Easier Swapping Between Characters

I feel certain that this has to have been discussed before, but would it be game breaking to add a button so that I can switch between characters without having to close my client and relaunch eve?
If it already exists someone please help me out and show me how.

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Yes it has been talked about many times and the devs have consistently said that “Yes it actually would be game breaking”.

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It used to exist, but they took it out I believe for a technical reason.
Maybe when they get everything upgraded they can bring it back, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

–Gadget Remembers

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I’ve been playing EvE for quite a while and was aware of it through a friend who played since Second Gen…I have never EVER known this to be the case. The game was designed to allow each character to create a user session when entering the game, to swap characters you have to physically terminate that session and start a new one on another character, while I am sure they could achieve a back to characters button, it would require massive rewriting of core code to do it and I seriously doubt anyone wants to A) Touch that mess and B) risk breaking the game. If a few devs wanted to take it as a secondary project and work off a dedicated server to solve the issues as like a hobby that might be different but don’t hold your breath for it anytime soon.

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The CSM even brought up the idea with the DEVs some years ago. The DEVs flat out said that it would take “5 programmers 6 months of work to save players 10 seconds.”

CCP Karkur wrote:
No. We would love to be able to do that, but that is not at all a “character selection screen” issue.
Once a connection has been made, both the server code and client code make a lot of assumptions that the characterID will not change, and it’s very far from trivial to change that (otherwise we probably would have done that a long time ago)

I think that had already explained the issue.

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I was there when she answered, you could actually see the regret and fear at considering the concept.

Pretty sure it is a no

m

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ccp claims it would take a handful of devs 6 months for a 15 sec advantage. so they wont waste dev time on it, but they will waste dev times on things no body will do because it isn’t profitable (or some other reason) and instead of changing it they abandon it.

I’m not much of a programmer but couldn’t you just type eve.exe on the line before you terminate the active loop. that would just relaunch the game and I could enter an entirely new session by clicking the character I want to be on this time.

slightly separate but related issue, is there a way for me to have my window go to a default position on the screen when I open each different profile group?

You could, but that action can be achieved client side via the player as well I mean honestly you are talking about automating a single startup button, it essentially is the same thing but automated instead of manually pressing it…kind of not even worth the bother to do it.

What the OP is asking is a way to have all account data preloaded into a account session with the character session based off that account data being constantly connected to the server when swapping characters to allow quick loading instead of restarting the client. This is contrary to how the game handles connections and that is partly because of the nature of the game when it was first released. The 3 character slot limit is a residual aspect of that philosophy as well which is to say CCP only really expected players to have a single primary character to play all the time with the other two characters as kind of alts that you may log in once a day or so to do trading and such. They felt that the skill point investment is what would prevent players from heavily relying on alts. So as a result the game was designed around that philosophy to allow for ease of connection via one character.

Fast forward to 2018 and we have features to the game that was never even conceived of back then let alone considered. These features allowed for more than one character at a time on the same account to be played multiple times a day. Such features as PI, Scanning, Boosting, multi-character skill training, skill extractors/injectors…EVE has in the past 15 years become way way more alt friendly than it used to be but the game’s core is still following that old mechanic. As I said I think a team of devs COULD do it, but I doubt it anytime soon. They seem to have a clear and defined plan for the next 5 years already and this would detract from that plan significantly with little return on the time. Most quality of life changes we have seen over recent years pale in comparison to how big a change this would be. Hopefully they can fix it in the 3rd decade :slight_smile:

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