I’ve raised some 20 or so characters on various servers, and played pretty much all of the game’s solo content… over, and over. And over. 3 have made it to 70 so far, and the rest are now mostly idling at levels ranging from the teens to the sixties.
My primary motivation in trying to level this crowd of alts has so far been mainly to grow characters into talent specs that I thought would be interesting, and then find out how the character “handles”, with the best gear I can lay hands on.
However, this has lost a lot of its luster.
The fact is I am actually pretty easily amused; it used to be pretty easy to find motivation from things like…
New classes. I’ve played everything short of druids and priests at this point.
Special mounts. Plan on getting a cross-race mount for the alt by running around finishing entire regions’ worth of quests for rep gain, to add a bit of flare to the lvl 40+ experience.
Pokemon. More of my toons are hunters than any other single class, and it can be fun to “shop” for new/interesting beasts over at Petopia, and then level up the hunter alt to find and tame them.
Dustwallow Marsh content. The new quests in DW marsh help make the trip from L33-41 more interesting (although they don’t give much rep so if you’re working on a cross-race mount you may want to skip these).
Trade skills. Research trade skills really closely and plan an alt’s questing/farming/etc around that, to pick up cool new items I’de never bothered with previously (or hadn’t gotten around to learning early enough to benefit from).
Twinking. No description needed for this one – this has produced mixed results for me, helping with some alts (like tanks and shaman) while making others boring as hell.
Rep grinding. I’ve made it to anywhere from honored to exalted with most of the factions currently available, and am currently grinding SSO with my lvl 70s when I get around to it. This however only really becomes practical in the Outlands since the BC expansion, since the old lvl 50-60 factions just don’t increase fast enough to give you anything worthwhile by the time you are high enough for Outlands.
Outlands rewards. The fresh burst of high quality gear available at lvl 58 used to be a big incentive; by the time you finish the quests in
Patch items. The new armor made available in patch 2.4 for level 70s is still kind of a nice incentive… once the character finally makes level 70.
All of the above got me a long ways – you can almost hear the jaws dropping into laps when other players ask me how many characters I play, and see my reply – but lately I’ve been finding there seems to be only one reliable draw for me, and that is world events.
Once upon a time, I used to loathe world events – patches always seemed to take longer when they were being loaded, world server restarts seemed a lot more prevalent, and they just seemed… silly. Back then of course we had 30-45 minute login queues, which made me a lot more irritable and prone to view things like this in a negative light.
Yet almost inevitably when a new world event launches now, I’m over at wowwiki doing my research and seeing what alt I want to send after which reward, what dungeon to make sure and visit for the special boss, etc.
It’s also helped a lot that the more recent world events have included some decent (i.e. combat-relevant) rewards, but honestly I’m so bored with everything else in WoW that even the chance of obtaining a “blue” non-combat pet is usually a big incentive for me.
Which brings me finally to the point of this post – why do world events have to always be tied to holidays? Does it really have to be a semi-monthly thing that is more about world travel than fighting? Fun as that is, how about something a bit more regular and integrated with existing areas/quests/factions?
There is a ton of game content in the pre-Outlands areas, but it’s all been played so many times that the thought of collecting 8 more boar tusks for some crappy piece of +spi gear just makes me bleak.
So, why not design an occasional event that is based in these areas but involves new NPCs involved in special, limited time activities? This should be a no-brainer – all over the world you have scheming factions like the Dark Iron Dwarves, Stranglethorn pirates, etc hoping to put a dent in the established world order – well, just build something out of those conflicts, with a few “hook” NPCs scattered around the capitals or whatever to alert players to the new quests/grinds.
It wouldn’t need to be anything too crazy; even perhaps a dozen events that repeat at random intervals would be a nice boost to flagging interest in leveling yet another alt. It's not even unprecedented - think of the Shattrath cooking daily quest as a mini-example.
I know this would not be “easy” to develop, but it needn’t be as sweeping as the holiday events either – all that’s really needed is enough exp to get you perhaps 2-3 levels of exp and some rewards – greens are fine so long as they have intelligently allocated stats (i.e. like they did with BC items and rewards in the new DW Marsh quests) and not garbage like most of the pre-BC rewards are (“w00t! Another reward with +2 stamina and +9 spirit! Yeah baby!!”) - if I wanted something that lame I could just buy it from weapon/armor vendors...
Of course, long before Blizzard even thinks about anything like this, they will roll out Wrath of the Lich King, and figure they’ve solved the alt-leveling problem by simply diverting players into unlocking heroic classes (which begin life at lvl 40).
Which won’t solve anything; all that will do is kick the can further down the road, unless they intend heroic classes to actually replace all of the pre-existing ones… otherwise, if you think leveling an alt from 1-70 sucks, just think how much fun it will be to do it from 1-80...
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