Hello, my name is Josh, and I'm an alt-a-holic~
I preferred to think of my condition as Alt-itis. I'd play one character devoutly for a few weeks/ months, and then I'd start to get that old, familiar itch. Maybe I was just getting burned out, and needed a change of pace, but most often is was because I had grouped with someone of X class, and was just so impressed that I wanted to try it myself.
At least in CoH, where there are so many different flavors of goodness to sample from, creating and leveling alts is easy enough (although repetitious. Wow, look at that, the exact same missions I've gotten on just about every single toon I've ever made. Imagine my complete surprise...), and they give you like 8 slots per server to toy with.
I can't tell you how many alts I've made only to delete them later, but there were always some that I couldn't stand the idea of deleting. I've tried just about every race/class combo at some point. Mostly, they got deleted before they got into their 30's or 40's, but that's just how it goes.
Hell, I've even made repeat alts. Remakes of old alts that I had made, lost interest in, deleted, and remade again a few months later. I've had at least 3 woody rangers, 3 halflings, 2 or 3 troll SK's, a couple gnome SK's, a few Iksar SK's (finally settled on one. May he rest in peace with his Greenmist forever. Amen), several iksar monks, 2 or 3 troll and iksar beasts, and at least one of the other races, before I finally settled on Iksar.
I stopped playing my monk a month after the nerf (it just wasn't... fun anymore). I stripped all of his droppables, and he sat un-used for over a year... until I got the mad urge to play him again, stripped some other alt to re-equip him, only to realize after a week why I had quit him in the first place, and began the cycle all over again. I probably did that 2 or 3 times. Even at the end, I still agonized over the decision to delete the poor fella. Out of all, he was my favorite, which made deleting hard, but also I still harbored some kind of pathetic hope that $OE might some day fix what they had done (and what absolutely fucking slays me is there are people who still believe that $OE will fix monks. Sure, they say they're currently evaluating the fix, but it's the same old string-along bullshit song and dance they've been singing for 3 years. I mean, come on, even in EQII they've already been "monked", and it's not even live yet
)
Once I started my beastlord's final incarnation, I knew that my mage was going to be mothballed for good (with the exception of maybe loggin him on for the odd summoned goodie here or there, or to be my spotter bitch in Kael or someplace), but I still could never bring myself to delete him, even if he hadn't seen any play since, like... Velious.
For the druid of my namesake, it was the same. Play for a while, get the itch, strip him to equip some alt, eventually lose interest in the alt, and come crawling back. Did that probably 5 times in 3 years on him alone.
Oh, and I've never had more than one slot designated to a bazaar mule. Usually, I'd just use an inactive character for that, since I always had a few of those :P
I really can't imagine any benefit a trader mule will have in EQII where there is no bazaar and you sell items out of your own home... I can see keeping trade supply mules (which you will probably be practically a necessity for tradeskillers, as there is even less inventory/ bank space than before, and you will be awash in trade ingredients unless they have radically altered how the system works) being made, but without a shared bank space it's either back to drop-and-grab transferring, or trusting someone to hold your shit for you. What a nightmare (again).
If I only had 4 slots to do all that shit (across all servers no less), it would mean completely scrapping characters I was attached to. Even if I didn't really log them on any more, I still liked seeing them there on my character roster, and looking at them I felt like I always re-gear them and go out and recapture that old feeling.
I didn't like a lot of their other design decisions, the Luclin 2.0 character models/animations, etc. already (nevermind the fact that I'm not ready just yet to go back to paying $OE for the privilege of beta tester another of their products. My asshole is still hasn't fully recovered from the last go around, although, to be fair, I knew what was happening, yet I kept paying...) but this one is a show stopper for me (as if the ass ream-age and ass-looking character models were not already).
