Alt

Alt is an abbreviation for alternate character. 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" - their primary character.

What constitutes "less" time and effort can be subjective with respect to the player. For most players, the main is the highest-level, most powerful, or simply the oldest character on the account, while some refer to all of their characters on their main server as "mains" and their characters on other servers as alts. Some players play multiple characters at around the same level, 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.

Uses

Alts are created for a number of reasons.

Variety

Players often create alts to have different gameplay, roleplay, or social experiences. They allow players to try another class, race, or faction, or to continue the leveling experience after reaching the level cap. Alts are also useful to experience different server realms with different conventions, like Roleplaying servers. Roleplayers may also develop different names, personalities and backstories, and utilize different gear between characters.

World of Warcraft does not reveal which characters belong to the same player by default, which allows players to choose who they would like to make aware of different alts. This allows for players to vary their social experience between characters. Guilds, for example, are character-specific and can allow different characters to have smaller, larger, or completely different groups of friends, or even be completely socially isolated.

This choice is diminished if players choose to become Real ID or BattleTag friends with others, since those friends will be able to see any character being played through BattleNet.

Profession alts

Some alts are created to increase their overall money or item making potential. Many profession recipes in the game require materials not available to a single character. For instance, a tailoring recipe may require ingredients obtained only by skinning or mining—or both—while a single character can possess only two of those types of professions at a time. With alts, a player can work other professions, and avoid problems with availability or cost of materials. A character may even be enabled to learn an unconventional mix of crafting professions if an alt knows two gathering professions. For instance engineering is normally taken with mining and inscription with herbalism to avoid relying on other players for materials, but engineer/scribes are feasible if miner/herbalist alts exist to supply them.

Alts created primarily for gathering resources for other characters are commonly known as farming or gathering alts. Hero classes are popular for this purpose since they start at a higher level and therefore have a head start at gaining access to all the areas in the game where resources can be found. Druids are also able to gather resource nodes while mounted in [Flight Form], making them efficient gathering alts.

Bank alt

A bank alt or "mule" is an alternate character that is usually low-level and sits in a trade city. This character's primary use is for:

• Extra bank space, possibly by being the sole member of a one-member guild with a guild bank
• Auction and chat sales convenience by remaining next to the Auction House, allowing the main to post and receive items without traveling back to the city
• Management of bulk items and resources in the alt's bags and bank, leaving the main's storage for cleaner organization

Other reasons

Some alts exist primarily:

• to be twinks (to excel in battleground brackets below the level cap)
• to be bots (which are contrary to the Terms of Use Agreement)
• to multibox (which requires separate accounts per character but is within the Terms of Use)
• to aid in debugging addons that would put "real" characters at risk of losing gold and/or items

These types of characters are not always played in the normal sense; see their respective pages for more information.

Functionality on a single account

Most players have a single World of Warcraft account, which allows up to 60 characters to be created at a time across all servers.

Features

Alts use the mail system to trade items to each other. Mail sent to alts will arrive instantly instead of the usual one hour, allowing for easy transfer of crafted, collected, or purchased items

Alts in the same guild can also use the same guild bank for ease of item transfer. There is no account-based restriction on using the guild bank to transfer items or gold, although different alts may have different guild ranks with varying bank privileges.

Restrictions

Alts on the same account cannot be logged into the game world simultaneously. This prevents such alts from directly supporting each other in combat (known as multiboxing) and from transferring items directly using the trade window. Limited-duration items can only be given to other characters using the trade window, and consequently cannot be passed directly to an alt. Alts also cannot buy each other's auctions, preventing transfers between Horde and Alliance alts on the same account using the auction house.

Use of multiple accounts

There is no restriction on the number of accounts a player can have, but each costs an account fee per month. Alts on separate accounts circumvent the item transfer restrictions placed on alts on the same account, and can still send and receive Bind to Account items as long as all the accounts are registered under the same Battle.net account. However, few players pay for a separate account just to occasionally trade items; the primary use of alts on separate accounts is multiboxing.

Trial accounts

An alt on a trial account is possible, but that trial account would not be able to trade, use the auction house, nor mail or receive items, so a trial account alt cannot get around the trading restrictions of a same account alt. When attempting to gear a multiboxed alt, the plyaer can run as master looter on their main to allocate items that drop. Players will also quickly exceed the level limit for trial accounts.

Alt-itis

This is a silly article.
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" or being an "Alt-aholic."

Symptoms include:

• Trouble having low-level mules — you just can't stop leveling them!
• Running out of the 60 global character slots
• Needing an addon to keep your Friends lists synched
• Inability to commit any characters to max level or a even a twink level

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)
• Wanting to start over on a new server
• Enjoying lower level content more than higher level content, especially the more solo-friendly quests and equipment progression before level cap
• Addiction to the fast level-up rate of levels 1 through 20
• Creating multiple characters on roleplaying servers, each with different backgrounds and histories

Many sufferers of alt-itis are proud to wear the label.