Happy (Character) Sorting Day!

I take a probably somewhat unusual pleasure in sorting things. I think it's something I inherited from my father, who was a "spreadsheet guy" before electronic spreadsheets were a thing. He was a collector of many things and he liked to keep them meticulously sorted. For example he used to record songs from the radio on cassette tapes, and movies/shows on TV on VHS tapes, and for both he kept detailed directories of what was stored where. Child me chose to imitate him by neatly cataloguing my own possessions, from my own cassette tapes to stuffed animals to books.

What does that little story have to do with WoW? Well, today's patch introduced a new option to sort your characters, and that delighted me so much that I haven't really gotten around to doing much else yet.

My "old mains" campsite, featuring (from left to right): the night elf priest that was my first ever character to level cap, the Horde troll priest who coined my online nickname of now two decades, the human paladin that was my first character ever, and the human monk that was my main throughout Shadowlands.

As a reminder, the introduction of Warbands in the War Within prepatch merged the character selection screens for individual servers into one big character selection screen. While most changes that have come with Warbands have been great, I thought this particular one was a bit of a mixed bag. At first, seeing all those old alts again was kind of cool and nostalgic, but in everyday play it got a bit annoying to have to deal with such a long list of characters. Sure, you could sort them, but there was still a lot of scrolling to do if you had a lot of alts like I do.

Well, since today's patch you can sort your characters into "warband camps" of up to four characters, which makes things a lot more convenient. I spent about fifteen minutes just creating groups and moving characters around before even logging in properly. My only disappointment was that you can't move the groups themselves around once created, so if you ever decide that one should move up or down, you have to delete/rename the existing groups and then manually shuffle the characters inside them as well.

I even took to reddit specifically to check out how other people were organising their campsites, and it's honestly been quite interesting. As you can see in the screenshot below, my own camps are primarily sorted by level progression and emotional connection. The ones named after servers are basically "those old Alliance characters from back when I played on Darkspear" and similar groups.

But other people took very different approaches. Some were sorting by play style (melee vs. ranged), some by class, faction or role (bank alts, crafters). Some came up with serious RP names, some with whimsical groupings like "might delete later". I just thought it was an interesting look into how other people view their stable of alts. 

Are you also an altoholic for whom this feature has been a godsend? If so, how have you sorted your alts into campsites?