Skill Discussions

to make isk, do you mine or do you rat?

Neither actually.

You should consider invention/manufacturing/trading.

1. PVE tengu and PvP capital Pilot. Ratting helps fix sec status

2. Cyno alts and subcap PvP. Ratting also fixes sec status

3. Trade, manufacture, probe, salvage, anything that assists the other 2 accounts. Always has good sec status.

Account 1: Combat pilot - rarely gets used
basic trade alt
empty - in case I ever want to purchase a pilot or transfer a pilot from another account.

Account 2: Trader / hauler
basic trade alt
basic trade alt

Account 3: Miner (inactive because mining sucks)
empty
empty

If you can get the bankroll going to support a huge amount of orders, a bunch of trade alts rocks. I made mine back in the day when you had skills on a brand new character so they've never trained a skill but can manage 40 some orders each. Between my main trader who has Tycoon IV and the 3 trade alts I can post around 400 orders; not that I ever do. That's too much work!

Account #1
Main PVP char
Dodixie alt
Rens alt

Account #2
PVE / WH char
Amarr alt
My-gf-wanted-to-try-char-creation-alt

Account #3
Trader alt
Miner / salvager / prober / hauler / whatever alt
<-- Troll alt, also watches Jita.

1) mission/mining/manufacturing/logistics
2) mission/better mining/refining/corp-ally
3) perfect orca/perfect noctis

Depends on the SP of the characters.

People seem to start most of the time with 2x combat 1x cyno or capital accounts. Combat /indy/cyno seems also pretty popular starting option.

After some years all your accounts can do what you need. After you pass approx 45 mil SP branching out starts to be attractive and after about 60 to 75 mil SP you most likely have already pretty decent skills on a char in many "professions".

I have something like 5 or 6 accounts. I'm atm "on break" however, so I have only few of those active.

In my opinion two accounts is the most optimal number for playing EVE. You can be still almost as effective as when flying solo with two accounts per account. Three and more - you start losing effectivity per account in most combat situations. Mining - about 6 to 8 accounts can be still controlled in reasonably efficient manner. For manufacturing related stuff even more as stuff happens mostly offline anyway.

Back when I ran three accounts:

Mining crew:
ACC 1 and ACC 2 each with a Hulk, ACC 3 the Orca

PVE Crew
ACC 1 mission main, ACC2 support main, ACC3 salvager

Other Crew
ACC 1 research/manufacture ACC2 Trade ACC 3 explore

However with Incarnarage my machine could no longer handle it all and I left for months. Now I am back with just my main and with the changes to PI and such I see little reason to restart the other two accounts.

Oh, and I had at least one Corp leader on each account to deal with decs.

Back when I had three accounts:

Account1
-Miner/Industrialist (first char) [training]
-trade alt (Jita)
-cyno

Account2
-Covert Ops specialist (explorer) [training]
-trade alt (Rens)
-cyno

Account3
-Combat/Carrier [training]
-trade alt (Amarr)
-hauler

Today I have one account because I found that keeping up with more than one made eve a job.

Account
-Miner/Industrialist/Combat
-trade/hauler alt (Jita)
-forum posting alt

Train as much ISK as possible, then sell him in a year for several billion ISK.