In answering a question for The Queue today I realized something; my main is dead, your main is dead, all of our mains are dead. The character that we played the most and distinguished from our alts is no longer a thing. Death Wing didn't kill them, nor did any of Ragnaros' appearances. What killed the main was WoW itself, and its death has been slow and painful.

Along with the death of our mains has come the death of identity in WoW; or at least the severe dilution of that identity. When we lack a single point of reference for Self, we no longer have a tie to reality in which all actions and speech are connected to. This presents a problem at multiple levels, and it's interesting to explore why we got here, what here actually means, and what, if any, solutions there are.

Now if that wasn't vague enough, I don't know what is. Let's dive into things a bit.

How and Why We Lost the Concept of a Main
My main character used to be the one that I play most. I'd stick with it through the thick of things, when I didn't want to run raids anymore, when I didn't want to PvP anymore, when I didn't want to farm mats anymore. I did it on my main and I never deviated. During this time my identity online was connected to this one character (Osullivan, on the realm Eldre'thalas, US). There were things that happened with me where my reputation preceded me, good and bad. My main was who I was.


Then, the game progressed. It became easier to level, easier to gear, and easier to learn a class to the level of acceptable skill. These changes all happened in order to make the game more accessible to a wider audience, and to keep the player base fresh. Not a bad thing, but at the end of the day, the death of the main could arguably be tied to the expansion of the game.

What Happens When We Don't Have a Main
Alts are now trivial to level, and most of us have little or no trouble picking one up and running with it. Of course there are outliers -- those that have never played an alt seriously, but for the vast majority of people I know, their WoW history can be traced in a story line that goes "I played a priest in Vanilla, then a warrior in Wrath, then a shaman in Mists."

Along this path comes the changing of identities, and as I specified above, with that change comes the loss of personalization in WoW. This loss of the personal touch, a tie that binds our virtual selves to our physical selves, leads to a de-personalization of WoW characters, which I contend, leads directly to the dehumanization of WoW players. When I can change my identity from Osullivan to Exshaman (my shaman character) without any realistic long-lasting consequences, then I can be a complete jerk on Osullivan and get away with it. I can be mean in groups, break up guilds, and generally live an immoral life without negative side effects.

When we lack those consequences as a whole, the community suffers and we degrade into the negatives that we see today. Our main is dead, long live our new main.

Can This Be Solved? Should It Be solved?
There probably isn't a way to solve not having a main and the general move towards not having one. Account-wide achievements, mounts, pets, heirlooms, toys, etc... these are all things that give way to the eventual death of the main. The only way to solve these things is to remove them, and that is not going to happen.

The golden ticket might be to incentivize playing one character a long time. Give players a reward for not changing identities, for keeping with one character for the long haul. Or if not the character, then find a way to create a universal identity throughout the entire game that binds characters to the player.

There are no perfect solutions, and I'm not sure there is even a solution to be had at this point. But I think it's important we recognize that a lot of the larger issues we see are related to not having this identity that grounds us in our virtual world.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion