EVE New Citizens Q&A

I know that you can have three characters per account... but only one character (main) will train skills when offline, the rest need to be actively played with for their skills to be trained. I know years ago that people would have multiple accounts... 3 accounts means 3 "main" characters can be trained even when offline.

I remember getting an email sometime back that said non-main characters in an account can now be trained even when offline. Is this what MTC is all about? At £15.99/month or 1 PLEX/month, it still more expensive than just making a second account and paying for that subscription. Why would someone choose MTC over making a second (or even third!) account?

Do non-main characters (I think they are called "alts"??) serve any use at all?

The main reason for me asking this is because I plan to roll up a new Caldari character soon, with a PvE (mission running, industry, manufacturing) focus which I hope to be self-sustaining in a few months. However, I would eventually want a PvP character as well, or maybe another character with a different race. Just wondering what's the best way to go about this.... if an MTC is better than a second account.

Thanks!

I have 2 accounts with basically 2 main characters. This one is for pvp, another is for pve/probing/leadership/etc. I use MTc to train 3rd character for hauling/trading simultaneously without pausing any of my mains training. hauler/trader will be basically done within a year, those 2 probably won't ever stop.

Yes they do but it depends on what you want to do. On most of my accounts the other two slots are cyno and/or scout alts or market alts. This prevents me from having to fly somewhere with one of my main characters because i can simply switch into one of the alts which is already at that location.

The alt slots on your accounts are handy for roles that dont take long to skill into and that dont need to keep on skill training.

They also serve as a handy work around for skill limitations. For example things like Planetary interaction or Production has skill based limits, you can only run x amount of colonies, run x amount of build jobs or hire x amount of research agents per character with maxed out skills. Training these skills doesnt take very long so spending a month training them on your two alt slots triples the amount of colonies, build jobs or research agents you can run at the same time.

Theres also more specialized things you can do; one of my accounts has a freighter pilot, cyno alt and a tengu pilot for making isk in 0.0 on it. I could have trained all those skills into one character but then every time i wanted to make isk i would have to fly into 0.0 with the char and start making isk, then if i needed to haul something id first have to fly back to high-sec. Now i can just logoff the freighter alt, log into the tengu alt and start farming isk. If someone needs something hauled i can instantly switch into the freighter pilot thats parked in jita.

All skills train whether you are online or offline. By default you can train one skill on one character. With MCT you can train two skills on two separate characters (or three). Actively playing the character has no effect on skill training.

MCT is useful if the training period will be temporary. For example, suppose I want to build a PI alt to bolster my monthly income. I can enable MCT for maybe two months to give him time to train PI skills without interrupting my main character's training. Afterwards, I simply don't renew MCT. I have paid 2 PLEX and now have a PI alt who I will log into daily to manage settlements. I do not have to sustain another account and I do not have to pay yet another PLEX to transfer him over.

Having a separate subscription is useful if you want to play both characters at once, as is often the case with hauling alts (or particularly vigorous station traders). It also opens up three more slots, which a resourceful player can turn into three more streams of income through PI or trading.