altaholism
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Storyboard: Army of me
There are, sadly, more character concepts in pretty much every game on the market than there is time for me to play them all. This is a horrible setup, and I've lodged a complaint with the management, but I'm not expecting any sort of response. Mercifully, in the vast majority of games, you can at least somewhat sidestep this issue by using up all of your character slots on alts. If the game gives us 12 character spaces, the odds are good that many of us will have 12 characters within a month, with that number only changing as we kill off some of that number or get more slots. All of this leads to another problem, though. If you play Alice and someone else plays Bob, there's plenty of space for the two of them to interact. But if you play Alice and Claire and Bob interacts with both of them, eventually, logic would dictate that Alice and Claire ought to interact with one another. And that's not just problematic from the standpoint of interacting with yourself; in many cases the game outright disallows that sort of login-juggling. Suddenly you need two characters to talk, and there's no way to even get them sharing the same room.
Breakfast Topic: Cross-character consistency
Most of us probably have alts at this point. On my main server, I have a character of each class (and besides the shaman and the mage, they're all at least level 40). And all of them that have leveled past Feralas have a Sprite Darter Hatchling to love and call their own. I like keeping at least something constant across all the different classes. I've met people who use consistent naming schemes, which is helpful because it makes it easier to tell which alts go with which mains. I've met people that get the same color shirt on all their alts, although it's hard to see under all that armor. Some people like to take the same leveling path every time (like me), some people like to shake it up. I even know someone who's leveled the same class to 80 several times - Warrior no less. But Rossi is widely considered to be crazy. If you have alts, is there anything you always do the same way across all of them?
Addon Spotlight: Altaholic
Altaholism is something we've all heard of, talked about and possibly suffered from. I have struggled with this as long as I've played World of Warcraft. I use a variety of addons, as you can well imagine, to enhance my game play. Some of these addons provide information about my alts, although not across servers and factions. The information I am typically concerned with is rest bonus, gold and recipes. I usually use the Armory to check my alt's gear and reputation, or God forbid I relog to the character in question to check something. Enter Altaholic, an addon I have recently started using to keep track of just about every detail about my alts. Developer Thaoky tipped us off to his addon, and I thought I'd give it a test drive. I'm not going to lie, I was a little doubtful about the usefulness of this one, but I have changed my mind. Altaholic looks akin to Auctioneer (and therefore the default AH interface) to allow the player to navigate different information regarding alts. Some of my addons duplicate features of this addon, but this package brings much more to the table. It's an Ace addon, and the developer seems to be very proactive about the future of this one. One warning, however, this addon will total up your /played time, which may cause you to ask serious questions about the direction fo your life. Come back after the break for a look at Altaholic.
