10/06/2015

The Alt

I haven't had much time to play WoW this week. Who'd have thought that working full-time, playing three MMOs at the same time and blogging about all three of them would take up so much time?

I've been finding myself logging into WoW mostly in the evenings, when I'm too tired to pay attention to the story in SWTOR or the action combat in Neverwinter. Slowly grinding away at twenty wolves and fifteen spiders while listening to a podcast in the background is relaxing and requires a lot less focus. I had kind of forgotten how good WoW used to be at this (before they took away most reasons to grind and made combat more demanding).

The only downside is that I'm always a little sad when I see a LFM request going out for content that I would desperately like to do but for which I simply don't have enough time just then. (Not to mention that a dungeon or group quest would require a lot more focus.) As I'm slowly climbing up the levels by soloing, the elite quests are piling up in my log and I hate the thought of abandoning them. We'll see if I'll manage to get in a good, long weekend play session some time soon to reduce their numbers.

In the comments on my last post, reader Shandren suggested that if I was having issues with bag space, I should roll up a bank alt, or at least an alt that I could temporarily mail things to in order to free up bag space, even if the other character wasn't meant to help with long-term storage. I took this as an excuse to recreate the night elf priest who was my main throughout Vanilla and early BC. It feels kind of wrong to create an alt before I've even hit level thirty on my current "main". However, I don't think it took me very long to create an alt back in 2006 either... in fact, I have a screenshot from back then that shows a level 1 warrior on the character selection screen next to my level 13 priest, though I think I ended up deleting that one without ever playing her.

I only played my little night elf through Shadowglen and then immediately parked her at the nearest inn, but I could easily see myself coming back to her to play some more. I just have so many fond memories of the early night elf zones, even if they feel a bit empty now without the friends that levelled with me back then when I was a new player.

This post includes a screenshot of my priest from original Vanilla WoW as well as one from Kronos. Can you guess which is which?

6 comments:

  1. Off-topic, but what layout/template are you using in Blogger?

    Mine is generally similar, though I haven't changed it in years. But I'd like to get the one level of nested responses to comments that you have.

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    1. All my blogs use a slightly modified version of the "Simple" template. It didn't used to have nested comments when I started, they just started popping up one day...

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  2. Hmm, I think that Blogger ate my first comment...

    I feel your pain, Shin. There's a lot of group content I'd like to do, but simply don't have the time.

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  3. Since nobody else cared to answer your question, I’ll give it a try: the first screenshot is from Kronos and the second one from retail WoW.

    I created all my characters the moment Nostalrius went live, simply to reserve the names. Currently, I have a female Night Elf Warrior (my main), a female Human Priest, a male Dwarf Paladin and a male Gnome Mage. All alts are now sitting in their low level inns, Goldshire and Kharanos respectively. I might also create four corresponding Horde characters on another account (damn you PvP server!): a male Undead Warlock, a male Troll Shaman, a female Orc Hunter and a female Tauren Druid. Maybe even some kind of Rogue as an extra.

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    1. You guessed correctly! I think the crucial hint is that in the second one, inexperienced me didn't pose her character as nicely, what with the clear view of a random quest giver's grey question mark. The full shot also showed the UI because obviously at the time I didn't know how to hide that.

      Does Nostalrius actually enforce the old-school PvP server rule that you can't play both factions? Because I don't think Kronos does... I haven't actually tried to create a Horde character yet, but the option is not greyed out or anything and I frequently hear people talk about having alts on the other faction.

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    2. Nostalrius is indeed very old-school ("blizzlike") aiming to offer a unique gaming experience and as such it’s not possible to have Alliance and Horde characters on the same account. People talk about cross-faction alts in chat here as well, but all those characters are definitely on a different account.

      I thought as much about the quest giver in the background ;)

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