Multi character training cost

Communications Center General Discussion
1

Why does Multi character training cost so much?

Currently a normal subscription for a month is £9.99 which is fine and you have the option of creating 2 other characters but you can only train 1 of the 3 at a time, which again is fine to some extent.

But this approach is horribly time consuming if you are wanting the additional characters to do anything meaningful. Currently it really only benefits those that have played them game for a long time and can just switch to training one of the other chars full time with no draw backs on their main character as he will have all the SP he requires.

Recently the addition of skill injectors was introduced which are great for quickly gaining a much needed skill here and there. But again they are totally unsuitable for trying to train up the additional characters as they are currently 700-800m ISK which for someone relatively new or apart time player is a lot of ISK. Again this system heavily favours the much older accounts that will have the assets/ISK to easily afford the injectors, leaving the new players lagging behind as always.

The gap between the old accounts and the new ones in EVE is staggering and the amount of time necessary to train even one character is huge and that is assuming that this person knows exactly what they want to do in the game. There are so many different ways to play the game which is great and the 3 chars allow you to specialise each one into a different area but the only realistic way to make proper use of these additional chars is to have Multi character training easily available.

This is not the case, it is currently £15.99 to activate training on just one additional character so to have all 3 characters training it comes to £41.97 a month, which seems ridiculously over priced. I have spoken to an assortment of people in EVE with regards to the costs of Multi character training and they all feel that it is just overpriced and not worth looking at currently. Basically all of them admitted though if it were made more affordable, then 90+% of the players would happily pay for multi character training.

How much you charge for this is the big question, leave it as it currently is and its only a handful of people will use it, charge to little and it could break certain aspects of the game. I would think that the somewhere between £4-6 would be reasonable and on top of that you could have the same discounts applied for purchasing 3, 6 & 12 months subs.

To offset people possibly abusing this to create characters to sell, the price of transferring character to other accounts could be raised to try and discourage this.

On a whole I believe this change could benefit EVE a lot as it allows people to easily explore different aspects of the game between the 3 different characters without punishing you like it currently does.

Anyways hopefully this will bring about an interesting debate and possibly a change to the game.

Regards

Scosha

2

If you want to have more than 1 character usually you are better having multiple accounts than multiple characters on one account.

Don’t forget: you only play with one character per account at the same time.

3

Though for something like a PI account it is better to have three PI chars on one account as it is cheaper to plex / sub that way.

4

Yep.

However once you finished training 1 character you can start training another and sell SP using Skill Extractors. This reduces payment for this account to almost zero (or still makes you little profit).

5

Or you could sub 2 accounts for a brief period, then when one is done, pay to transfer the character and cancel that one account.

6

This is all well and good but if someone if wanting to move into any kind of industry on a decent scale then what you have suggested doesn’t work. Whats the point in have another 1 or 2 accounts if you aren’t even using the 2 additional character slots. You are essentially would then only be using 2 out of 6 available characters just having additional accounts. This again is a flaw in the system that makes it very limiting for new people getting into the game etc.

7

What would be the point in training one character on an account to just to use extractors on it to train another character?

8

Again what you have outlined here where you train a character on a different account and pay to move it to your main, just shows that the current Multi character training system doesn’t work and people don’t want to use it.

Therefore I believe it needs to be reviewed by CCP.

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9

It’s completely opposite:

  1. Train one character up to level you want it to be
  2. Start selling SP and paying for this account

Result: fully working account for free. Additional bonus over having multiple characters on one account: you can login more than one character at a time.

This was bad attempt to use “think of children” to be honest.

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10

No. It just shows that multi character training is designed and planned to include a trade off. You want one account and to train 2 characters at once, you must pay X. If you want two accounts, you pay Y.
CCP is smart. They know what they want. If they truly wanted everyone to use multi character training, they would have priced it the same as having 2 accounts. They didn’t. They viewed it as a limited option.

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11

It used to cost a full PLEX to multi-train, and now it’s actually a lower. Apparently, enough people are paying 485 PLEX that they have no reason to lower the cost at this time.

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12

Don’t know about you, but my main Account character currently has about 50m SP and I still have a truck load of stuff I want to train on him. So unless you are someone with like 100m SP who has trained everything basically that they need to ever train, or someone who has train to just do like one specific thing only. Then what you are proposing doesn’t work for a large portion of the EVE community.

What I am trying to discuss in this thread is the 2 additional characters you get on a standard account and how the current system doesn’t work for training them into doing something useful with great sacrifices. Admittedly these characters will be primarily used from Industry, trading alts, PI things that are generally passive to some extent.

But if you ever want them to be anything other just a trading char in Jita, then significant time is required. If I wanted to do say T2 or T3 production on my 2 other characters while my main one is for PVP/PVE then it would takes easily several months to acquire the necessary skills and on top of that you would have to do it twice.

It just seems silly that to easily train something else that require significant time, everyone response is just get another account, whats the point of the other characters then.

13

Also with regards to activating Multi character training through 485 Plex in game through the New Eden Store, this is still £17 of real money or about 1.5B ISK. Just seems like they should be rewarding their customers by making the multi character training much more accessible. You stated “enough people are paying 485 plex” most of them will no doubt be old chars that have the ISK they can just pump into PLEX’s.

14

I have know doubt CCP is smart, they created this game and it has been greatly successful, but what you have outlined if you take it as face value. Looks like they want a system that pads the number of account active in EVE rather than the number of characters.

Also it should NOT be priced the same as having 2 accounts as you aren’t getting the same product/result:

1 account can only have 1 char in use at one time. Therefore why are EVE punishing people wanting to make use of the additional characters on that account?

2 accounts allows you to have 2 chars in use at one time.

There is a clear difference here that you have totally overlooked.

15

There are literally no changes you could make to benefit newbies that wouldn’t be even more beneficial to veteran players…I believe the bitter vets refer to that as “Malcanis’ Law”. Your idea might even cause more vets to multitrain, causing the price of PLEX to skyrocket more.

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16

i am aware that changes to training will benefit the VET possibly just as much as the Newbies, but I think that EVE pretty much declared that they don’t care about if newly implemented systems can be abused by one side or the other.

Example A - Skill injectors costs like 700-800m I believe.

Who is that going to honestly benefit? Pretty sure the rich Vet more than your average/newbie player.

Also you stated that messing about with the Multi char training cost could crash PLEX market place, that would only be if you lower both the really money cost on the EVE Online website and the PLEX in game price from the New EDEN store.

Solution lower real world cost, not in game cost and if you are worried about SP farming then a simple solution would be that on each account you specify a main character and that is the only character that you can extra SP from, or something along those lines.

17

Because people want to do it. That simple.

18

Problem with the number of characters is that characters are rarely fully deleted. They be biomassed and end up in Doomheim but they are not really deleted. So character count isn’t even a metric worth measuring.

As for why, the problem with saying it is for account inflation is that multi-character training came late to the party. It wasn’t something there from inception. This means until recently the only method of multi-training was to have multiple accounts. And if you ever wanted to train a 2nd character at the same time, you had to pay for 2 transfers (from The main account to a 2nd one, then back later).

So CCP said this was a little rough. Instead we’ll offer multi character trading as a way to cover the gap but it won’t be a cheap fix. It will cost a hair more as a way to balance and appease those who oppose tge change.

We were all happy. The problem is you are looking at it now with out the historical perspective and just see it as bad while older players are saying it beats tge old system.

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19

Multi training costs more than a sub because of economics, I could bore you to tears with the details… but I won’t.

In a nutshell, it is all about creating demand and mobility for PLEX.

20

I came across a big problem with MCT.

A month or 7 weeks ago I paid for a months MCT , and then they came up with MCT for a Sub deal. My account was due a sub so I paid for 6 months.

But, it went straight to the character that already had MCT running, and added to it. I didn’t get the option to put it where I wanted, ie the 3rd character. Or spilt it.

But yes, the cost is waaay too high.