EVE General Discussion

Convenience.

Wonderful! Now I might actually get some training.

The benefit is specific purpose alt training becomes convenient and doesn't disrupt training of your main. It's also better for alt training at times, since training it on another account requires either continued payments on that account or paying a character transfer fee. More importantly it's not supposed to replace making alt accounts. It's just an alternative way to train alts.

THIS. WILL. DESTROY. EVE!

...because it will make the sub numbers appear to go down (i.e. a sudden and dramatic increase in churn.)

and then the web-o-sphere will hear about the sub numbers going down but won't report on why, and then the financial types will jump on the "omg-subs-are-down-sell-sell-don't-invest" bandwagon, which could impact WoD and Dust by proximity, which means layoffs for CCP which means Eve dies for realsies.

/it's_been_a_great_10_years

It saves you the character transfer cost once the second character's training plan is complete.

-Liang

Here's feedback:

It's a good idea, because it allows flexibility and further options. I can't think of a reason not to like having extra choices in account handling, except to repeat some of the dogmatic concepts regarding the use of alts. But that's rigid thinking.

I think the option will be more popular with veteran players who have learned since starting how the total amount of SP does not determine outcome and this would let a 3-slot account allow for specialization of same-account alts and overall, more fun or objectives without the management of 2 accounts and later movement of characters.

Hopefully this will eventually lead to the end of the limit of 3 characters per account. Of course having seen a lot of savantry, bronyism, and obsessive compulsive disorder/aspergers on the web, some arbitrary limit of characters per account would be necessary lest an entire new server farm be needed for that 1000 players who just have to have 500 alts each, a limit of 3 characters seems a bit small. But then, I'm not in charge of the infrastructure so I don't know.

Overall, being able to train same-account alts while seemingly pointless to the chorus of the dogmatics, merely represents an option that is simply more flexibility and I applaud it.

So far I have yet to see any other game as flexible as this and have yet to see any other MMO producer to be as responding as CCP.

not really.

here's how it works, you trade the ability to log in to both characters at once, for the ability to log in to the second character any time you want even after you've stopped plexing it.

it's a bit of a trade-off really. a character you can't use while another character is online, but one that doesn't require it's own subscription if it's not training anything.

after my initial skepticism i've realised it's actually a really nifty idea.

Seriously, has anyone run this past the high level business types at CCP?

If it this feature reduces sub counts then advertisers and investors would conclude that there are fewer players than expected, which implies that Eve has a smaller marketshare which makes Eve even more of a niche game which makes CCP/Eve a riskier venture to invest in.

Even worse, the increase in PLEX sales could turn Eve that much more of a cash cow, and business folks milk cash cows, they don't invest in them nor do they take risks with them.

Seriously, this could backfire on CCP.

This has been a nice reminder why I don't read these forums too often. Jeez this post is terrible.

The only downside I can see for CCP is that they do lose out on some transfer plexes/fees that some of us have spent way too much on over the years moving alts back & forth to different accounts to train.

I know I could be > 20 bil isk richer if this feature was in place years ago.