I do this because it’s a real pain in the ■■■■■■■ ass getting my bank to stop whining about “fraud prevention” when i try and pay CCP directly for subs.
That is a liiiiiiiitle bit of a problem as Alpha accounts are still using up about if not the same amount of resources on the server.
Which has to be taken into consideration.
1O will stand for 1 Omega account
and
1A will stand for 1 Alpha account
and
[[OASRAU] - [4.0]] will be a base Omega account server resource allocation unit. [for demonstration purposes]
and
[[AASRA] - [3.7979]] will be the base Alpha account server resource allocation unit.[for demonstration purposes]
Throw in the brand new player that knows… Virtually nothing about EVE. [Fair enough?] 1A=3.7979 =AASRA
How long before they get invested enough before realizing they need to be getting serious by creating a second email for an alt?
Not long. and then there where 2A= 3.7979 x2 = 7.5958 AASRA
and they start to get invested in the game. {Time investment}
How long before they realize that they have sub optimally trained {a character/pair of characters} and it is going to block them from experiencing the whatever race it is that they did not specialize in and borked in the trial?
About…4-6 months give or take.
Ooops.
Then meet a vet like you who says, start over and make 4 alts or go Omega.
So player wanting to get a better Idea about what each race can really do without investing money into the game, does what you suggest.
4A= 3.7979x4= 15.1916 AASRA
They probobly wont throw away their original characters with the time they have invested into them, so we are up to 6 so far.
6A= 3.7979x6= 22.7874 AASRA
Now, it will take around 4-6 months more or less depending if you optimize your attributes for one race.
{if you even know anything about them or messed around with them at all or use implants etc.}
So, now for possibly a year, a player has been trying to learn what each race is really about and learn their strengths and weaknesses, debating is the game really worth the cost.
Having had to make no less than two accounts to play and operate effectively and invested a huge amount of time and effort already in the game just to see what each race can truly do…
The server is loaded down
and the new player wonders… I’m restricted as an alpha, unable to train certain skills… Ok I get that, it is only an unlimited trial… But why does the trial not cover all four races? 
This is very inefficient.
I spent all this time and effort learning about all four and finally come to conclude that this one {Insert whatever race} is the one and play style I like…
But I had to do all this finagling to do it…
Now I have 6 accounts but only need 2 for what I want to do…
What do I do with these 4 extra accounts that I spent all this time working on?
…
A hard cap that lets me train all four races to the maximum demo skill caps LV4 on ships an LV 3 on others etc would have ment I only needed 2 trial accounts instead of 6!
This is stupid! >:frowning:
{Meanwhile in CCP}
We have a large number of new players! 6000! The server AASRA is at 22787.4 
We are having a hard time handling them all!
{Actually only 1000 who did as the one we showcased before} 7595.8 AASRA
This could be done so much better to prevent this kind of strain on the server. 
and make catching botters easier.
You’re talking about data on a harddrive or whatever. It’s cheap and readily available.
Take for example how every inactive character that still exists (which is a lot since ccp don’t really delete them) became active again when alphas were implemented. The amount of characters there are is unlikely to ever be an issue.
You also don’t need to train all the way to 5mil sp to get a feel for a ship/playstyle. I’m pretty sure you can train all frigates, dessies and cruisers to 4 on under 5mil sp. So if you train them to 3 you can definitely get a good investment of support, guns, missiles and drones on one char. You can then further train it by paying or if you don’t want to pay, start again (what do you expect when it’s free?)
Or, you can make unlimited accounts and try a different playstyle on each one whilst they train simultaneously.
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Honestly, if I played for free, I’d still make multiple accounts regardless of the training cap and max SO. 4 characters means you get to train ship and weapon skills in parallel, which is a lot more efficient. In fact, even though I am omega I still made a minmatar and an amarr alphas to mess around with things.
Also, I doubt the information for alphas is a stress data wise compared to vets who have billions of items all over the cluster. CCP struggles with handling 6k players in one system (processor/ram limitations on a node), sure, but as was mentioned above, hard drive capacity is really not much of an issue nowadays. Except for the portrait which is probably a kind of large resolution picture and your 3d avatar, everything else probably fits on a floppy disk 
More likely a double-sided high density CD. Floppies were tiny, remember?
Nope, only the stuff you put into your client at home is cheap. While good performing server space got cheaper it is not like “just buy a couple of 1TB drives and be done with it”. Backup got cheaper, but serverspace still has it’s price that has to be coverd by some revenue.
Do you think space will ever be an issue?
The question is not
But
“How much of an issue is space and more importantly How much of an issue is processing power?”
The last part being one of the bigger problems.
It’s the same thing.
Will the amount of characters ever cause performance issues? I very much doubt it. A character merely existing, logged off or doing nothing, is a negligible load on the server, if any.
Yes, look at major battles, but overall?
In theory, you would be right.
…
But…
If the number of characters that have been logged in at some point within the span of time that CCP considers an account active exceeds the normal server operating capacity, you get people who get kicked off the server and have to relog.
Meaning that CCP must always reserve capacity for a surge of logins from accounts considered to be within the margin of active accounts that need to be serviced at any given time.
Once the servers capacity to handle that many clients, is exceeded it has to make decisions over who stays and who gets kicked.
It is already an issue.
It has always been an issue.
CCP has just figured out a few tricks to make it less apparent than anywhere else in MMO history.
You know eve used to have twice as many, and more, people logged in at a single time than it does now, right? Never had issues then.
You know CCP used to rent expensive servers and processing power for EVE to handle surges in population and client dropping was rampant in comparison to now, right?
CCP has greatly reduced it’s operating costs by running only it’s own servers more regularly.
… it’s to keep you from using alphas to farm them. That’s the entire reason the sp minimum exists
Then make extracters not work on someone until they have x amount of XP that is beyond what an Alpha can train to… Kinda like now, but with req lock.
No you don’t understand.
Players logged in on a single node can be an issue. But eve is a cluster. We are so far away from the numbers of players being logged in being an issue it’s not worth worrying about. Eve once had over 60k players logged in at once. Everything was fine. I don’t think jita was even laggy.
But even then, thats not what we’re talking about here. You were talking about players creating lots of alphas to try different playstyles at once. Which is even less of an issue than 60k people logged in at once because you can’t log in all your alphas at once and logged off players are a negligible load, if any. AND since then we’ve had TWO server upgrades.
Number of players in a single fight can cause performance issue yes. Number of players in the game overall? Very unlikely. Number of active characters (not necessarily logged in)? Not even worth worrying about.
CCP should introduce a “lite” subscription just for Alpha clones that’s 50% off. Same 1x training time, same expanded skill queue - but change skill extractors so that they cannot be used on Alphas (only Omegas). Make it only a yearly option @ $60 or something (no monthly or quarterly).
This would make Alphas cost-prohibitive for SP farming and at the same time allow Alphas to train skills past the 5m SP cap (up to the new expanded skill pool).
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