Cre­at­ing an Alt in not a easy deci­sion for me to make. It’s a great respon­si­bil­ity to bring a new char­ac­ter into Middle-Earth, and I want to make sure that I’m going to be able to pro­vide for it. The biggest thing for me is: Will I have the time? Usu­ally the answer is no, and I promptly ignore this and cre­ate the Alt anyway.

So what dri­ves me to cre­ate an alt? There are a few dif­fer­ent reasons:

• I want to play the game with­out out-leveling the group that I’m play­ing with at the time.
• I want to be able to play a dif­fer­ent “role” in a group that I’m play­ing with.
• I want to try out a new game mechanic that is only avail­able with that class.
• I’m bored/frustrated with what I’m doing with my main at that moment.

I have been play­ing MMOs for so long now that I’ve got­ten fairly good at notic­ing the way in which the game “works.” Each game tends to have a pat­tern that it fol­lows for effi­cient lev­el­ing, and if you fig­ure out that pat­tern, and fol­low it, you can level fairly quickly and with min­i­mal effort. There are some excep­tions out there of course, Star Trek Online and Star Wars Galax­ies being notice­able ones, that fol­low a dif­fer­ent pro­gres­sion path than “lev­el­ing”, but most MMOs have that in common.

What this means to me is that I tend to out-level sta­tic groups that I play with. I’ll get on for an hour while my wife watches TV, or just pop on for a quick skir­mish and oooops, another level. This is quite frus­trat­ing for the other mem­bers of the group, and it affects the group expe­ri­ence that we’re hav­ing. I’ll be over­pow­ered com­pared to some other mem­bers of the group which makes it not fun, as they start to feel that they are not contributing.

So I’ll often cre­ate an Alt because I still want to play the game, but I don’t want to end up 4 – 5 lev­els ahead of the group.

I also find that I like to play ALL of the “roles” in a group. I’m happy tank­ing, heal­ing, dps’ing or buffing/de-buffing. Both of my “main” char­ac­ters at the moment are tanks, so one of my “main Alts” (now isn’t that an oxy­moron!) is a hunter, so now I can expe­ri­ence a DPS char­ac­ter. It changes the way that I approach each encounter with ene­mies and stops me from going on autopi­lot as I play, which I might be known for doing with my mains every once in a while.

One of the rea­sons that I love Lord of the Rings Online so much is that is has a great diver­sity of game mechan­ics in the dif­fer­ent classes. Yes, there are classes that play very sim­i­lar, but most classes have some sort of game mechanic built around them. We all know about the War­den and the gam­bit sys­tem, but there is also the Guardian’s set of skills that only become avail­able after you have par­ried or blocked an attack. There are the dif­fer­ent tiers of bal­lads that Min­strels have. There are the tricks for Bur­glars. And the list goes on. I enjoy try­ing out these dif­fer­ent mechan­ics, and that’s what often dri­ves me to cre­ate another Alt.

I might also have a lit­tle bit of an atten­tion prob­lem. I find myself get­ting tired if I’m “grind­ing” through some con­tent. Some­times, how­ever, it’s just sim­ply that I’m tired of that class. So instead of log­ging on to my main, I’ll cre­ate an Alt.

Just one of these rea­sons is rarely enough to cause the cre­ation of a new alt. I find that a com­bi­na­tion of these sit­u­a­tions leads to my alt-aholism. There are just too many cool new things to try, and you never know when a group might need an *insert class/role here.”

Hi, my name is Chris, and I’m an alt-aholic. And that’s OK.