Project Lore

Wishful Thinking is a column for the theorycrafting behind World of Warcraft.  No, not the number crunching madness perfected by the folks at ElitistJerks, but the features, abilities, and design ideas that the Project Lore writers conjure from their squishy pink stuff.

World of Warcraft has been available for more than five years now.  That amount of time has enabled me, someone who's never been into alts, to not only roll one, but two alternative characters to level 80.  Add my mule and then the Auction House character and I have a grand total of five characters with over 30 days played each (mostly idle time on the bank and AH toons).  My point is this, I log in and out of my characters a lot.  I am talking about five to ten times a day.  That's why I wish Blizzard would implement a /relog characterName command.

It's an incredibly simple request that would do nothing fancy.  You'd simply type /relog Goggins, or any other toon's name, and the game would log you out of your current avatar and into the requested one in a seamless step.  No need to hit the selection screen and double-click.  You'd go from logging out to logging in.  We'd still have the option to hit the character selection screen through the old /logout, or the initial login, but how often do we really need it?

I figure that every relog wastes anywhere between a few seconds to thirty seconds, depending which computer I am playing on.  Compile five to ten relogs at ten seconds a piece over the course of five years and there's a lot of lost time there.  It's a simple request that would save me, and likely many players, a large chunk of time in the log run.

Frankly, I can't see any downside or possible abuse to it.  Can you?