The Daily Grind: What makes your characters stick?

Being mainly a Guild Wars player, my main is a Ranger, but I also have a ritualist, mesmer, and assassin.

For me, whether I keep an alt or not depends on their character. I love rangers for their whole 'run with the animals barefoot through the forest' type thing. I love the Lore behind the different classes, the way Ritualists are so shamanistic with their dancing and their creepy armour, and the relationship between a Necromancer and his minions.

That backstory has to be there. Warriors for example, 'beat stuff up'. Doesnt do it for me.

For me it's usually finding a really cool name, well cool name to me that is. But I'm a hrrible altaholic with my mmo's

For me it is a combination of does the class match my playstyle? Is it a fun class to play? Is the Lore surrounding the class not only interesting, but consistent? Are any Class-quests fun? And, can I solo with the class?

Generally, I will level one class to max, while playing the others a fair amount for relaxation - but two more will be a bit ahead of the others. Eventually, I try to get all my alts to max level - but then, I'm a bit OCD....

I very, very rarely make alts. I tend to pick a class that sounds good and roll with it through the game (though I tend towards paladin and warrior style archetypes where available). The repetition associated with rolling an alt is what gets me... once I've raised my gathering skill, or completed the newbie island quests (press x to auto attack!) I really don't want or need to go through that again.

The primary reasons to make alts is to play with low-level friends who joined late, or to switch servers.

I hate games where alts translate into advantage, such as trade mules, crafters, or PvE specialized characters (such as making a dedicated miner in EvE). It feels so unnatural and counterintuitive. If this is expected behavior, why not just roll it up into one account with shared bag space for all, or make it so one character can optimize both PvE and PvP when they want, or even make crafting scores shared across characters in an account?

I love games that let you multiclass freely, so you're never locked out of content until you start over from scratch. Moreso, because now I can start playing a different class and maintain the personality and style I've worked so hard to cultivate on my main. I don't want to be known by three different names. I just want to stay as "Niko" whether I'm slinging spells or blacksmithing.

-SirNiko

Not sure. Perhaps it's the way the class/character matches my playstyle. Or it could be that they are so similar to me.

The one character I stuck with the longest was a Bard on EQ1. I guess what connected me to the character was the similarities we had. The bard being a musician, a jack of all trades and flaming gay; we seem to be a good match.

More games need to do what SWG did with the one-character per server rule. It very much enhanced community-building, which I feel is sorely lacking in MMOs today.

It has to have a good name, look right, be able to kill and heal itself, and it has to have some intellectual trick to it, while still being able to contribute to a party in the main class' stereotypical role. I'm primarily in DDO, and thanks to the source game there's a lot of cool things you can do to a build..

Examples of my characters I've kept - a cleric who is a top-notch trap finder and disabler, an armor-class build rogue assassin with a splash of monk, an evasion wizard and an evasion bard melee build...

It's hard to give an answer, because it's just ...did the class have that 'spark' for me? Did it make me want to play it, and play it every time I played the game? Those make me elevate an alt to 'main' status (though I have been known to have more than one 'main' now and then). What else can keep an alt alive... is that alt part of a group I play with regularly? That alt will become tied to my enjoyment of being with that group, and will keep me playing it longer... and has even let me find that 'spark' in a late-blooming class.

Though I have, now and then, played two characters with enough equality to consider both 'mains'... in most games, I have one character that gets 90% or more of my play time. Any other characters are side projects created for all sorts of reasons. One may get played once every few months...but playing that character was what I needed at the time I played it, and that made all the difference. Perhaps it was for a completely different playstyle. Perhaps it was to escape from something weighing on my main's shoulders. Perhaps it was for privacy, to be a complete unknown. Or perhaps it was to play with lower level friends. All have been important to me from time to time.

What designates a main is just... that 'spark'. Frequently, I don't even find it on the class I expect to be my main before a game releases / I start playing it. It might take me a few test characters before I find it...but once I'm in a class that 'fits', I'm in it for the long run.

Whoever's not earning my ire that month.

It varies so much for me. Sometimes, I base my decision on how I think the character will perform in the endgame. Other times, I base it on what is the most fun to play while leveling, since I spend so much time leveling. Sometimes, I like the the armor or the pets that a particular class gets that's enough to keep me interested. Social ties help - I'm generally more faithful to alts that are guilded. Except in the case of one character, which I enjoyed leveling specifically because she didn't have any social obligations to level faster or gear up for the endgame. Of course, I guess that begs the question - can a character be your "main" when all you do is level? What really defines a main?

I'm an altaholic mess. I probably need an intervention.

It takes two things for me to stick with a character.

First of all, I have to find a class and a build that is really, really fun for me. It's surprisingly hard to do, because I'm not drawn consistently to any one character class. Oh, on some level I prefer pet users over stealthers, stealthers over crowd controllers, crowd controllers over ranged, and ranged over melee, so that's usually the order I try them in. But after all these years I've finally figured out that it has more to do, for me, with hard-to-quantify things like pacing (not too slow, not too fast) and balance (ever so slightly overpowered relative to NPCs, enough that I'm never at risk, not enough that I don't have to work at it).

And secondly, I have to have a name, backstory, appearance, and costume that I can stand. But I've got a lot more control over that than I do over the first part.

I'll play around a little bit with other classes, but I generally stick to one class and try to reach max level with him.

My first ever character in an MMO was an orc warrior in WoW, and I leveled him to 60 without messing with other characters much at all. To this day, it doesn't feel right in any MMO unless I'm playing a big beefy tank, whether its pvp or pve. So thats one reason why generally stick with one character.

Another reason is that I like seeing all the areas of a game. This motivates me moreso than seeing what another character is capable of. So if I do roll an alt, I'll try to make his leveling experience as different as I can from my main.

I like a character that is easy to play - I'm not looking for extreme challenges. I'm really more of an explorer than a fighter. So I generally choose something ranged but not too squishy - which is mostly a hunter/ranger type. Then I tend to stick with my first character for a while until something stalls me out. It might be boredom, or hitting one of those levels that's hard to get through, but then I'll start an alt. I'm an altoholic - I like playing around with different crafts, different races, different starting areas. My main usually stays the highest level toon in that game because I always go back to it. The exception is WoW where my main turned 50 and opened up the Death Knight class which I decided to check out.

I pretty much always roll a tank as my main, the tank I like the best in the game!
After that... It's pretty much random ;) Some continuing trends seem to be the character that I managed to get the most of the worlds flavour in during creation (one of the reasons I like character creation soooo much... This is probably why I have so many alts too ;) ) or simply which one has the most striking purple mohawk =D

Favourite alt ever: My conqeror in AoC! I made his nose look broken his one eye black, I made him skinny as hell and gave him peasant features, the farm hand who found out he wanted to try something except for hay on that pitchfork :) and had a couple of accidents with some rather rougher guys while getting trained.

If a character has varied tactics that they can choose for each battle then I'm far more likely to stick with them, because it's the tactical side of combat that I find fun. If I become bored by not having many tactical options per fight then I'm very likely to abandon that character and start another. Basically I like something that is challenging to play and takes some thought, not something that just requires repetition/rhythm or that I can play in my sleep or while watching TV and barely have to pay attention to.

In EQ1 pre-Kunark I abandoned my L50 Warrior because it just became so dull to play (just two click attacks plus taunt to use along with auto-attack for 50 levels) compared to spellcasters and I switched my main to a Druid - admittedly I also wanted to be able to solo and cut down my horrendous travel times with the warrior (which couldn't solo and didn't have teleports like the druid). By the time I quit I had found a fairly decent balance of casting and melee in the Shadowknight, but not enough to overcome the crushingly boring repetition of tactics in both group and raid combat.

In WoW I avoided Mage after my L70 Mage friend told me that he basically used the same 2-3 spells all the time - my main in WoW was a L70 Hunter, but the tactical variety of combat decreased as he reached higher level ironically (his talents specialised him too much - I ended up using the same shot rotation every fight as it was the most efficient). By the time I quit WoW out of my five L40-50 alts I actually preferred my Warlock, Druid and Rogue over my main as they had different ways of approaching each fight, but I had become bored of my Shaman and Warrior, and I never made it past L20 with Paladin and Priest (Paladin especially was a snorefest - almost as little to do in combat as EQ1 melee classes).

In EQ2 I stuck with Guardian to the level cap (50 when I played) but it bored me with the monotony of its combat, and tbh my L20 Swashbuckler and Monk alts weren't much better, so I quit rather than make more alts - none of the other classes seemed that different from other similar classes and unlike WoW there didn't seem to be such major playstyle differences between them.

I've just passed my 4 year veteran subscriber status in City of Heroes and one of the reasons I keep playing that game is because not only does every archetype have a very different playstyle, but pairing together different powersets within that archetype can totally change your playstyle and tactical options too - plus you can pick exactly which powers you want from your two chosen powersets and whichever power pools you want and slot them up however you want with enhancements that change the power's behaviour (one of my characters has Total Focus slotted as an attack, while another has it slotted as a stun as he only took it to help stun elite bosses together with another stun power he has).

So in CoH every new alt is like discovering a whole new way to play the game and approach each fight - plus levelling is so fast that I never get bored of any character once they get past L20 (I've deleted plenty before L20 though - lets hope Going Rogue fixes how poor the lower level game is with its endurance issues and how few powers you have to start with) - pretty much all of my alts who get to L20 make it to L50 and I tend to focus on 2-3 characters at a time until they hit L50 before focusing on a fresh alt. Levelling is so quick and I've got so many characters to the L50 level cap (18 so far) that I don't really have a main, though I do have 4 level-capped characters that I still play occasionally on raids and task/strike forces and they're the four I'll be using for the endgame system post-Going Rogue.

Though in CoH, like in a lot of other games, it's very important to me to have the right name for a character - and in CoH it's also important for me to have the right costume and bio/backstory too - unless all 3 of those elements mesh perfectly with an archetype/powersets I enjoy playing then that character is likely to get deleted and remade with some changes, until I have something I'm happy with - then it just has to last past L20 and soon enough it will be L50 ;)