Alpha SP cap for ex-Omegas...wat do?

New Citizens Q&A
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I have two accounts, one currently Omega status and one Alpha (I am poor and can’t afford two Omega, FML). The Alpha account has my oldest EVE character, from 2008, who I never really played much beyond a bit of mining with friends but am obviously quite attached to.

So, the problem:

When Alpha clones were reintroduced this seemed like a great opportunity to dust off the old miner and actually play with her. My old mining troupe are long gone from the game, and I’ve never done much PvP, so I figured FW might be fun. I was starting with basically no relevant skills and there’d be a cap on what I could fly & fit as an Alpha, but that was fine. Sadly I managed about 1 day of faction warfare (3 deaths, 0 kills, woop!) before RL events took me away from the game.

Fast forward to now. I’ve come back excited to get stuck in and lose a ton of t1 frigates to the hated enemy. Researched fits and PvP tactics, familiarised myself with ship changes since I was last around etc. Then I log in and discover the new SP cap on Alphas.

Sadface.

This character is stuck at 5.2mil SP, under the 5.5mil limit to use an extractor. Most of those points are taken up in mining and industrial skills, a lot of which are Omega skills so can’t be used. I’m unable to train anything else without using injectors, because she’s over the 5m limit.

This unnecessarily long backstory is basically leading to the following question: When the SP cap was introduced, did any mechanism for re-skilling ex-Omega-but-now-Alpha characters get introduced with it?

At the moment my options seem to be:

a) use a series of skill injectors and extractors to take me over 5.5mil and then extract back down, repeat as necessary until all my Omega-only skills are gone (expensive)
b) go back to mining (ugh)
c) roll a new Alpha and train it up for FW and retire the old one (this would make me sad)

Is there an option d) that I’m missing, or is this just how it is and I need to suck it up? If the latter, is there any way to tell how many points I actually have tied up in Omega-only skills so I can figure out how many rounds of injection & extraction it would take to get rid of them?

Thanks!

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The Alpha skill cap is now 20m.

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IF you don’t mind not being able to learn more on your 2nd account you can use isk to train for 1 month then at the end of the month extract that sp you learned in the month out and sell it then use that isk to plex the next month, you wont make money and you wont really learn new stuff but at least you can keep your old character omega.

If you choose this route then you only have to farm 1.6bil to plex that account once then it’ll keep paying for itself.

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I think beyond 5mil you have to start using injectors, though, can’t just train normally.

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That…might just work :o

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You have the option of Small Skill Injectors now.

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Just to clarify I have no problem with there being a SP cap and needing to use injectors beyond it, it’s fine for new Alphas. It’s just a bit more complicated for ex-Omegas with unusable skills under the new regime.

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Just remember to use +4’s x 2 for the main attributes of the skills your learning to at least break even, I use intelligence + memory and learn science + production. +5’s will make it even easier. Training PI alts on the other 2 slots will help you with isk as well :] if you mind putting in the extra investment and time.

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Yeah I’m quickly pricing up this strat now, and feeling a lot less sad (was convinced this would be cost-prohibitive to fix and I’d have to abandon the character).

Thanks muchly!

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Problem: Most advanced mining skills are not alpha compatible, so I presume many of the SP your first toon achieved are useless as long as it’s alpha. If you really want to play with that toon, you have to make it omega again, e.g. with ISK as described above.

If you want to start faction war though, I would strongly suggest to create a new toon, because (s)he needs very different skills for fighting. Every account can be split up with 3 toons, but be aware you only can train one at a time or you have to purchase multiple character skilling. That’s what I did: After bringing my alpha to 5.2m SP, the next toon just started from scratch, completely different race and another skilling aim.

The 20m SP threshold is meant to be the sum of all alpha compatible skills, but you only can skill 5m SP for free.

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I had this issue on my alt (When I lapsed my main account to alpha), he was fully trained up as gallente so when it was in alpha, it was already at 5mil SP, so he couldnt crosstrain. I eventually resubbed so I now have taken the time to crosstrain.

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Not sure why some still spread this confusing misinformation. There is no SP cap for alphas. There is just a defined set of skills (with level caps) they can use and the skill queue will only work until you have 5mil SP.

To tell people there is a 20mil SP cap just confuses them because they think if they have more than 20mil they can’t add SP to skills they don’t yet have in the alpha set because of the non-existing cap.

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Fine. Alphas have an expanded skill pool of 20m SP.
They can train up to 5m SP for free at which point they will need to use inectors or temporarily upgrade to Omega to acrue additional SP. Ultimately, however - even if they have more than 20m SP they are still limited to the pre-defined pool of 20m as an Alpha.

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I don’t really like a, b, or c. extracting is expensive and you lose sp in the process, if you don’t want to mine don’t, and having any SP on a character there’s a very good chance there’s something useful so rerolling is almost always a bad move. I tried rerolling once, got probably a few 100k into training a new character and thought I already trained all this might as well stick with that other character that already has a few mil SP.

I think I’m going to suggest d, but we still kinda need to define what d means. My main question is what are you doing on your other account that’s omega? Maybe just focus on that and feed the alpha account since you can’t have them both logged in at the same time anyways. Give it a week or two and the alpha should be closer to self sufficiency. Some support skills to 3 or 4, some t2 small guns, and racial frig 4 should give you a decent chance in a lot of the novice plex fights. and if you fleet up that just gives you even better odds. I don’t know who the FW groups are but I’m sure there’s some that take new FW pilots.

Daily alpha injectors are fairly cheap and roughly simulate normal training speeds. they are about 58mil in jita right now, so they are a bit more expensive than paying for a month, but at 58mil it’s much easier to pay as you go.

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That’s precisely it. As for mining, there is a good reason why the good parts on mining are excluded from Alphas. Mining is inherently boring for most and most newbros are here for the epic fleet fights rather than the boring chore of pressing F1 every time a rock depletes.

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