Altoholics and randomness

When playing a MMORPG I am rarely able to stick to just one character. It feels like I am missing out on what the game has to offer if I do, so even before I have reached the level cap (the maximum level a character can have in the game) on my first ‘game toon’ I have created at least one more that I have tried out to make sure that the ‘toon’ I am focusing on is the right one. When starting out a game this mostly works out nicely.

But playing the same character with the same game mechanics doing the same kind of quests over and over can easily kill the joy of any game MMOPRG. And this is when ‘that other toon’ suddenly becomes a ‘game savior’ by letting me diversify my game experience by alternating a little between the different characters. This way I am able to keep the game interesting and it also lets me explore what the game has to offer in a broader sense.

Then we start ‘capping’ characters. And this is where the random element in the game starts messing things up. When I first returned to WoW (World of Warcraft) last year after a long break my plan was to avoid some of my original characters to make the game feel ‘new’. Initially this worked out quite well, but as the game progressed the altoholic in me took over and in due time all of my ‘toons’ got capped and opened up the door for ‘end gaming’ or ‘raiding’, which is also the part of the game I enjoy most. To avoid playing all of my characters at the same time I kept trying to focus on a few of them and preferably characters with focus on different ‘roles’ in the game (healer/tank/DPS). I would have preferred to make this choice myself, but this is where the random element appears and the game chooses for me. How does the game choose? Well, to be able to progress in the game and face new and more difficult raiding challenges I need to upgrade the ‘gear’ my characters have. And the ‘gear’ is randomly generated as ‘loot’ from these raid challenges and are largely out of my control. From a statistical point of view I know this is not the truth, but it feels like when I try to focus on getting certain items for a specific character I enjoy playing, they seem to have completely disappeared from the game.

When faced with this frustration over several gaming sessions in a row it is easy to pop over to one of my ‘alts’ to ‘calm down’ only to have all of the best possible items drop for this ‘toon’ without focusing on it at all. So suddenly the only character I can actually continue progressing with is a ‘side kick’ that I originally had not intended on playing that much. The randomness of loot from boss challenges has made the choice for me. And last night I was wondering if this is an intended element of the game or if this is just a random result of how certain game mechanics work together? The reason was of course that I have been trying desperately to ‘gear up’ one character and failing, when suddenly a character I have only been playing one the side ended up with some amazing gear that suddenly makes this character my best candidate for further progress in the game.

Naturally this is a situation that becomes even more prominent with the LFR (Looking for raid) tool that allows anyone to be teamed up randomly to take on ‘raid challenges’. Its easier for me to just sign up for a ‘raid event’ on any of the game characters that I play, and the ‘loot’ I might get is random. I could get loads and I could get nothing.