EVE General Discussion

Accounts and Alts in Eve Online seem to offer interesting options for game play, building your empire and advancing your cause.

With one account you get as many as three characters, and an additional three characters for each additional account. You can now train all three characters on each account. It does take PLEX aka real money and/or isk made in game.

Personally, I think it would be better for the game AND increase CCP's profit, if instead of actually costing MORE to train a second character on an existing account, than to add a whole separate account and train one character on it, there was a small discount for training a second character on the same account, and a further small discount for training the third character on the same account.

I expect CCP is concerned you will train your alts on the same account to a certain point, and then cease paying to train them at some point and still be able to play them, while if you went with separate accounts instead, you have to keep paying for them to play them. But respectfully, I think in the long run it would still be better for the game and still make it more profit to give the small discount.

How you focus each character, and whether they are on the same or separate accounts seems to offer options.

I have in mind a couple of characters focusing on pvp (one focused on guns and one focused on missiles), a couple focusing on mining (working together is a plus), one for trading and freighting, and one for missions. I keep at least a couple in ncp corps to be able to play whenever I like, and a little privacy is nice at times. I have one of those training in production industry and manufacturing also. One is training in PI, without much of a clue yet as to doing it, but hey, at least he will be there and ready should the need or interest arise.

What are you doing with your own characters, and do you have some tips to share?

First of all, there's no reason they should charge less for something than what they're already happy to pay.

Depending on what you're doing, having a character on the same account does different stuff than having one on a different account. Same-account characters (those not intentended for resale) are often intended for specific purposes, such as cyno alts, scouts, market scouts, PI alts, research/copy alts, or corporate management alts. If you want to have a high sp character capable of doing all sorts of things such as combat at high proficiency, you of course want that alt on a second account (as your second account main).

Currently I don't make much use of dual character training, both of my accounts have SP heavily invested into the respective main, with one being focused into specific combat roles as well as various industry skills, while the other is a general combat character that also flies capitals. I have cyno alts on the other character slots of the indy account. Of of my accounts has an alt that's training for orbital bombardments for my dustbunnies. Each of my accounts can function independently, but I use them to tag team nullsec combat plexes, domi-duo for wormholes, or just in general have one scout the other.

If they wanted to give a discount, that would mean having it cost less than a plex, which currently cannot be subdivided.

well, they would need to introduce a discount redeemable purchaseable with aurum that could only be used for dual character training. But you can't combine the rest of that aurum into a plex so you stuck using it for accessories. Quite the discount. I guess people could do it in bulk, roughly changing some number of plex into a slightly higher number of dual-training plex. If you wanted to purchase dual training with cash you'd need to sell a plex then use the isk left over for the dual-training-plex, so really none of these are optimal aside from offering the dual training plex as a second purchasable token.

Would be a not-insignificant amount of work on the account-management end for something that would likey hurt revenue.

It costs two plex to transfer a char to a different account so if you only want one months training on a char for some extra market slots (for example) then it is already cheaper to use multi-char training than to create a new account for a month and then transfer the char to your main account at the end of that month.

I have two accounts. Each one has a main character (ME YAY) that are into indy and PVP. Now my alts on both accounts have different roles I am skilling them up for such as marketing, diplomacy and then minors into indy, sounds like a professional degree here LOL.

Anyway I can see the debate about multi character training is quite an investment of finances and time, but it;s the end rewards we all look forward to.

FLY RECKLESS 07