Operation "Spread the Love"

I kind of like that title; it's one of those things that may sound vaguely dirty or sanctimonious, but it's really a reference to leveling alts.

If there's one thing I've made abundantly clear while writing for Parallel Context, it's that I'm not that much of an altoholic. I think the most toons I've created on one server for a single MMO has been one of each class for SWTOR because I wanted to see each class story*, and WoW hasn't even come close to matching that.

No, several Cardwyns out there don't count, because there's only 6-7 of them out there (2 are placeholders to reserve the name on other servers), and 2 of them are effectively the same toon (the one I saved on Era and the one that progressed into TBC and then Wrath Classic). 

So if you know anything else about me, I tend to play one or two toons at a time, and that's that. I'm not one to have a toon for every profession, and my completionist streak is kind of limited to within a specific toon rather than having one of everything.

For the 20th Anniversary WoW servers, I was presented with a conundrum: how do I slow down my leveling to the pace I want without letting FOMO get in the way?

Or to put it more bluntly, how do I play on the WoW Anniversary servers with my friends without coming off as an asshole for not rushing through leveling?

Enter Operation "Spread the Love".

This isn't even all of them; more like half.

I went and created a ton of alts. Well, for for me they're a ton, anyway.

There's my usual couple of toons, such as Cardwyn, Linnawyn, and Azshandra, and another incarnation of the Retail toon Balthan (as a Warrior for a change), but most of the rest are new. And I didn't try to make the names sound that impressive (or good enough to RP with); one name came from David Eddings' The Belgariad, another from Sesame Street, and one came from a prescription drug. But the idea is that by leveling a bunch of alts all at once, I'll be able to slow down my overall leveling process so that I won't be tempted to rush forward.

The first 5-7 levels of a WoW Classic toon take about an hour, and things slow down after that rather quickly. The leveling speed only becomes a crawl at certain choke points, such as the upper 30s and the mid-upper 40s, but since I'm in no hurry I can get about 5+ toons to the mid-upper 20s while most of the server sprints to L60.**

The goal here isn't to get to L60, run instances and raid, but to get to L60 in time for the Anniversary servers to get to the TBC pre-patch. Since the phase schedule is going to roll out for the Vanilla WoW portion over the course of a year, I have a year to get to L60. Not weeks. Not months. A year. Sure, I can eventually go faster if I want to, but the height of FOMO is right now, when everybody is pushing ahead, and it will peak again when people en masse (my friends among them) begin to reach max level.

I am not going to let FOMO win this time, and if Operation "Spread the Love" does it's job, it won't. But we'll see.

*I've been a very bad boy, as I still haven't finished the Imperial Agent's class story yet.

**There were already two toons at L60 as of late Tuesday/early Wednesday, which is kind of nuts. Those players must not have slept since the servers opened on Thursday the 21st. Given my age, I have to wonder just what the hell the point is, because I doubt anybody is ever going to remember who these players were, but that's just me.