Resulting from a perfectionist attitude about any aspect of CF, be it roleplay, PKing, whatever. Eventually causes you to delete your flawed character and roll up a new one.

OR...

Resulting from new ideas for "better" characters, causing you to delete your current, "boring" character and roll up the fantastic ones in your head.

In each cause, there is an inability to "stick" with one character.

Does anyone suffer from one or both of the cases of character hopping? Or know how to resolve them?

Morrigun

The things that cause me to "character hop" are:

1) A new idea that I just have to try, or something I just have to find out about (e.g. cabal I've not been in, or something).

2) I log on the read a helpfile and a minotaur slot is there, so I take it while I can.

3) Dying in a fashion that disgusts me, at which point I need a break from the game for a while. This include things like being jointly ganked by two cabals that both outnumber you anyway when you are no powerhouse, and already have your item when they both for some reason attack your cabal when you are alone, to getting multi-killed by an air-offense form and full-looted every time you unghost if you are an orc. (The latter never happened to me but I've seen it done to others, and it is cheap imho.)

I still manage to have a few chars that I play for over 200 hours, but owing to factor 3, fewer than I once did.

Generally, I have a very hard time deciding 'what' to
play, and brainstor, several ideas.

I will roll up a small handfull of various characters
class/race combos, and pretty much rank to PK.

In the meantime, I kinda just play around with each to see
which persona better grabs me, and I find more comfortable/curious.

Then once I decide what I stick with, I delete off the rest because
I feel having/playing multiple characters can be detrimental of
the focus you keep on your main character you play, and can cause
some intresting/confusing/borderline cheating situations keeping
character knowledge seperate.

I would suggest to just try a few, but plan to pick and stick
with one, while also deleting any in-active characters to help you
keep more creativity focused on your character, and also just saving
space in general.

In my observation, this is very common among new players, and ultimately a limitation in most cases.

The thing to keep in mind is that each character will play differently, and experience you gain playing one loses some value the second you switch to another. Also, you're going to have to repeat the easiest sections of the game- this can be good to an extent, but the 10th time around your player skills are probably atrophying compared to the guy who is plugging away at the higher levels.

You'll learn a lot more playing one (flawed) character to its end then you will by playing many characters for a few hours each. You might lose experience or equipment due to a defeat... but deleting a character means losing 100% of both, along with all the progress you made with building a reputation, skills, and more.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com