I was listening to Limited Edition Issue 10, and there’s a rather funny moment towards the end on a levelling pact in City of Heroes breaking up. Obviously one of the problems with the system is that it doesn’t work so well if one member doesn’t play their character so much. If, say, they’re something of an alt-oholic. Entirely hypothetically, perhaps you’d roll up a Corruptor, and join into a levelling pact with their Brute. Only next time you’re online they’re playing a Dominator, then later a Corruptor, then a Brute again (but a different one, the first was Stone/Dark, this one’s Dark/Stone), then another Brute (back to Stone/Dark, but with a different costume and power selection to the first one).

Then I thought… what about if you could get into a levelling pact with yourself? Sign up a few alts, and any XP you earn on one is distributed between all of them. During the earlier levels of most MMOs, the natural habitat of the alt, experience tends to rack up so quickly that spreading it out over a few characters couldn’t hurt. Possibly flawed later on, as many games seem to have a bit of a “doldrums” range where the levels slow down, and you wouldn’t want to multiply that by 2 (3, 4…), still, worth exploring maybe.