EVE New Citizens Q&A

Yes you can diversify on one character, the basic trade skills don't take long to train and will only eat into a small part of your training time. Time spent training the basics of a career path are never wasted, because you can upgrade them when you have the time or inclination. You can choose to have specialist alts at a later stage, even then the basic trade skills are handy for buying and selling stuff on any character.

Most people can do multiple things with one character, many mission runners will also do exploration and trading on their missioning character.

Most players will get "off-career" skills on their main eventually.

Whether it's better to use a 2nd character or your main, consider:

1) Whether you train trade skills on your main or your alt, in both cases you have to stop training combat skills on your main.

2) More skill points means a more expensive medical clone - if you get into a career where you lose your pod often (i.e. PvP in null-sec or wormholes), it might be cheaper to train those secondary professions on an alt.

3) Your main is where he is, while an alt can be elsewhere. This is IMO the most important difference. E.g. refining skills - if you run missions, you will loot a lot of garbage and it's nice to be able to refine that where your main is. So it makes sense to train refining skills on your main if you do missions. If you want to station trade, it's good to be at some trade hub, so you'd want to have an alt for that who's sitting in that trade hub. OTOH if you want to sell the loot you collected from combat, you'd want trade skills on your main. For production, you want to be where your blueprints are, so an alt is better. Etc

But when you're starting out, I'd focus on one career. Or start a couple of alts to see what career you like best. Remember that if you buddy invite yourself you get 51 days of play time almost for free. (It's not entirely free, because you get 51 days on the alt + 30 days on your main for ~15$, while otherwise you can get 30 days on your main for 11$ with a 12 months subscription.)

It takes some more time but you dont have to be "maxed" in everything to be efficient in the professions you want to try/do.

I only have one character (this one) and i am able to do everything i want to do without having to worry about it.
But as others have said, certain professions dont take that long to skill to the point you need. Trading, mining, hauling and industry are all professions that (when you look at the big picture) dont take as much time to "max out", as other professions.

That is actually very good advice. I already have that alt made and with some trading skills already trained so it doesn't hurt to do that.Thanks for the tip!

LMAO!! Yeah I know man, but its just the OTHER layer of patience that I can't handle but yeah... I'm cool with it now. Instant patience came to me!!

i have this one char who can fly hulk, orca, fenrir, prowler, noctis, covops, has perfect probing, good PI, manufacturing and market skills AND near perfect small railgun skills to run the sisters epic arc. he's my bitch essentially.

Thank you all for the advice. Yeah I think I'm just going to go with an alt to be quite frank. I'll put my main on hold and fund my alt with my main for his skill books as a In Station Trader. Who knows maybe I'll even bite the bullet and get PLEX to do it.

PS- You might want to reconsider rifters. Once upon a time they were the best frigate, but with the rebalance they became middle of the road. That said they are good at a lot of things which is good for a new pilot. But flying them tends say I don't know what I'm doing.