Let me give you some background so you know where I’m coming from, but I completely acknowledge that the game I’m about to reference is VERY different regarding both alts and industry (crafting) and that’s why this may be a dumb question.
I just quit WoW. I never really liked it but it was my first MMO and my sister played. The part I moderately liked was earning cash. I was good at it. I made about a token a week.
The thing is that I had 6 alts that worked together to make anything I wanted. Now, WoW is very different in both how alts work and the restrictions on industry, but any other version of my WoW system would induce constant logging in and out and misplaced materials.
Eve is harder in this respect since you can’t simply mail materials everywhere, the markets aren’t global (er…universal?) and it takes FAR longer to train up a industry focus. The alt types that I hear about also don’t obviously fit into the same lanes, with one or two exceptions (Ratting/PvP, Mining/Processing, perhaps).
So my question is: How should one arrange the industry focus on alts in order to maximize efficiency? Clearly a combat focused alt would be a thing since there are so many skills and ships to learn, but do you combine research and invention? PI and exploration? Mining and production? Trading and hauling? Is it just as reasonable to put it all on one character as it is to spread it across 3? Do you have 6 accounts with each focussing on one portion of ISK making? I’ve heard someone say to put PI on every character and differentiate from there…heck, I have no idea nor do I know if this would even make sense.
The flip side of this question would be: “What skills should I NOT pair together?”
Thanks for listening, I hope you can provide some insight, and thank you for your comments!
I dunno, man. All I know is I’ve found that even though every alt I started I intended to specialize in something or other, they’ve all ended up as generalists, training pretty much everything. Except capitals. Haven’t gone there yet.
The science skills and manufacturing skills almost need to be on o e character because of prereqs to build higher end ships and these skills can take along time to get. Mining and reprocessing can be there own. Trading and hauling can be another. I would train them all for PI since within a month or so you can have what you need for some decent chains.
Overall though you will want more slots to build and research so you will want to spend some time on all of them to get slots.
This was pretty much exactly what I was looking for, thank you!
How would other ISK making strategies fit in here, i.e. exploration and/or ratting? Though I’m not convinced either of those are really scalable, or if they are, time efficient. Seems more “something to do” rather than “reliable way to make ISK”, though I don’t know jack at this point…
Exploration can be one fun when doing hacking and relic sites. If you find the covert sites you can make some decent isk as well with rare BPC which will go well with manufacturing since you could then build said item and then sell.
Instead of working things out from the micro level and branching out to the macro level try to decide what are you going for along with the time to reach that goal?
Had you looked at what part of the market in Eve that would help you reach that sort of goal?
Is the ISk making your end game objective or are there parts you wish to focus on, like ship building, structures, etc or something like that within New Eden.
Mission running., Mining, Scanning, Hauling, the list can go on and on and sometimes the starting goal changes as you find yourself cutting corners due to not having that Macro level worked out from the get go.
Myself I had started via wanting to be a bounty hunter, quickly turned into a mining character then a mission runner, then back to mining and ship building.
Though as of late due to a war dec last month and a change of direction in my mining / ship building goals I had branched out and now increasing 10 fold by focusing on skill point farming.
Though the market might shift and place me back into mining / ship building as that is where my main goal still has me seeing over the horizon.
So, the big picture for me would be to have 3 useful alts on one Omega account. If I make enough ISK for a second, so be it, but that’s not a goal and I’ll cross that bridge if and when I get there. I have no issues paying to play the game, i.e. maintain the server and other attributes…once a month.
That being said, having a production chain is ideal to maintain flexibility. As far as I understand it, the production cycle goes from BPO research and invention, then resource gathering, then product manufacturing, then logistics, then sales…not all that different from real life, truthfully, on the macro level.
It is true that I enjoy the market PvP, I’m not looking for micro level advice here as to what to do and where and when. However, it took me several tries to set up the system that I talked about in my OP and if I can avoid that trial and error process that would be ideal. Though, I noticed that no one else had a setup like mine in WoW so perhaps trial and error is all I’m going to get. Fortunately, there isn’t a limit to how many pies a single character can have their fingers in here, so a mistake does not negate the prior effort, unlike in WoW. Surely there are efficiencies to be found in not having one character do all things, however.
I currently have 3 characters per account trained for Production, Science and PI. You can manufacture, research, invent and manage planetary colonies simultaneously and these are all background activities - you only need to login to start and deliver the jobs.
A basic industry ALT skilled for T2 production needs about 10 million SP. Well trained about 20 million. I have a couple of characters with subcap combat and trade skills. They manage my markets and have excellent standing with the sovereign NPC to minimize brokerage. Most of my characters also have several research agents for low cost datacores. They can all fly transports and I do most of my hauling myself.
You really need to share between characters to do industry efficiently in Eve and that requires access to a corporate hanger/wallet. A lot of small industrialists create an ALT corp alone or with some trusted real life friends and either build their own Raitaru or rent offices in someone elses engineering complex. That doesn’t stop you from placing a character in a player corp for social gameplay.
I can’t quite tell if you mean all 3 characters are trained for all 3 or if you mean one character focused on each. I suspect the latter, but want to make sure. Given that they are all background activities you could easily mean the former.
Other than that, it sounds like you have a good setup going, but that it takes quite some time to get it all together. I’m sure you don’t haul stuff around in a basic freighter!
Would you make any recommendations to a new player that may save some headache down the road?
Also, it sounds like you let someone else do the mining for you?
After 5 years all characters on each account are fully trained for research, production and PI - most have a bit more than 50 million SP. You don’t need level 5 skills to do industry profitably but, once you’re earning enough to PLEX the multiple character training - why not?
I make low m3 products - mostly drones, modules and capital BPC kits. I can haul that stuff in Blockade Runners. For bulky stuff I use a DST, if I need a freighter load of anything, I’ll contract Red Frog.
I haven’t done any mining for several years. Back when Mindlinks gave a 15% boost, I used to take a couple of skiffs out and mine Plagioclase - Mexallon was extremely valuable at the time and it was a worthwhile use of time with the boost. Now I buy my minerals.
As a new player, I started with T1 rigs, added mobile depots and MTU’s and then graduated into T2. I made a lot of ISK on T3 destroyers when they were first launched but that market saturated quickly. I use https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/blueprint/ to decide whether a product is worth building - if people paying Jita sell order prices can build it profitably - so can I!
Alts can learn research and industry skills, to alleviate the cost of the bpos (time).
All my alts have +5 implants and manufacturing/TE/ME +6(I think ? the middle one), advanced laboratory operation 4 and most are either training V or already trained it.
Also all have the “physics” skills lvl 3 , capital ship construction III , anchoring (3 I guess ? to create structures), at least 9 manufacturing slots, all the time-related skills for manufacturing and research V, rigging III (to search and craft capital rigs) ;
Most also have PI skills maxed but not all and I don’t intend to max it on them (not worth the time)
3 alts also have trading skills (not maxed), I intend to max trading skills for an alt in each HS trade hub (though I only craft in Jita)
Yeah…it LOOKS like a lot more because when you start there is more, but everything for the last 14 years is obsolete and you really only need to know about the current items, of which there are not all that many. A few kinds of ore, fabric, and herbs and then very direct transitions to products. Another difference is that you can’t do more than two professions at a time. It would be like you could do research and pi, but that’s it.
From what I gathered from what has been mentioned that I should probably use my Omega slots to train PI, but otherwise just focus on one single character for now. Since I have MCT per the recent deal but don’t plan on purchasing it again, I’ll probably also add in Research and Manufacturing to an alt, but that’s more happenstance than a plan. I’ll see how much time I have left on the MCT once PI is done to determine how to proceed.
My other alts right now will remain alpha and be used to buy BPOs and shuttle them to a drop off point, mini-hauler alt, but with 15 cubic meters. There’s a couple of extra slots for that, but oh well.
Do spiral training. Basically train a level in everything then train the next level. If you want to focus you can start to. Most lvl 1s take less than 14min
Literally the worst advice.
Don’t ever do that.
If you have a rare occasion to train an alt : trading is always a good idea unless you already have some. Hauler, too.
It’s 125k gold to buy a token now. I didn’t actually buy the tokens until a couple of days ago. I had 1.5M in the bank, but now my sister won’t have to pay out of her pocket for a year. Basically, I bought one material at a set price or lower whenever it was available and did what we call a “shuffle”, where you create an item, destroy that item, create another item, destroy that item, and either sell what you get from that or do what I did and create another item after that. Except for the first step each step was profitable, so I turned 20k gold worth of cheap material into 150k worth of items. It would take a few hours due to the slowness of the process, but you can semi-afk it. Since each step was profitable I just made as much as I could buy the materials for the price I wanted them.
The real secret to my success was using the third party addon “TradeSkillMaster” effectively and being able to do basic coding/algorithms to have the system do the decision work for me and always sell for a profit. I had more fun working with “Spreadsheets in Azeroth” than I did any other part of the game.
That wasn’t during the most recent patch, though, where they added new items and made the current products obsolete. Which, imo, is about as stupid of a mechanic as you can get. Given that it’s such a popular game I thought that maybe there was something in endgame that is wondrous.
I found that in reality, I just really hated the entire game. The concept, the design, the playerbase, etc. Just had to experience a new patch coming out to really recognize that fact.
