Some of you may know me as Neschria's husband. What most of you may not know is that we disagree on nearly EVERY point in any MMORPG. And the subject of alts is no different I just wanted to show how hard playing an alt could be in EQ.

I started playing EQ waaay back in June of 1999. I started a dwarf cleric (Dikmer Orless. Dik to my friends.) For the first 2 years I didn't even have a second character on my account. For 3 years after making some alts, I still only played Dik. I was a regular poster on EQ Clerics and considered by many to be on of the best clerics of my time. I couldn't even tell you how many times I'd see a conversation go like this:

group/raid leader: "Where going to do..."

prospective player(s): "you wanna do WHAT??!?! no way""

group/raid leader: "Dik is coming"

player(s): "oh, ok I'll come"

One day, while I was at work, my wife made a human mage on my account (female at that).  I found I REALLY liked playing that character but I also found I had trouble finding time to play her. Too many nights of "can you just log in Dik for this, or that, or the other thing?"

Finally, one day, I put my foot down. I showed up to a raid (planes of power era) with my mage who had just hit 55. The raid leader was like "switch to your main, dude, we need you" and I said "no, this IS my main" The raid leader called off the whole raid. I felt like a schmuck. A whole raid canceled because I wanted to play a mage after 5 solid years of playing a cleric. How could I be so selfish? And the other 3 clerics there were all like "what are we? druids?"

But I stuck to my guns and retired Dik. He eventually hit level 66 sometime after they raised the level cap, but you can blame that one on neschria as she had him out doing some power leveling or something and accidently got him some EXP. I played Sodi all the way.

Other than those 2 characters, the next highest was a troll SK I got to 30 and my wife eventually played him to 35 so he could cast feign death. Below him, none of my alts ever got past 20-25. I don't think I ever deleted a character over level 10 "just to make room for a new one".

Neschria, on the other hand, has deleted more levels of characters than I ever had. The top 3 of note were a 65 gnome SK, a 52 ogre warrior and a 45 high elf cleric. Not to mention the dozens (scores? hundreds?) for 20 something and under that got the axe over the years. How she ended up with 72 still on her account is simply amazing to me. And just goes to show you how different she and I feel about the whole Alt subject.