but its more efficient to level up specific chars.
Not to put words into anyone's mouth, but I think that may partially be where some of the frustration stems from.
If I had to categorize players very,
very broadly, I'd at a very basic level assume there's people more interested in the RPG/immersion/social aspects and people more interested in the pvp aspects. To give a basic example, I'm not interested in pvp, I don't use alts and I play a doctor. For the sake of giving me a few more options I made some minor sacrifices in the build and diverted a couple skillpoints to other areas of expertise. Does it mean I'm a bad doctor? No, i am fucking incredible. What it does mean, though, is that someone else can just roll his medic alt with exactly zero personality and background and that alt will outperform me any day of the week. What it also means is that not only is my character slightly devalued, but that I quite frankly (with very few exceptions) value my ingame interactions with other players a lot less whenever I know he's using alts, because I then know that the character I am interacting with is in fact not an in game representation of the person I am talking to, but part of an alt net as it has been called earlier - or a spreadsheet as I would call it.
Obviously I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, that would almost be like saying there's something wrong with focussing purely on pvp, which would be a ludicrous statement. Similarly I can see the appeal in minmaxing the shit out of an army of alts to support and participate in large scale pvp, even though it's not my cup of tea. Just as i can see why I always run the danger of getting lead pumped into me when venturing into northern towns, which are more geared towards pvp/tc and don't exist just so i can do some quest peacefully and I sure as hell am not going to cry about that, I'm not
that full of myself.
All that said, though, pvp may just be the tip of the iceberg, if (and since I have personally gained from other people's alts this is going to be as hypocritic as it gets) I can apparently tour the mines to highfive one of Marko's alts at each, visit waterworks to see alts for gathering chems/ep materialising in front of me, maybe meet an alt in NCR/Hub that only exists for 10 minutes to collect caps from a starting quest to make the main slightly richer and then finishing it all off by camping a vendor in hopes of spotting a dedicated "trade x for caps, once they respawn" alt - probably only to have someone walk in and switch to his burster alt to safely loot my corpse in a protected town. So yeah, maybe fast relogging is, in fact, a great feature, but I am not entirely surprised some people may get
slightly frustrated by it. Oh yeah, and by being told they're playing the game wrong after that, which is nothing short of hilariously insulting. For all I care everyone can have a dozen alts for every ingame location, but it would be a lot healthier for everyone to try and see where the other side is comming from, instead of belittling them outright. Meh, maybe that has nothing to do with it and it's just about fr in pvp, then go ahead, dismiss the statement. But apparently some people are bugged by it, may as well try to paint a perspective here.
And as food for thought while I'm here, just a wild guess, I could easily be totally wrong, but maybe a lot of new players actually quit, because they were expecting an RPG (not entirely unreasonable to expect from a Fallout mod) instead of something more similar to a 4X/RTS, and not so much because some of us think "Wasteland is harsh" - which by the way it isn't.