Your points are all valid. I was thinking about making an alt and that immediately got me saying to myself, "Do I really want to go through all of that again?" Funcom pretty much had to set it up that way though. The combat is so different from what most of us are use to(L2, WoW, etc.) that I found there to be an excrutiatingly long learning curve and it would have been even more painful if I didn't have multiplayer and single player quest carrots to keep me moving forward.

As weird as it is for me to say, I found myself hitting a wall early on because I still wasn't mastering the combo system or the idea of constantly juggling HoT's and potions depending on the situation. The quests kept me going and not that I've got the system down I am having a lot more fun. Seriously...I was ridiculously close to rerolling from Bear Shaman but the wealth of things to do in Tortage kept me putting one foot in front of the other.

It's that same "wealth" of things to do though that makes me think it will be a great while until I can stomach making an alt. This has got to be the longest it has ever taken me to get:

1. A handle on a game
2. To level 20 and out of the newbie area

Again, it's pretty much essential for slow learners like me, but it is a grind for sure. To Funcom's credit though the leveling curve actually seemed to speed up remarkably after I hit Conarch(the first Cimmerian village you hit after you leave Tortage). After level 20 it was off to the races. Exp comes in huge bundles after doing just a few quests that are almost right on top of each other.