Alt-Itis: Difference between revisions

 

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** Not helped by the fact that players who have remained subscribers for a long period of time are occasionally awarded more character slots. A player is also able to buy more slots now as well.

** This is largely due to many if not most of the character customization options being available right when you first create one.

** Having less than ten characters is considered weird.

** It's also somewhat common for people to meticulously recreate an existing character, but not play as them for fear of having them deleted or changed by the mods.

*** And now, a "demo" version exists which consists entirely of character creation (with only two character slots) and the tutorial level.

** [[DC Universe Online]] users tend to suffer from Alt-Itis as well, for largely the same reasons

** 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.

** 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.

* ''[[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.

** The above term has been latched onto by a mod developer; there is now an add-on entitled [http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/altoholic.aspx Altoholic], designed to make keeping track of your numerous characters easier.

** 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.

*** 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 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.

* Laughed at in ''[http://www.crispygamer.com/comics/ding/ding-2008-01-20.aspx Ding!]'' webcomic.

* Multis are fairly common in ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]''. The fact that the game is free and there is no limit to the number of characters you can play means that many players have at least 3 multis. This is a little odd, given the prominent [[Anti Poop Socking]] of having a limited number of "adventures" per day.

** Alt abuse is a problem the KoL devs have been trying to combat. Early in the game's life, it was easy to create an alt and run it through the early quests in order to shuttle the valuable quest rewards to a primary account, then abandon the alt and repeat. In recent days, there are specific rules against players trying to abuse the clan raid dungeons with their own alts.

** 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]].

** 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.

** 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.

*** 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]].

** 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.

* ''[[Neopets]]'' has some many different pet/color combinations, that it is no wonder people might want more than one account, as one account is limited to maximum of four pets. However, the number of accounts per one e-mail address (read: person) is limited to five, and only one of these can be your main account, the others being side accounts. What you can do on the side accounts is restricted, the main thing being that you're not allowed to earn any neopoints, currency of the site.

* Registering on Kongregate takes about a minute, there is no activation link to click and no limit of accounts per email address. As such, alts are created freely there, often for just a single purpose. Ban avoidance using alts is rampant as well, though...

* ''[[Warhammer Online]]'' had grand ideals, but their grasp seemed to exceed their reach at the start. Now, however, it's free to play! Well, "endless free trial." Which means that you can level a character up to 10, one level shy of the talent trees. And you can't leave the starting zone-pairing, except to go into Scenarios. And there's only two servers (down from four) to choose from. End result to keep from getting bored? A ''lot'' of characters.

* Averted in ''[[Grand Chase]]'', where 3 base characters/classes (they're essentially the same in the game) are available at the start, and additional ones are unlockable by special quests. Not to mention that profession promotions can be reverted simply by equipping the appropriate weapon. There's even a cash-shop item to change your in-game name, if you don't like it. Virtually no need to have alts at all!

* ''[[Mabinogi Fantasy Life|Mabinogi]]'''s cash shop appears to have been designed around Alt-itis. Each account has a limit of up to 80 characters, almost limitless customization, new character cards being released frequently, the ability to move items across each character's individual banks, and has the Advanced Play feature given with the VIP service which allows every character on each account to obtain a randomized free daily item. It's not unheard of for some players to have bought enough characters to fill their account's character limit with only a handful of the character slots being used for pets.

** Not to mention themed characters, [[PvP]] characters, [[Pv E]] characters, characters to join each Covenant...

* ''[[Maple Story]]'' has this in a couple ways. First, a single character has a very limited inventory, so creating mules to keep spare items on is very common. Also, do to the sheer number of character classes (28 at last count) many players have more than one character. The game has several character slots per server to support this, and more are available during events or in the Cash Shop.

* [[Saints Row 2]], in particular, allows the ability to replay missions as well as customize looks, voice (with different lines and quotes in gameplay and missions), mod cars and cribs, ect. So you could have one save devoted to a muscle bound Japanese [[Dark Action Girl]] who races souped up sports cars, a mammoth bald possibly transgendered [[Spicy Latina]] who drives a jeep with mounted machine gun, or anything in between.

* [[Smackdown vs. Raw]] is the standard bearer of character customization in fighting games. Want to have [[Buffy the Vampire Slayer|Buffy fight Faith?]] Simply create or download the characters. Want last year's [[John Cena]]? Make him up. Wish Goldberg or [[Lita]] were in the game? Choose from the odd fifty versions of them online.

 

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