EVE New Citizens Q&A

There are game mechanics that cater to alts. With the right number of alts in the right place doing the right thing, you can plex an account per hour. Everything after that is just padding the wallet of your main.

Alts are a Faustian feature. A deal between CCP and us. Alts are a pay to win feature that make the game worse, but without them CCP never would have had the capital to build the game into what it is today.

Or maybe I'm blowing smoke and have a spai alt spyin on everyone including my own alts, which is the end meta of the spai game.

I have 3 accounts just to train the other 2 alts up on industry just have another 3+ months left reason for this then I merge them to 1 account then plan to make money on industry then make wads of ships and then go have wads of fun that way I hopefully should not have to worry about money

Alts are definitely a thing in eve. You can play eve without alts if you want, but you certainly handicap yourself if you do. For instance, you cant see outside of stations while docked, so why not keep a cloaked alt outside to tell you what's going on? You cant tell what is on the other side of that gate or wh that you want to jump your expensive ship through, so why not scout it in a disposable alt? Camping a gate or station can be boring, why not box another account making isk while waiting for something to happen? Then there are hauler alts, research/manufacture/mining alts, booster alts, cyno alts; the list is endless. Sure, like with most mmos, you can get friends/corpmates to fill the roles of your alts, but then you are beholden to the whims and timetables of others.

Let's say I'm sitting in a belt mining for 10 million ISK an hour. Do that 20 hours a week, and I have my PLEX to let me play for free. Do that 30 hours a week, and I have my PLEX plus my 400 million ISK. AND, it is very non-attention intensive.

So, I create an alt. With 2 accounts, same 30 hours a week mining, I have 2 PLEX and 800 million ISK extra.

Then I realize my 2 toons are spending a lot of time warping to and from station to unload. So I start a 3rd toon just to haul for the 2 miners (51 days free with buddy invite yourself to game). But end up training that toon to be a miner also. So now I'm mining on 3 accounts, same 30 hours a week. Making enough to PLEX all 3 accounts and have 1.2B a month ISK left over.

So I start a 4th account (51 days free) to be a hauler, but instead of taking that one the mining route, I take it the booster route and put it in the belt boosting and hauling. Now I'm PLEXing all 4 accounts with 1.6B a month extra ISK, from the same 30 hours a week play time.


Then you're in null, and all those toons are not only mining, but also have alts on each account, so you have 12 toons doing PI, running manufacturing jobs, cranking out super capitals and inventing T2 ships, and running 1000 market buy and sell orders and....

Then you get burned out, unsub all your old accounts, and start a new trial account to remember how simple the game was when you had 1 toon on 1 account, and skills took 8 mins to train instead of 80 days.

The game does not just encourage alts a little bit, it does it a lot. The power of two is directly promoting alts, and supers are pretty impossible without them, and capitols in general to a lesser extent.

For some of us its a way to play in our respected TZ with our friends with some flexibility. My main can fly dreads, and minmatar recons, my other account can fly cald HACs and HICs. Sometimes i just need cloaky eyes. Othertimes i am fully multiboxing. It permits our smaller corp to do what we could not do otherwise. Then there are always links. Links are pretty fantastic.

Oh sure there is the more friends things. And believe me we would prefer it. Multiboxing a carrier, dread and webs on a botched double escal spawn in a C5 is less fun than it sounds.

In fact that is my number one objection to people that complain about multiboxing. IT is far far less effective than the same number of real players. 2 ships are flown with a good multiboxer at about 80% effective and a normal boxer at something like 60%. 5 accounts is much less.

And i also totally reject the premise that it is pay to win. First of all please define win? win what? a carrot? 1B isk? a banana? Oh you mean someone blew up your internet space pixels and you have defined that as losing?

I know people that are strictly one account and love the game and don't care about multiboxers. I know one guy that is -10 and doesn't even have a 2nd character and is loving the game. He is also a dam good PvPer.

There is absolutely no need for alts. I would say that most of the things that people use alts for is most of the less fun things.

Alts are often used for:
Lighting cynos when moving stuff around.
Hauling ore for a mining toon
scouting ahead.
cloaky boosting
recon.

An alt is a really great thing for skilling.

If you have 1 avatar and you want it to be a miner + pve + pvp + industry + trader and all with perfect skills, it just gonna takes ages and by the time your main is trained to do that, you left EVE a long time ago by boredom or burn-out.

Why not skill 1 avatar for pve + pvp + scanning and another for mining + industry + trading or maybe 3 avatars (1 trader with perfect refining and building skills where you can contract your mined ore to with your 2nd avatar and in the meantime join some FW of incursions with your 3rd?). After a time you can dismantle 1 avatar (by the time your miner is skilled enough to a perfect trader and refiner for instance).
It safes time, you make more isk with it, and have more time to play EVE then looking at an asteroid for ages..

If you want to play the game and have fun, decide what you want to do. But don't make it a jack of all trade (it can do everything but is not good at everything)
I lost months of training to skills things i never use and need.

I can actually name a few.

Why, because I would do the same for them if needed (it helps if you can offer something in return when asked).


Hell, I had friends that dropped their gametime for that day, just to help me move my capitals around when needed. Which was about 1.5 - 2 hours work BEFORE the jump changes. Knowing that if they ever needed my help, I would be there for them.



If you haven't got people like that, they aren't friends.

Then, presuming PvP, battle fit him and fly as a battle pair. Or set him up for hauling in an orca on grid as its almost as boring as mining.

Of course not. The alts have to be on separate accounts. The definition of "alts" that we use is "not my primary character", regardless of which account the alts are on.

CCP published some statistics in the past saying that the average number of accounts per player in this game is 2. That means a few people are running 3, 4, 15 accounts, and others are running just 1.

Personally, trying to control more than one character feels too much like work for me, so I tend to only play 1. But I do have a website posting alt (Hi).