I don't think using alts is cheating.
I never used an alt before merge. Sometime after the merge I finally decided to create an alt. Got all the remaining masters I wanted very fast, became much more anti-social as a result, could dig anywhere in PR without much difficulties.
It did make the game more boring for me in the long run, took a lot of the challenge out of it. I don't have an alt any longer.
However I'm one of those who can't be bothered to play an MMO solo style. Single player games have much more interesting gameplay, stories, quests, etc. Only reason to play an MMO for me is the player interactions, cooperative or competitive.
I feel like Ryzom definitely suffers a lot from an excess of alts. Many players who multi box are also very social and focus on building big active guilds. But a lot of players stay solo because it's faster to grind with an alt than other players, you may get more rewards from boss hunts, you can be solo and have access to the end game content like NPC armor through Chanchey hunts, etc. Just feels like there's very little incentive to build large guilds in Ryzom.
I personally feel like that's a downside. Too many solos and one-man guilds. I prefer to log on and interact with guildies and do things together with them, than log on and grind skills by myself. Gives the game more of a ghost town feeling when 90% of the guilds are tiny. Unless you're chatting in universe channel all the time, but again, that can be accomplished in better ways outside of an MMO.
Sure, you can level solo without an alt by sitting all the time to regen in between kills. But that's boring as heck. The game was clearly designed to be played in groups because of the lack of self heals.
I never used an alt before merge. Sometime after the merge I finally decided to create an alt. Got all the remaining masters I wanted very fast, became much more anti-social as a result, could dig anywhere in PR without much difficulties.
It did make the game more boring for me in the long run, took a lot of the challenge out of it. I don't have an alt any longer.
However I'm one of those who can't be bothered to play an MMO solo style. Single player games have much more interesting gameplay, stories, quests, etc. Only reason to play an MMO for me is the player interactions, cooperative or competitive.
I feel like Ryzom definitely suffers a lot from an excess of alts. Many players who multi box are also very social and focus on building big active guilds. But a lot of players stay solo because it's faster to grind with an alt than other players, you may get more rewards from boss hunts, you can be solo and have access to the end game content like NPC armor through Chanchey hunts, etc. Just feels like there's very little incentive to build large guilds in Ryzom.
I personally feel like that's a downside. Too many solos and one-man guilds. I prefer to log on and interact with guildies and do things together with them, than log on and grind skills by myself. Gives the game more of a ghost town feeling when 90% of the guilds are tiny. Unless you're chatting in universe channel all the time, but again, that can be accomplished in better ways outside of an MMO.
Sure, you can level solo without an alt by sitting all the time to regen in between kills. But that's boring as heck. The game was clearly designed to be played in groups because of the lack of self heals.
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"We are Kami. We are here to be you. We are many as you are of many minds. We are one as you are one in Ma-Duk."