Guild Wars 2: Alt Friendly?

[Shortcut]

If GW2 is going to be alt friendly or not is definitely a difficult question to answer.

On one side it has accountwide achievements and absence of mounts, so you don't have to miss anything (except pets maybe).
On the other side, earning achievements on alts is one of the things that made them a timesink in the first place.

One thing is very likely though: GW2 will have a high amount of replayabililty to it.
Personal stories, dynamic events, all those features are there to stimulate replayability.
But the question still remains: will you play it on an alt or stick with your main?

This is where GW2 scores a bit lower then other games.
Where in other games you needed an alt to replay lower lvl areas, you can now replay them on your main.
This discourages the creation of alts by default.

This, of course, doesn't count for personal story.
But since personal story will create a deeper bond between player and avatar, it might be harder to leave your main character for an alt.

Of course, it's not all bad.
Downscaling might discourage people to create alts, but it also makes alts less of a thing to plan in.
In WoW, you and your friend have to plan out times, builds, races and quests just to play together.
In GW2, friends can join and leave on the fly, making the planning less tedious.
This encourages people to make alts.

Also, while personal stories may bind you more to one character, playing several characters has the advantage of experiencing more personal stories and therefore more lore.
Since personal story also ties into race, playing more then one race is a great way to get to know a lot about the lore of every race.

All in all, It's very difficult to determine if GW2 is going to be alt friendly without playing it first (for a long period of time).
There are goods and there are bads on this front, so it'll probably depend on the person playing.

I will definitely make at least one alt, perhaps more

[Whitepepper]

Yea, I got your reasoning in the OP. Takes all kinds I suppose. All kinds...

You're coming across as an asshole. Do I misunderstand or is that about right?

[Fencers]

You're coming across as an asshole. Do I misunderstand or is that about right?

"Takes all kinds..." is an idiom to express one is not passing judgement.

I'm not particularly nice though. No.

[Guilegamesh]

"Takes all kinds..." is an idiom to express one is not passing judgement.

I'm not particularly nice though. No.

I would call you seasoned and worldly (in MMO worlds). I haven't even heard of most of the MMOs you reference in your posts. Have you ever played Ragnarok Online or Talesweaver? Those are the two most obscure MMOs I've played.

OT: Concerning the character slots, assuming they charge $10 a slot, wouldn't it be easier just buying a whole new box? It would probably be quite the hassle though, but hey, you save $10 (assuming, again, the price is $40 for the game, which as I'm typing this seems quite unlikely for a AAA MMO that's B2P.)

[Fencers]

I would call you seasoned and worldly (in MMO worlds). I haven't even heard of most of the MMOs you reference in your posts. Have you ever played Ragnarok Online or Talesweaver? Those are the two most obscure MMOs I've played.

Played both. Didn't care for R:O too much. And Tales was interesting but sorta old by the time I got around to trying it out. I liked the puncture/slash/crush mechanic in Talesweaver which reminded me of a slightly cruder Vagrant Story. Without the overarching craft system.

[Guilegamesh]

I played RO quite a bit way back, never got to 99 though. Damn, looking back that grind was insane, killing birds over and over until you see them in your sleep. Best thing about that game: the Agility Knight. I enjoyed TW, but I played it when it was only in Korean so, being very not fluent in Korean, I never got past lvl 60 out of the 255 levels. I heard there was an English version released a while ago.

[Fencers]

Hehe, I don't mind the Asian grinders. R:O/TW are child's play. One of those I played (forgot name) long ago had a system where the leveling never stopped. There was no L cap, quests or gear. You just killed stuff till you reached L10, then you got a box with gear for 10-19. At 20 you got another box of gear, and so on. Someone made it to like level 700 and it took him years.

I tapped out around 130ish after a year or so.

[Squirrelbanes]

Hehe, I don't mind the Asian grinders. R:O/TW are child's play. One of those I played (forgot name) long ago had a system where the leveling never stopped. There was no L cap, quests or gear. You just killed stuff till you reached L10, then you got a box with gear for 10-19. At 20 you got another box of gear, and so on. Someone made it to like level 700 and it took him years.

I tapped out around 130ish after a year or so.

Are you a professional gamer Fencers? You seem to have played virtually every mmo under the sun lol.

[ArcticBlade]

All characters will be stored in a centralized database and your name is going to be 100% unique, no one else in the game will be able to have your name.

That doesn't sound good to me. It's hard enough on WoW to come up with a cool-sounding name that hasn't already been taken (aka stolen!) on your server. Imagine how hard it will be to come up with something unique out of probably well over a million players.

[Balfire]

OT: Concerning the character slots, assuming they charge $10 a slot, wouldn't it be easier just buying a whole new box? It would probably be quite the hassle though, but hey, you save $10 (assuming, again, the price is $40 for the game, which as I'm typing this seems quite unlikely for a AAA MMO that's B2P.)

Well assuming the pricing is even the same as the original guild wars first of all and then assuming the box will cost $40 also. Is saving $10 really worth giving up your account wide achievements/identity/unlocked dyes and possibly more. In GW unlike most games all your characters are connected. All your achievements are shared, unlocked dyes will be shared, and your account shares one identity, if you join a guild on one character when you log in as another character you will still be in that guild and people will be able to know through the guild list that your original character is so and so, its the same for your friends list.

On the topic of mounts I'm ecstatic they will not be in GW2. I was an avid mount collector in WoW and I'm not going to lie and say I won't miss that aspect, but mounts kill all sense of scale and exploration. I mean really after you obtain a mount you just pass on by all that beautiful artwork Blizzard put into a zone. Its a real shame most players in WoW nowadays barely leave the city and when they do they just use there ridiculously fast flying mounts to by pass all the content and reach point B.

On the topic of alt friendliness of GW2; I don't see any concern as stated earlier by many this game seems to have huge re playability and the interconnected achievements and identity don't make switching characters seem like a huge loss. I've always been the one main kinda guy maybe with one or two alts always a bit behind the one, but maybe in this game I'll have more, time will tell.

[aej]

WoW only allowed single words as names (although it did allow unique letters).

This is the current naming rules of GW2 from gamescon..


So multiple words and spaces work aslong as it doesn't exceed the 19 character limit.

[Balfire]

That doesn't sound good to me. It's hard enough on WoW to come up with a cool-sounding name that hasn't already been taken (aka stolen!) on your server. Imagine how hard it will be to come up with something unique out of probably well over a million players.

The difference is you have have spaces in GW2 like for example my new eles name in GW1 is Misty Riverfall. Misty has probably been taken in 1000's of variations but even after 7 years and over 6million boxes sold I still very very very easily found a name I enjoyed. Hell even in WoW I hardly had a hard time coming upwith a name that wasn't taken. And most of the people I know who do have that kind of trouble frequently are using gimmicky LOLIPWNU names with puns in them and such.

[Fencers]

Are you a professional gamer Fencers? You seem to have played virtually every mmo under the sun lol.

Yes and no. I always been attracted to puzzles and game systems-- trying to figure them out/crack/beat them. In the past I have done QA and play testing for a company in Lake Mary, FL but they closed down. So don't actively test games for $ anymore but sometimes do alphas/betas for fun like TOR or Rift recently. Or EQ2/WoW back in the day.

I still tend to look at games in pieces or as discrete elements of a DD/T.

Way, way off topic.

[Squirrelbanes]

Yes and no. I always been attracted to puzzled and game systems-- trying to figure them out/crack/beat them. In the past I have done QA and play testing for a company in Lake Mary, FL but they closed down. So don't actively test games for $ anymore but sometimes do alphas/betas for fun like TOR or Rift recently. Or EQ2/WoW back in the day.

I still tend to look at games in pieces or as discrete elements of a DD/T.

Way, way off topic.

yh...a tad off topic, but never mind. Mods are a relaxed bunch.
Yes, I used to feel the same way about games back when I was playing things on the NES and amiga etc. Very simple so they could be puzzled out quite easily, but I loved getting inside the game and finding the best way to beat it...especially if that meant exploiting something lol.
Raids feel the same to me, ostensibly complicated but really quite simple once they're broken down. I guess it's why I stuck with wow for so long.

Anyway...yes, less off topic

[Serpentsatellite]

Anything I accomplished on my main in WoW that I considered valuable (and worked hard for), I "lost" when switching to another toon. Similarly I accomplished things on alts that I wished I'd had credit for on my main. It's easy to roll another toon and get to max level, but to me that isn't valuable. Certain low chance mount drops, pets, achievements, and titles made me not want to switch classes because I would "lose" them. As an example; The Insane. With the amount of time it took to get that title I didn't want to go without it by playing another toon. For me that felt like a big loss in terms of time invested, so I kept playing the same class even if I didn't like the route the devs would take with changes to the mechanics.

Edit: At the end I found myself playing my Druid (main) not because I liked playing the class but because I didnt want to give up my accomplishments. To be honest this soured me on the game.

I just really wanted to go back to this, because this is soooo much what happened with me in WoW... It's kinda nice to see others felt the same.

In the world of endgame progression (and I hear endgame PVP) there was often such a focus on having certain classes for certain fights, or times I found it difficult to impossible to get into a certain level guild with a cetain character, and over the years I found myself playing an "alt" as my new main - I enjoyed it enough at the time, and ended up getting Mountain o Mounts, all the pet achieves, and many many pets, mounts, etc that were no longer in game, or cost a FORTUNE in gold and time.

Come Cata, and a lot of class/playstyle changes, I found I was REALLY not enjoying that character anymore and it soured how I felt about the game, and frustrated me to no end in raiding.
Once I started playing the game on a more casual level, I really wanted to go back to my old main... but I felt trapped with the guy who had all the cool stuff.

[Creepjack]

For me account wide achievements are a must have - I just don't understand the logic behind achievements locked to a one character oO (of course, besides business model ;P ).

[Freehoof]

Switching "mains" in WoW never really bothered me too much, or at least never bothered me enough to stop me from doing it. Each expansion I had one character I'd play more than any other, and every time a new expansion came out I'd swap which one I focused on. It does, however, irk me that some of the characters I don't really play any more have tons of interesting titles, mounts, vanity items, etc., while my newer characters have practically nothing.

This makes some sense, in a roleplaying way of thinking - why should my Druid have a Black Protodrake, if she's not the one who earned it, or why should my Death Knight, for god's sake, have the Hand of A'dal title? But at the same time, it would be nice if some of these things, maybe even achievements only, were account-wide. Lord knows I'd probably have like 14000 achievement points if all the disparate achievements on all my past characters were taken into account.

So I understand what the OP is trying to say here, even though there are many things about WoW that make it extremely easy to level and maintain multiple characters. Heirloom gear, easy and quick leveling, plenty of character slots, fast mail between characters on the same account, the few account-bound pets and mounts they have... It may not require a lot of work to level multiple alts, but it is hard, psychologically, to "lose" progress on one character just because you're having more fun playing another in any given patch or expansion.

[DonCorleone]

So I understand what the OP is trying to say here, even though there are many things about WoW that make it extremely easy to level and maintain multiple characters. Heirloom gear, easy and quick leveling, plenty of character slots, fast mail between characters on the same account, the few account-bound pets and mounts they have... It may not require a lot of work to level multiple alts, but it is hard, psychologically, to "lose" progress on one character just because you're having more fun playing another in any given patch or expansion.

From what I could make out of the answers given so far Gw2 provides: (feel free to correct me, i'm just making a list to help)
=> Names cannot be longer than 19 characters long and accepts "name & surname" (minimum of 3 characters, spaces count, english only characters)
=> "x" amount of character slots (most certainly less than 6, more can be bought through microtransactions probably)
=> Servers are a "centralised database" (which means u can hop from one server to another without any problems. no need to make or level multiple characters on multiple servers)
=> Dynamic Events are ever-changing (which means that you most probably won't experience the same stages of a DE on your multiple characters unless u try to force said events/stages)
=> Achievements are Account-wide (finally!!)
=> There are no mounts upon release (map travel makes it irrelevant - some "collectors" might see this as a minus, but you can't collect something that isn't there yet anyway)
=> Huge customization of character available (not only facial/body features but also storyline can be completely different for the same profession, you can play a "paladin-like" guardian and still create a secondary guardian and play it as a "death knight / blackguard or evil paladin"
=> Down / Up scaling of characters in an area (you can still play with ur friend on ur alt since either he will be down scaled to ur lvl if he comes to help u or ur up scaled to his lvl if u go with him)
=> Account shares one identity (if you join in a guild on one character when you log in on another character you will still be in that guild and members will know who you are, same goes for friends, just a a RealID thing)

=> Traits and skills being Profession specific (this I didn't understand well)

[Ghostrider]

=> Traits and skills being Profession specific (this I didn't understand well)

I hope this is what you mean, but e.g. a thief with DW pistols has very different weapon skills (skills 1-5, and obviously skills 6-10 are different too) than an engineer with DW pistols. Traits are like ''talents'' which add passive bonuses like +75 power or bonuses to skills, like a bleed on crit for a certain weapon skill. And with different skills come different traits.

There is a very useful tool so you can see it for yourself: Skills Tool

[DonCorleone]

I've seen the skills tool but I think I did a mistake by putting the "Traits and skills being Professions specific" since I think it has nothing to do with being Alt Friendly... I don't think if u have 2 warrior professions on the same account the low-lvl one will benefit from the same traits/skills as the main one since skills are gained through usage and quests (just like vanilla wow) and traits would be too powerful at low-lvl.