spare accounts being used solely as "mules" are not unheard of.

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* Many arcade [[Driving Game|Driving Games]] with a card system have this, as many of those games restrict the player to (usually) one car per card.

* ''[[Second Life]]'' only allows 3 characters per user, but clever people will avoid the extra fees and end up with hundreds of alts!

** This has varied over the life of SL and is no longer true. At one point people were allowed one free account, and a token charge for further accounts. The official ruling is currently no more than 5 accounts per household. Alts are extremely common and used for privacy, maintaining groups (groups of one are dissolved) or providing a distinction between a different personae (business and roleplaying, for example). They are known to be abused as an anonymous means to grief other residents. There was also a point in SL's history when the in-world currency earned by an annual membership was worth more than the real-world subscription fees.

* Heavy heavy aversion: the closest ''[[Cyber Nations]]'' comes to this is letting you just delete your nation and make another. The admins of the game at one point in the long past allowed alts; now even sharing a server with another player can trigger anti-alt sanctions.

* ''[[Pokémon]]'': Once you pick one of the three starters, you're stuck with it; you have to start over if you want to try a different one. If you have an extra copy of a game and want all ''three'' starters, you'll have to play through the whole intro section with each of the other two, since it's not possible to trade right away.

** Given the other one-off choices in ''Red and Blue'' (Hitmonlee or Hitmonchan, Omanyte or Kabuto, what to evolve Eevee into), you pretty much had to play through about half the alt-game at least once to get every Pokémon. Later games in the series were just as bad, if not worse.

** Ever since [[Pokémon Diamond and Pearl]], this was fixed with the GTS, meaning that one only has to have a single cartridge to get all the Pokémon, not to mention the fact that you can trade for all the ones you can't get there over Wi-Fi.

*** That, of course, considering you are the sort of player who has no other friends who play Pokémon. Trading has always been a staple of the series, and thank goodness the DS has native Wi-Fi connection instead of Link Cables. With easy Internet access, it's fairly easy to get every Pokémon (at least the non-legendary ones) just by making a request thread in [[~~Game FAQs~~]].

*** That, of course, considering you are the sort of player who has no other friends who play Pokémon. Trading has always been a staple of the series, and thank goodness the DS has native Wi-Fi connection instead of Link Cables. With easy Internet access, it's fairly easy to get every Pokémon (at least the non-legendary ones) just by making a request thread in [[GameFAQs]].

** The really Anti-Alt nature of the Pokémon games comes from the fact that no Pokémon game (even spin-offs) ever had such a thing as multiple slots. If you ever wanted to try playing with another starter or try a [[Self-Imposed Challenge]], you either had to conform to erasing all your data or get a new cartridge. Or, of course, resort to emulation.

*** A flash cart is an excellent remedy for this, as you can easily back up the "battery"<ref>A save file. Note that "'battery' file" hasn't been the correct term since the Game Boy Advance days, when many cartridges started saving to flash memory; prior to that, many cartridge-based games would save data to built-in RAM, which was kept alive by a battery in the cartridge</ref> file to, say, a computer. Many flash carts have firmwares that allow the user to create multiple battery files per game, and pick one to use before starting play.