Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So, I've noticed that plenty of times I have had ideas for a new character and wanted to make one and play it, but every time I find myself giving up on the idea because it means completely stopping the skill training on my 'main' character to be able to train anything at all on the new character. With three character slots, that can make it really frustrating for those of us on a fixed income without a whole lot of time to spend online to earn the ISK for PLEX to support a second account.

So, this idea is to help out people who want to play more than one character but just can't work the cost of a second account into their RL budget: Shared Skill Queue.

Instead of 24 hours on each, they would have 24 hours each but a shared "active" 24 hours as well.

This shared 24 would work like this:

Player A wants to play two characters, so they start playing them, splitting the time evenly between them. Player A can then queue skills on *both* characters for active training but must split 24 hours of queue time between them. They can do 12hr for Character 1, and 12hr for Character 2, or 20hr for Character 1 and 4hr for Character 2, however they choose to split it. Of course, they still have the option of pausing Character 1 or 2's queue so that they can train skills that take several days. This obviously precludes the possibility of training a skill of level V on two characters at once, but for the casual players who have the time for only one account this allows them to train the lower level skills (I-IV) on two characters at once (or 3, if they really like. 20hr for Character 1, 1 hr for Character 2, and 3hr for Character 3, or however they choose to split it)

Tell me what you think!

When I first read this I thought it was a bad idea. After mulling it over it makes sense. And you don't even need additional limitations for it to be OK.

Just have a standard 24 hour skill queue but dont make it character specific, make it account specific. This way you can have a skill for character 1 in training. Then when you're playing character 2 you can just add a skill to the queue before or after character 1's skill.

There's not any sort of game play issue against this. You don't get additional SPs or training time. You're just able to more effectively use the 3 character slots on an account.

Perhaps

All I know is that I've found having multiple characters on one account to be quite pointless. The skills you can start off with when you make a character (depending on race/type/subtype/etc.) would not take long at all to train into if the character you made didn't start with them.

Why give up training on your main to train another when there is nothing stopping your main from training the exact same skill, in basically the exact same amount of time?


But hey, the idea presented here simply opens up options without really changing the existing functionality. So why not.

+1

I see. Clever. The queue is for the account, bypassing the stopskill-logout-login-startskill rigmarole. It just makes it easier to train the other characters.

I would just let you pull skills from the other characters into the queue. It just would be easier. The queue would be for the account, rather than just one character.

This would make training up a scanning alt easier for WH dwellers.
Maxing out R&D slots would be easier too.
I know some industrialists who train all the characters on the account.
PI, ninja mining, etc. all need few skills and are useful. Even mini-PvP alts.