Altitis

[Arethor]

If you're here chances are you've already got it.

While waiting for the new patch to download I decided it was time to address a problem that has been plaguing me for quite some time. Everytime I go to log on to WoW I'm confronted by a barage of choices of what toon to play. I've played every class at this point and I must say that I enjoy all of them with only a few qualms with certain classes. This means that of my 6 characters on Stormrage I'm readily willing to play 5 of them at any given logon. My problem however doesn't reside in choosing which character to log on.

The problem I'm having is with focus. Arethor is finally getting pretty old at 42 but he's starting to lose his luster compared to the shiny new alts begging for attention. He's sat more than he's adventured recently and I think it's due to a few hurdles.

1. Slow leveling/questing: Levels and quests are beginning to take a lot longer to complete. Quest-time seems to be increasing exponentially while soloing for each consecutive quest.

2. The world is becoming too large: I'm one who's liked to hunker down in a zone for a number of levels trying to complete all the quests in the zone before moving on. I've found this to become increasingly less efficient as quests are regularly ferrying me to somewhere on the opposite end of the world. This leads me to my next issue.

3. Travel time: The time to get between continents and different zones is just entirely too frustrating to me most of the time. This time is significantly reduced with the use of my mount and a hearth stone set to Menethil, but the distance between like-level zones and quest-related areas is a bit broad at times. I understand Blizzard's reasoning but at times it gets to me.

4. Gryphons and Ironforge: I know my computer I play WoW on isn't the best machine available, but it surpasses the minimum specs. However anytime I want to use a Gryphon or even step one foot through the door of IF I might as well go make a cup of tea. While on a gryphon my screen will regularly refresh only 4 or 5 times and about 1/3 of the time when the screen finally shows I've landed I'm already AFK. When walking in IF I have regular lag spikes that cause me to spin in circles, fall into the ever-annoying chasm by the bank/AH (which i think should be removed entirely). To travel from the front gate to Tinker Town can take up to 10 minutes and it's the same going from Tinker Town to the gryphon master. Also about 1/2 of the time when I land in IF the system hangs up so much that I'll actually crash. I understand this is probably partly due to me only having 512 RAM and running it on a laptop with a Pentium M chip but as I said, I do surpass the minimum specifications. This however also increases my travel time as some places force you to travel through IF as there are no direct gryphon routes.

5. Variety: I believe that variety is the spice of life and with how different each of the classes are I regularly find myself wanting to play "X" class because I feel like doing "Y" Example: I want to play my Priest because I feel like being a healbot for a while. or I want to play my Rogue because I'm feeling like a DPS Monkey. This causes me to swap characters fairly regularly too.

I realize this may have kinda turned into a rant of things about WoW that bother me, but I think they're the major contributors to my severe case of altitis. I've even noticed a major decrease in the amount of time I've spent playing my 28 Rogue whom up till around this point I couldn't get enough of. I'm afraid that each of my alts will Hit the Wall ™ and will fall by the wayside getting only occasional play as I build up another alt to the 30's.

I don't see alts as a bad thing at all, in fact I encourage them. They're the only way to fully experience the game. But right now i'm feeling like I'm stuck in neutral. It feels like I'm making no progress. Am I to be forever stuck in Mid-game?

Edit: After finally getting the patch installed i logged in with minimal addons enabled and performance became many times better even with a laggy server (confirmed by other lurkers) so perhaps that will help the performance issues a little bit. I'm going to try and be a minimalist as far as addons go from now on.