Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I was pondering the idea of my trade alt today. Once the skill training for that character is completed I have no real desire to keep that account running; so I will likely transfer the character and have a dead slot on my main account. And then begin training something entirely different just for the fun of it or let that account lapse until I have something I want to train.

Now this is all well and good; but it made me wonder about the age old question of multiple characters training at the same time. I know this is a topic done to death; but I was wondering about subscription options at the same time. CCP and the CSM had discussed this during the latest summit (Microplex, etc.)

What if:

1. A base subscription costs $10 / PLEX equivalent.
2. For each character you want to train up to all 3; add $5 / PLEX equivalent.

This means if you wanted one character trainable, you'd pay $15 (Same as a current subscription). If you wanted all three training you'd pay $25 per month. On the longer duration subscriptions I think the $10 base price should be adjusted, but the $5 per character training fee should remain static.

There are two problems I see with this:

(a) It makes training multiple characters easier. This is primarily not desirable because it reduces the amount of interaction and reliance on other players. Easily circumvented by multiple accounts, but that has a commensurately higher cost.

(b) It is a relatively cheaper way to train additional characters. This may have a very negative impact on the character bazaar where a years' training sells for a few billion ISK. There is a disconnect between the character training cost in real world $ value and the value of the trained character.

In any event, one of those shower thoughts in the morning.

The current fee setup is simple: $15/month for each character you want to train. If you want to coalesce your flock of trained-up characters to one account, it's $20 per character to transfer to a different account.

Being able to train SP on a character is the service of value being supplied. Why would CCP cut off their money supply by giving you SP accumulation for less than $15/month? It's easy to see that SP accumulation is valuable, because there seems to be at least one suggestion a month for options that allow SP accumulation on multiple characters on an account for less than $15/month + $20 transfer fee.

Specialise your character, and you'll be meeting your goals by the time you have 20-30M SP trained. After that, every SP trained is gravy.

When ever this idea comes up, (very often) people most always think they should pay less for training chars on the same account.

Even though this would benefit me greatly, I have to say hell no. I don't wish to reduce CCP's income with this idea ever. If they were to change it, then full price is what you should pay for each char training.

I have all three slots filled with active, productive characters on all my accounts. Anyone engaged in industry will have alts for research, invention, and manufacturing. The number of jobs you can have active encourages spreading the load over multiple characters. The other two character slots are useful for specialist services too: for example the NPC corp alt who can fly a freighter load of supplies to your hisec station without being intercepted by the corporation that is currently wardeccing your industrial corp.

People who live in w-space will have a number of alts flying covops frigates with probes living permanently in their system, as insurance against accidentally getting shut out of the w-space system they call "home".

The two other characters on my account are trained for research, invention and manufacturing. That training time was taken away from my own schedule, including the time to train up learning skills back in the day. I managed to train those characters without having conniptions about my "main" not accruing SP.

Perhaps other people have to look at the value proposition of having the alts accruing SP instead of the "main". Why do they want to train that character? Would it be cheaper to buy a suitable character from someone else? Will they really miss that 10M SP from their main?

If you're not enjoying playing your main right now, why is that? Are you fixated on flying something you can't fly yet? Why aren't you looking at what you can do, rather than what you can't do? Why do you feel the urge to fly that ship which will take a solid year of training? Why aren't you looking at what fun you can have with the ships you can fly?

One option I would accept is the ability to "unlock" multiple training on your account through spending a PLEX or three. Then you would pay one PLEX a month for each slot that you want to have training this month (over the 1 active training character we already have). That's still cheaper than running a second account and transferring the character over (4 PLEX to transfer characters into the two vacant slots).

What it boils down to, from my perspective, is that suggestions about training multiple characters on an account are a short-sighted attempt to bypass the 2 PLEX transfer expense. Training a significant amount of SP on a character will take significantly longer than two months, so the 2 PLEX to transfer back to the main account is minor compared to the cost of the accumulated SP. Thus the people who are suggesting ways of bypassing the 2 PLEX transfer cost are displaying a deep lack of planning capacity.

These people who cannot plan further forward than three minutes really need to HTFU and develop some life skills. Go to the kitchen and boil an egg. Sit and watch it boil, time it for 2 minutes. If you start getting impatient and distracted by thoughts of other things (such as how much you'd prefer to be playing EVE or chasing the dragon than watching this egg boil), you really should seek professional help because you are likely suffering from attention deficit disorder, psychosis, or perhaps are displaying the symptoms of addiction.

The CSM support the idea of multiple characters training because there is a direct benefit to them for doing so. These are the same people who suggested wormhole stabilisers, who believed that a jump bridge nerf would destroy null sec, who believe that nerfing super caps will destroy null sec, who believe that Faction Warfare (being a non-nullsec activity) is a great place to beta test sovereignty mechanics (because then it won't break null sec while Sov 3.0 is being developed and tested). They are only motivated by what brings them benefit in-game.

The benefit to the system proposed/supported by the CSM is the lack of requirement to pay the account transfer fee once the training is completed. The penalty is that the character you only ever log in to update the skill plan for, can't be logged in at the same time as any other character on that account. This is not really a penalty for people raising industrial alts, hauling alts, research alts, or alts being raised to be sold on the character market.



Why would a person with a 24 month plan consider the transfer fee to be a significant penalty, after having spent 24 PLEX keeping that account running? Why would someone who doesn't balk at investing hundreds of dollars on their hobby balk at the cost of character transfer? The transfer fee is a barrier to entry in the business of accruing SP on multiple characters simultaneously. Since the barrier is there, there is a clear advantage to those willing to accept the penalty. Removal of that barrier would surely lead to more people training multiple characters on one account.

The market that would benefit the most from the "parallel training" ideas would be the people with less than 6 months of training planned: industrial alts, w-space emergency probing alts, and so forth. These are the people I'm referring to with my egg-boiling impatience scenario. The impact of such a feature on the game will be felt by industrialists, researchers, haulers, w-space invaders, and character traders.

The current penalties are either accepting a character transfer fee, or halting training on the "main" character in order to train up the "alt". These are very small penalties to pay for the advantage of an alt that is useful for something.

Having a benefit that outweighs the penalty is not a "win-win" situation, it's a profit situation. Who are you in contest with that you are "losing" due to the character transfer fee or one-character-training being a greater penalty than any benefit you might gain?

Perhaps a fairer solution would be to remove the two extra character slots?

TL;DR -

Simple math for me... $25 for three character to sell on the bizarre vs $45 for three of the same qualified SP characters.
Same goes for using PLEX as payment, except that PLEX (as of right now) cannot be broken into smaller parts.

PLEX cannot be used to acquire long term price reductions in subscription fees. PLEX discussion are for breaking it into smaller chunks for payment on partial fee items, not combining PLEX for 12 month subscription discounts.

Character bizarre would be overrun with alts that can fly a Tengu payed for with cheaper than normal rates for a better profit.
It would be a major win for me, and PLEX becomes more inflated that it already is.