Terrible mechanics for Alts.

[Welsper59]

Simple response: Not designed for alts. If you choose to have them, they give you the option to do so.

Just to clarify, there are reasons why people would want alts too, despite it not being designed for it. The most dominant is probably that they want to experience the game from different perspectives (different races, starting zones, etc). Then there's the less frequent, but still legit reason that they may want to level alongside friends who are much lower (and you don't have any class along those lines). Let's also not forget that people share accounts and use different characters (siblings for example).

I'm sure SE is not foreign to the idea that people do also use alts for storage, as that was a common practice in XI, so that's also probably why they're still available to people. You just kind of have to run along different channels to do it.

Beyond these reasons, why would someone want to have alts in a game designed to be a 1-character based game?