Have you ever hit a point in a game where you just have TOO MUCH of something – be it inventory, alts, quest backlog, whatever? And you’re feeling stifled by the sheer amount of what you’d need to do to organize it all. Or, at least get it feeling organized enough?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just odd, but that need to declutter drove a lot of what I did over this past weekend.

I’m an altoholic, even in games that don’t need alts, and I know that. There’s something I enjoy about creating characters that look different, have different personalities (in my writer’s mind), view the world differently, and are different races. Even if I can play all the jobs on one character, that will not stop me from switching it up to play alts.

But sometimes, it gets to be too much, and I feel the need to cut back on the number of characters I have. I’ve already done this once a while back – straight up deleting alts that I only hung on to for whatever reason. And I’ve done it again, this past weekend.

Why So Many Alts?

Part of the reason that I have as many alts as I do is because I use them in creative projects – namely, the Spot of Mummery story that I write. In the early days, if I wanted to take screenshots of these characters, they needed to exist in world. That isn’t the case anymore with specific screenshot tools on hand…

While it was hard to part with these alts, I told myself there was no way I was going to get all of them through Shadowbringers and Endwalker. Not to mention seasonal events.

The All Saints’ Wake event was a major wake-up call in that if I wanted the cosmetics, I had to run the instance twice on every character I had. I did it, but man… it took a LOT of time.

Whenever we have a seasonal event, I spend my first time going through it thinking about if it’s going to be quick and easy to do on my stable of alts. And that’s just not keeping with the spirit of such events.

So, I clicked the delete button and officially removed two of my story characters from my roster. I also deleted a third alt that was just sitting there holding on to a name for a character I’d considered messing around with, but decided against in the long run.

That still leaves me with 14 characters – plus a few more if you count alts I don’t play at all. But 14 characters that I take through seasonal events every time one happens.

That still feels like a lot. But… one step at a time.

Alternate Focus

I also spent some time doing some organization and clean up on individual characters this weekend. For example, I decided to take one character on Mateus and combine elements of two of my alts into him.

I’ve long had a bunny girl named Fljot, and I’ve held on to the character for a good while because I like the name itself. But I’ve come to like the bunny fellows better than the gals, so I’d also rolled a bunny fellow based on a completely different concept. I decided I like the bunny fellow so much that I wanted one to be in my main FC – so I repurposed one of my story characters to be the bunny fellow (pictured above in the header) and used the name Fljot for him.

Now, I have both aspects of those two alts combined into one character, and that makes those alts free for whatever I want to do with them. I haven’t deleted them yet – for reasons that they were leveled or boosted or had rare things I wanted to keep. They’ll probably end up repurposed – I’m still looking forward to seeing the Hrothgar females when they release!

I also spent some time with Tai this weekend. He’s a level 80 Reaper and the next to go through Endwalker. But before I started the expansion again, I needed to tie up a few loose ends for him. Namely, I’d not done the Reaper job quests – and there are important skills you get from finishing that quest line.

The quest line for Reaper started out a little lackluster to me, but did finally get interesting after a few quests in. I’m still iffy about a character who taps into voidsent to fight – it just seems a strange bending of lore to justify a cool job. But the job itself fits Tai’s character so well that I can overlook all that. Plus, I just have fun playing Reaper!

I also spent some time finishing Tai’s gathering quests. Shortly before Endwalker dropped, I started leveling Tai’s gathering jobs (except Fisher). Mostly, I used the daily Grand Company turn-ins. He’s about level 84 on both jobs now, so he’s capped in those turn-ins due to the fact that I need to unlock Endwalker zones to proceed (another reason I want to start pushing him through the expansion).

However, I’d left off on gathering job quests in the late 50s or so for both Miner and Botanist. So, this weekend, I pushed through both of those quest lines. Because I’ve done for other characters before., it was mostly just warping from place to place (Botanist quests were terrible about this!), skipping through text, and gathering the few things they wanted me to gather.

Since there’s no high quality gathering mats anymore, the gathering to most of these quests was trivial. Until you hit the timed nodes, and that was just more of a pain waiting on timers than anything difficult.

Anyhow, I finished all that up on Tai, and was happy with getting all that sorted. He’s begun Endwalker as of last night, so here comes my 4th time through the expansion!

Meanwhile… I’ve started leveling gatherers on Zuri. 🙂