EVE New Citizens Q&A

1. Jump Clones - This allows you to quickly "jump" from one station to another... so if you have some high sec stuff you do every couple of weeks you can jump to your PI clone... haul PI stuff to Jita and set up sell orders... then jump back to your primary clone the next day. It also allows you to have a clone with expensive implants for less dangerous play and a clean clone for PVP where you get podded a lot.

2. Second (and Third) character on same account - You can set up relatively passive income streams with PI/research/station trading alts with a relatively small amount of training, then log in for an hour or two a week to rake in isk to support your main account.

3. Second account. The above stuff with second and third characters apply. You can also use your second alt to SERIOUSLY aid your main in many ways. Flying a freighter... have an alt checking out for gankers before warping/jumping. Flying a capital ship? Create your own cyno's to jump to. Set traps with one account as bait. Have your second alt fly an orca to boost your primary accounts mining or a logistics ship to boost your combat abilities or a salvager so you can salvage and loot missions as you go easier.

Plenty more I'm sure.

The general guideline is if you don't have a reason for it, you don't need it.
For a second account, in most cases you'd want both to be Omega accounts so that they can be logged in at the same time.

2. Second (and Third) character on same account - You can set up relatively passive income streams with PI/research/station trading alts with a relatively small amount of training, then log in for an hour or two a week to rake in isk to support your main account.


what does this involve?

Advantages of multiple characters:

1. Anonymity. Multiple characters allow you to keep things separate. Useful alts for this: forum-posting alt, PVP/war character separate from PVE / moneymaking character, corp spy alt, corp thief alt, pirate, suicide ganker, etc.

2. Faster training / specialization. It's faster to train one character in Amarr T2 ships and one character in Gallente capital ships, than it is to train a single character first in Amarr T2 and then in Gallente capitals.

3. Location. If you have many alts, one can sit in Jita and watch the market, one in Dodixie, one in Amarr, etc.

4. Bypass the game's hard limits. Each character is limited to 10 production jobs, 10 science/research jobs, and 6 planets for PI, 17 contracts, and some 300 market orders. Thus, if you're heavy production, trading, or PI, you need multiple alts trained because of these limitations.

5. The ability to fly together. Examples: scouting ahead for your loaded transport ship full of loot, cyno beacons for moving your capital ship safely, miner and ore hauler, PVP'er and logistics / ship repairer, and so on.


Disadvantages of multiple characters:

1. Support skills (armor, shields, navigation, targeting, engineering, electronics) and other auxiliary skills must be trained on all character, which costs some ISK and takes some time.

2. If the alts are on multiple accounts, you must pay for Omega for the alts, to keep access to their high skills and ships.

3. Location. Especially if the alts fly together in a fleet, you have to bring all of them to the location, and bring enough spare ships and supplies for all of them to function.

4. Log on / log off. The game forces you to log all the way off, in order to switch to an alt. The UI preferences don't transfer, bookmarks/saved locations don't transfer, etc.


Some examples of common alts:

- Forum-posting alt, for anonymity.

- Market-trading alt - sit in Jita, watch prices, trade.

- Industry / production / PI alts (because of the limits).

- PVE alt separate from PVP alt (because enemies won't stop shooting you just cause you want a break).

- CEO (this will hold your personal corp while your main roams around sowing his wild oats).

- Spy (for other corps, or even for your own corp, to check if other people can bypass the security you've set up for the corp).

- Pirate, suicide ganker (these have a tendency to go -10 sec. rating and be unable to enter high-sec normally).

- Scout.

- Cyno alts. If your main has capital ships, they cannot move safely without cyno beacons to jump to. You can rely on friends and corpmates to provide these beacons, but your own alts are also quite convenient, esp. at odd hours in the night.


What's involved.

1. The alts may need some skill training. You can get PI, trading, transport, scout, and cyno alts for under 5 million SP, so it's pretty simple to just activate multiple character training on a single account, or get a few skill injectors, and train them to 4-5 million points then call them done, all on a single account. On the other hand, for full PVP alt vs. full PVE alt, you'll need extensive training on both, so separate accounts may be better.

2. Separate accounts cost money. Simple enough; you typically need to keep Omega for the more highly trained characters, so it's a question of how many accounts do you need, and how many characters do you need to be able to fly at the same time or keep training for long term.

3. Anonymity. Do you need to keep your alts secret? Almost all corps ask for API access to see what alts you have, do you want them to know about your pirate or your scammer alt? If no, then separate accounts.

4. Interest in the game. Some people lose interest if they have multiple characters, because they prefer to play and identify with a single character, which is totally possible in this game (the game doesn't restrict your skills, you can make a "do everything" character and be fine, it just takes longer). Other people don't identify with their toons, and create multiple characters for multiple purposes.

Yeah it's quite normal.
Not required but certainly useful.

What a lot of us do is use the increas earning potential to buy Plex for the additional account.
Some activities scale like mining.
I have a friend with an 18 account mining operation, it's highly profitable for him provided he mines enough to break even I.e. about 18 billion in a month.

Well you probably don't need to yet.

But I guarantee there will come a time when you realise than an extra pair of hands or eyes will come in handy, and you'll probably realise that sooner rather than later if you continue to play and upgrade to Omega.

This is the best response IMHO. If you don't have a reason for one then why look for one. If you ever come across a need for one then you can start one at that point. Otherwise why worry about it?

I came to Eve from WoW and when I did I was very worried about what I would be doing at "level cap" for "end game content". Once I realized that Eve was not like that it seemed to matter much less. Just play the game and have fun. Everyone can train everything and there really is no reason to worry about potential playstyles now before you even figure out if they fit into your likes and dislikes.

TL;dr
My best advice is that if you don't currently have a reason to start a second account then you should not be worrying about it.

Maybe. Or maybe you'd waste a lot of time and money.

Let's say you decide now to start a second account as

and train a whole pile of science, research and indy skills (which are not Alpha skills)

Then, later when you go to start using that alt, you realise that you *hate* indy with a passion. You've got a useless alt that you invested money into.

There's no 'getting ahead' in Eve. This isn't WoW, race for 80th level (or whatever the max is these days) to be useful. You may never need an alt. You may find later that you need an alt for a purpose that no one here mentioned and you never considered.

I have one account, three characters. It's enough. I had a second account for a while, let it's sub lapse and biomassed the characters.

My view.

Im totally new to this game. I started alpha and hated the game.

After several character builds and redoing tutorial and missions
I got some hang of it.

Now I have 2 omega accounts. Trasch is in one training skills for
joining a nullsec corp and starting some PvP.

The other account is Jon and trains for exploring, doing solo missions
and making ISK (maybe) by treasure hunting.

The reason I did this is because skill training takes LOTS of time, especially
if you want to specialize (level 5).

Different account is better than 2 characters on one 1 account.

Skill training 2 characters on 1 account still cost about 20 euros a month,
but you can only play one at a time.

Im very temped to use skill injectors, will take years before I have skillpoints
to produce them myself.