An abbreviation for alternate character, or alter-ego. Virtually all MMORPGs permit a player to create more than one player character on his or her account. An alt is a character to which a person devotes less time and effort than the person's main character.
What constitutes "less" time and effort can be subjective with respect to the player. For most players, the main is the most powerful, highest-level, or simply the oldest character on the account. A few players may play multiple characters simultaneously, keeping them roughly equal in power. In those cases, players often simply use the term alt to refer to a character other than the one they are currently playing.
Alts are created for a variety of reasons.
Some players create alts to have a different social experience. In some cases, the change is minor, being simply a second character with a slightly different personality and/or abilities. In other cases it can be drastic, being a member of a different race or gender. Alts may have wholly different circles of friends from the main, or no friends at all.
In WoW, many players create alts to try different classes and professions, to enrich their gameplay or remedy boredom. People who bought the game when it first came out typically reached the maximum level of 60 within a few months, and started alts. WoW does well in this regard, by providing ten different races, nine classes, and four realm types; it's easy to encounter a completely different gameplay experience.
Some alts are created on the same realm to increase the power of a player's main, or to create a team of characters all mutually reinforcing each other. Many quests and recipes in the game require materials not available to single characters without help. For instance, a tailoring recipe may require ingredients obtained only by skinning or mining - or both - while a single character may possess only two of those types of professions at a time. With alts, a person can work other professions, and avoid problems with availability of materials, at the expense of spending extra time leveling up.
Some alts exist primarily to be bots or mules. These types of characters are not always played in the normal sense; see their respective pages for more information.
Alt-itis
The content of this article is not part of official Warcraft lore, but has nevertheless become part of the World of Warcraft culture or community.
Players who have a large number of mid-level characters rather than a few high-level ones are sometimes jokingly accused of suffering from "alt-itis". Symptoms include:
- playing for over a year without ever getting a mount
- trouble keeping mules — you just can't stop leveling them!
- running out of global character slots (a player can only have 50 characters across all realms, and 10 on each individual realm)
- needing an addon to keep your Friends lists synched
This term is almost always used in good humor, despite the usual implication that it's a sign of indecision. The most common causes of alt-itis are:
- wanting to experience as much of the game as possible (different classes, races, professions, zones, race-/class-/faction-specific quests)
- trying to socialize with as many people as possible (with enough online friends, you seem to end up with one at every level)
- before paid character transfers, needing to start over on a new server
Many sufferers of alt-itis are proud to wear the label.