Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Legacy Code™

The launcher is as close as CCP can get without having to delve into the 13+ year old, probably undocumented, code that handles session changes and rewriting it to accommodate a character switch. If they did dive into the code to do so the likelihood is that they'd break something else that they didn't know it affects; it wouldn't be the first time, IIRC POS's occasionally go terminator and kill all of the things including the owners when CCP play with unassociated code.

TL;DR They're not going to spend 6 months refactoring the engine for the minimal benefit of saving a few seconds when switching characters.

And don't forget that we'd also lose out on all the other things they could have done with that manpower/time.

So yeah, would be great if it weren't so damn expensive.

If you leave the launcher open it's probably not even any more clicks to change character than a logout button would need.

With the explanations of why this is not a thing out of the way my mind wanders aimlessly into the mists of computer games past and present while there is discovers something rather interesting. Every single computer game I play or have played requires you to essentially "log out" of one character to be able to start playing another. Some do this by requiring you to return to a menu to select that new character while others use some form of the launcher idea but all of them require that your new game session be reloaded and on average none of them take any more or less time to change characters than EvE does. This aimless wander begs me to ask the simple question if most of the other computer games past and present require some form of log out / log in to change characters what makes you think EvE would be, could be or even should be different?

Getting to a more realistic point and simply accepting that you cannot do what you want, if you are changing characters so often that the time required is a big deal to you then I suggest that you start a second account and have one of the characters transferred to the new account. Not only is switching between them as quick and painless as possible but you can even have both, or even multiple characters online at the same time. Yes I know the whole it is to expensive to have multiple accounts thing. But fear not intrepid EvE player I have ideas for that as well. For each account you want online you have to drop one latte a week, or a couple of beers in a weekend and those are just two of the many ways you can make enough money to have that second account without increasing your monthly expenditures. So while you wait for CCP to change the game it all comes back down to you and what you want most, you can trim you expenditures somewhere else in life so you have money for those other accounts, or you can deal with the log in / log out hassles the choice is yours to make.

If the characters are on different accounts you can play them simultaneously (as long as they are all omega). I'm not sure it would be any faster to simply swap characters since the client would need to purge the data for the old character and load the data for the new one - essentially the same process, you save 1 mouse click.

You are describing a design catastrophe.

No he is describing the usual fall out of code that is more than 15 years old and written by a small company that cannot afford the devs to do a top to bottom re-write every time they make a change to the game.