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When is the best time to train up your alts a little?
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Linna Excel
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#1 - 2012-05-20 00:08:59 UTC
I've come back to EVE and while Linna has enough SP to fly a battleship (not well though, needs more SP) my other two chars are really underskilled. When do you know is a good time to put your main on a short training hiatus? For example, should I wait until I have the skills to solo L4s before starting to work on my other characters? One of them has 250k sp. Dunno about the other, it has cruiser 3 or 4 though but not a lot of support skills.

I know there's no right answer, but I'm just fishing for some thoughts and what other people have done. I'm kind of at a point where I don't want to put off going for the L4 missions but I'm also feel like I'm neglecting my other two chars.

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Mars Theran
Foreign Interloper
#2 - 2012-05-20 00:57:22 UTC
Best time to skill your alts is when you are satisfied your main is up to snuff and good enough to do anything you want to do with it.

Depending on the person, that may be anywhere between 8-80 million SP. Personally, I've never hit that mark. Even at ~30 million SP on my old toon, I wouldn't have considered myself to have time to commit more than a single day to skilling an alt on the same account.

Realistically though, if all you're in for is mining or PvP and strictly that, then 10-15 million should do, and give you some time to skill up an alt for trade or something. Keep in mind that you can't play more than one character on an account at a time, where you can play two characters on different accounts at the same time. Not much for it myself, but a lot of people do it.
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Florio
Miniature Giant Space Hamsters
#3 - 2012-05-20 08:14:04 UTC
I also only have a single account, and have had for 7 years. I've got 2 alts other than Florio. Good time to train an alt on your main's account is when you need it.

For instance, if you go into a corp that is at war or based in 0.0 you will probably need a hauler alt (freighter). This is also a good alt to train trade skills on. If you want a dedicated PvP brawler for 0.0/lo-sec suicide giggles, then train up a pilot dedicated to a single ship type.

The way I've done this is by using free-trials to start up my alts, pay for a month or two of extra training, then pay the transfer fee to my main account: I think this is the best way of meeting all the demands of eve with a single account.
Nerath Naaris
Pink Winged Unicorns for Peace Love and Anarchy
#4 - 2012-05-22 09:27:21 UTC
Frankly, you will know it when it is time to train up your Alts.

For me, it was when I discovered the joys of playing the market (and the money to be made there), so I decided it is time to but my Alts at work on two other trade hubs......

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Gul'gotha Derv'ash
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#5 - 2012-05-22 13:16:29 UTC
When you are able to plex two accounts and run alts on the second :-)




You should at least train your two alts up to do PI. This will give you a decent amount of nearly passive income, and it only takes about 13-14 days to get a PI alt trained with decent skills. I would get your main toon up to snuff for lvl 4's (or stick with rushing lvl 3's) then do the PI alts.
Gianath
Gallentian Legitimate Businessmen
#6 - 2012-05-22 15:47:34 UTC
My preference is to never, ever train an alt at the expense of my main account. Time spent not training your main is always time you end up regretting later when you have to wait for what you really want to complete.

If you need an alt, either set up a second account with the power of two, the buddy system, or whatever promotions/incentives CCP has going on at the time. Yes, you pay for two accounts, but you can get that second account on the cheap.

Once you've trained the alt up to whatever skills you really wanted, transfer him to your main account.
Marsan
#7 - 2012-05-22 15:50:54 UTC
It really depends. I found the following reasons to train up alts:

1) I had enough isk and interest to do station trading, or buy and haul to a hub when I found an interesting opportunity.

2) I was getting in enough wars to need a neutral scout and hauler.

3) I was in an area like WH or NS where I could do PI, and having another PI could make me decent isk.

4) I was in a lightly populated wormhole system and needed a scout I could depend on.

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Mashie Saldana
V0LTA
WE FORM V0LTA
#8 - 2012-05-22 18:24:25 UTC
The best time to train up alts are before you need them.

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Pinstar Colton
Sweet Asteroid Acres
#9 - 2012-05-22 19:07:55 UTC
When I need to venture into a dangerous part of space and use a jumpclone (to protect my main implants from loss) I use that time to start skilling up an alt. I can fit my alt in +3s quite quickly and cheaply.

That way I protect my implants from loss on my main, yet my account still gets a character training with boosted attributes. Once I'm done in dangerous territory, I'll jump back into my main body and resume skill training on my main.

In the cat-and-mouse game that is low sec, there is no shame in learning to be a better mouse.

Linna Excel
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#10 - 2012-05-22 23:09:06 UTC
Thank you for your input everyone.


I can see the argument for having a second account but part of me is trying to be cheap and saying no, the other part of me says eve shouldn't be a game where you can just throw money at something.

Nerath Narris wrote:
Frankly, you will know it when it is time to train up your Alts.


Right. I'm not there yet but I'm thinking I might be there sooner rather than later.


Mashie Saldana wrote:
The best time to train up alts are before you need them.


Yeah, I can't argue with this one. Since I don't need anything now aside from perhaps some skills on my main, part of me is saying maybe now would be a good time to get the basic skills on them. Part of me wants to use one of my alts to start a corp (I don't want to leave CAS ;) ) so I know I'll need that "alt" to have the proper skills for corps before I'm ready. Then I can build that char up as a mission runner one it has a tax free corp and leave Linna as a more take it easy/have fun talk in chat kind of char.

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IIshira
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#11 - 2012-05-22 23:16:46 UTC
I don't see the point of stopping training on your main pilot to train an alt. Unless you have a specific need for an alt on the same account it's just wasted skill points that could have made your main better.
Yassavi Domani Yassavi
Doomheim
#12 - 2012-05-23 13:42:27 UTC
IIshira wrote:
I don't see the point of stopping training on your main pilot to train an alt. Unless you have a specific need for an alt on the same account it's just wasted skill points that could have made your main better.


Exactly this.

The only good reason I can find for skilling up a secondary character is for trading purposes or scanning. A scanning alt can be handy to have parked in your WH for example. It takes a week to train a simple scanner and then you can switch back to your main.

You never feel "done" with your main character, so realistically skilling your alt toons will probably never be done. And why would you anyway? If you can just learn those skills on your main, why need the alt at all?
Raziel Walker
NPC Tax Evasion Corp
#13 - 2012-05-23 13:45:21 UTC
Not sure when I started training up an alt but did it before reaching 10m SP. (I also made wow/diablo3 characters of each class and played them before completing the game with the first one. More because I wanted to do so as to fulfill some ingame need)

Started training an alt when I wanted to make some sideway money farming datacores and doing PI.
(datacore farming is no longer worth training up for I think since the research project management skill alone costs 40m so takes quite some time to earn back. Only trained up & did the standings grind with 4 out of 6 characters so far.)

Training up for PI, trading, mining, manufacturing, research or other non-pvp skills seems mostly to be reason to do so. Or if you have lots of sp and dont want to lose expensive medical clones while flying cheap ships.
Pinstar Colton
Sweet Asteroid Acres
#14 - 2012-05-23 15:14:31 UTC
IIshira wrote:
I don't see the point of stopping training on your main pilot to train an alt. Unless you have a specific need for an alt on the same account it's just wasted skill points that could have made your main better.


If you are into PI and happen to have access to low/no tax planets via your corp's POCO's you can maximize your PI benefit by training your two alt slots for PI skills (and really basic hauling). With IC trained to IV on all three characters, that is 15 colonies pumping out PI for you. Depending on how much time you wish to spend on PI, you could coordinate your alt's productions to create some rather elaborate P3 and P4 production chains between your 3 characters.

The skill points on your alts aren't 'wasted' simply because you aren't logged on to them, as their colonies are still generating PI for you even while you're on your main.

In the cat-and-mouse game that is low sec, there is no shame in learning to be a better mouse.

Linna Excel
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#15 - 2012-05-29 02:42:17 UTC
Well, I've just got bitten by the exploration bug, so I'm going to be training up my alts on that (they are all in different areas).



Yeay for finding one of those new armor BPCs!

I can has blogging skills!