Thursday, May 16, 2013

Dual Character Training. I Thought We Had That Already!

By now everyone has seen the post! http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/dual-character-training/  By now if you are like me you already don't care about it. I mean the title alone made many a capsuleer prematurely excrete some pod  juice but once I read  the explanation, it left a lack luster feeling.

"Case 1: You have an alt and you just need a few days or weeks of training but you can't be bothered with logging into your main, pausing the skill training, logging out and then back in again to resume training on your alt. That or you simply don't want your +5 implanted, carefully EVEMon-planned main character to stop training.

Case 2: You need an alt, you create a new account, pay a signup fee, a month, two or three, then train the alt. After all requirements are met for the alt to do it's new job efficiently, you transfer it to your main account, i.e. consolidate, and pay a transfer fee. Sooner or later you're facing Case 1 because after all, your industry alt will need to invent new things, your market alt will need higher order capacity and your cyno alt could be turned into a covert cyno alt. Then later a covert recon cyno alt... then later, well you know where this is going.

A simple solution to this is to offer users to enable secondary training slots on their accounts using PLEX."

These 2 case points, to me, feel like an attempt to make us think they are doing us a service. But in reality they aren't giving us anything we didn't already have in just a different form! For instance case 1. How many people really, on a regular basis, train in this fashion? I can pretty much say very little and be correct without even checking. The only reason to train like this is if you are on a budget or just need a quick little ship to do something specific. My opinion of case 1 is that they just needed another point because it holds no true point for the majority of eve players. Now to be far about case 1, it is convenient indeed for those that want to do a easy 30 day train here and there. Buying a plex in this manor 2-3 times out of the year just to get a character into something more useful to you is great. Training 2 characters on 1 account is what we have asked for, right? Well yes, we did, but I'm pretty sure we had a more permanent thought in mind. The only reason I see to stop a main from training is because you have reached a point where you are fine with what he can do.

Now to point 2. Its a much better point than 1 that's for sure, but it has its flaws. First lets look at what people do with their alts. Scout, cyno, freighter, booster, and industrial/pvp depending on what your main is. Pretty standard imho but how many of these are you going to have on the same account? On average everyone has at least 2 account and 3 accounts being a close second. I would assume that the characters that will need the most amount of training up keep would not be on the same account. Surely a cyno/scout alt wouldn't be on the same account as the cap and/or jump freighter pilot. Surely a booster alt won't be on the same account as the pvp pilot. Point I'm trying to make is that they are saying save your plex that you would use to transfer accounts to buy a plex to  train 2 characters for 1 month even though in most cases you aren't going to transfer those characters anyways. By doing this we will avoid a new account start up fee and save 1 billion isk. WHAT A DEAL! Not. Most players no matter what are going to get a second account or already have multiple accounts and this doesn't affect them any. The players already have a system in play that is sufficient and honestly, more beneficial to us.

Most of my corp mates and myself have alts which are on separate accounts. Those accounts are paid for with plex that we buy with isk. Some pay for all accounts with plex but I only pay for one with plex. Either way, if we want to train multiple toons on those accounts the isk we spend is doubled which in turns mean we must make double isk to compensate. Living in a wh isk isn't an issue but its not as easy to make isk in other places. It would seem the best way to deal with this is to consolidate characters. Well that would imply we needed to buy more plex to make the transfers so more isk spent there, or the other route and buy the plex with real money which opens up another argument as well!

Are CCP after our money? Simply put yes. They have to make money if we wont to continue to play space pirates. They have to turn a profit to pay employees and maintain the servers. That's the simple truth. The hard truth is that, like any other company, they aren't satisfied with enough. And that's not a completely bad thing. If they make more money than they could grow, hire more devs and get more shinnies out for us to play with (or fix all the area's that need fixing). Instead we still have things that need to be done and nothing is happening. To say they are implementing this training for plex just to rake in the cash is a bit over board. To say its a big factor in the release hits the nail on the head. You have a lot players that don't make enough isk to use for a plex but will want to dual train, players that make enough isk for one plex to pay for accounts but not 2 to do the dual training, and then you have the players that use real money to buy plex to sell for isk. These players will have to, in some way, spend more real money to compensate for this change. (This is an obvious assumption that they want to dual train.) But to assume that CCP didn't take this into account is just ignorance. TBH to implement this now just screams "show me the money."

The way it should be done is simple. Give us a permanent dual training system with stipulations. You choose which toon is main and which toon is alt. The main gets everything like it is now. The alt has all training times doubled. If they still want their money then allow a plex to shorten the alts training times but not enough to train at the normal speed. Would this be the ideal method for everyone? No, but it would be so much closer to what the players have asked for over the last 10 years. But instead what we get is a fresh paint job over a system the players have been using for years. The only true difference is CCP's way costs more.

In this case id suggest to everyone to stick with our methods of alt training and don't buy into CCP.

No comments: