Birth of an Alt-er

So, how does someone catch altitis?

Do you start the first day and say, "I think I'll make sure I hit max level as slowly as possible while I juggle a billion characters at once?"

Usually, no. I suppose if you've been playing MMOs for a while and are looking for an extra challenge you might say just that, but even then you've most likely developed the proclivity somewhere else.

I mean, I could blame it on advice I found in the WoW Wiki newbie guide. Try out one of everything to see what you like best. But, for me, that's only a small fraction of what made me the alt-hopping monstrosity I am today.

I remember the night I started playing WoW. There were so many choices, and they were all outside of my comfort zone. Well, back in high school, and a little bit beyond, I played AD&D a lot. My parents played basic D&D when I was little. I played other RPGs as well, but I was a mom now and hadn't really had a chance to play in a while, with a little kid to take care of. One of my favorite characters had been a cleric, and I'd always loved elves. I topped that off with a character from a novel I'd written (I'll get into that later) and my first WoW character was born.

Joulaim stood on the screen before me with the long, silvery hair swept back from his handsome features as I'd always pictured. Kinda. Well, not really, but I accepted that there were limitations in the existing framework, and I couldn't make him look like the paragon of male beauty I'd imagined for years, but he was there and in 3D for the first time. Excitedly I pressed the "enter world" button and set out to explore this new world with my imaginary friend of old.

Yea, verily, did I slay little piggies and kittens in an effort to cull the wildlife in the hinterlands of Teldrassil. I vanquished demons that didn't attack first and had a funny kind of flippy jump that made me giggle like the girl I am. I killed icky giant spiders that made my skin crawl and would come at me sometimes two at a time. I set aside the RP crap, since this was a normal server and I realized I was a stranger in a strange land. I picked flowers and mushrooms and wondered what kind of weird clerics they had in this game.

In other words, I learned the basic mechanics of the game, and set aside my delusions of what I thought the game should be. I forgot about getting into character and sat down to learn how to not drown in the shallow pools of the starting zone.

One of the earliest lessons I learned was that I couldn't stand how my character looked. I had this mental image of my Joulaim, and fugly wasn't part of it. Stupid Michael Jackson dance moves had no part in it. In fact, the Joulaim I had written was a mage, not a priest, and the only elves in the game at the time were too snobby for mages.

My dissatisfaction grew, so I picked avatars for other characters I'd written. One by one they didn't measure up, and the deletings began. My night elf priest didn't last past level 20 before I sighed and basically threw him away. (He was wearing a stupid bright orange pirate shirt he'd found on the corpse of some guy that was stupid enough to build a ship underground. It didn't look right. In fact, he looked like a 70s reject, with his shirt hanging open at the chest and old-man ponytail. The stunning silver hand long since faded in my mind's eye to a dull grey with all the wrinkles on his 'roid-rage face. He had to go.)

We knew some people on another server who played Horde, and I finally sighed and decided to see how the other half lived. I'd only chosen Alliance because that's what the boyfriend had been playing for a year and a half. I wanted to play with him, but at the same time I had other friends I wanted to play with. So, while he was at work I created my first shaman. He was a big, burly tauren who wasn't named after anything I'd played before. He was all new, and peace-loving, and totems were the shit. Shaman was where it was at!

But, I couldn't play with Wolf Cub (my boyfriend), while I was on my shiny new toy. The solution was coupled with the best timing in history. A week and a half after my tauren was created, the expansion came out and I was ready to take the plunge and be an Alliance shaman.

I'd found my calling, or so I thought at the time. I played with the Wolf Cub and other RL friends in the evenings, but I'm a mom, and I'm a writer. I had a lot of free time during the day, and I wanted to catch up to their mains who were already sitting at 60. I'd play my shaman while they worked, or I'd play around and create something new in my bordom. I'd wake up with new ideas for new characters and new names. Some of them lasted, and some of them went the way of Joulaim in his bright orange clown shirt and orange fingered gloves.

I thought, at the time, that my shaman would be my main, and I could quit alting at any time.

I was so young and naive.