Why does it feel like the game encourages you to spam pilots and accounts? I feel like a person with multiple personality disorder. I wish I did not need more than 1 pilot.
An idea for a different game: Make players feel like they have a presence in your universe by having access to a single pilot instead of “possessing” the poor things. For “going on an adventure” there could be special modules hiding the pilot’s identity inside the ship.
You don’t need more than one pilot. If people tell you otherwise they are wrong, and don’t fall for marketing tricks.
You don’t need alts though. In every case where you think you need multiple accounts, you can easily accomplish with friends. Triple boxing Hawks in Abyssals? Just grab 2 friends instead. For every account you are managing, you have a cost to maintain it-be it via ISK to PLEX or just paying from your real life wallet. Sure you have to divide the loot from those abyssal sites, but you also aren’t paying $40/month to hoard it all yourself and you will make more meaningful bonds and fond memories with those other pilots.
We are the Frostpacker, high expectations are futile. 
In theory, you’re not wrong that everything done with alts could be done by friends, however…
Good luck in practice finding friends that have the necessary:
To replace the jobs that alts do in many circumstances.
Edit: Also consider that people saying this that pursue playstyles that don’t really need alts anywhere near as much as others is much like someone living in the Sahara desert wondering why anyone would ever need a raincoat.
Added to that:
No one forces you to have several characters. It is not an obligation. The game encourages nothing more than to join a corporation.
You can do it all on one pilot, you just choose to “optimize” by using more, no one is forcing you to do so. If you don’t like the consequences of your choices, make different choices.
I would argue, using alts is not optimizing, but in most cases just convenience for not willing to optimize 
Like seeing a problem, and just throw another alt on it.
For PvE there is absolutely no reason to team up or spamming alts, it’s solo content with solo reward. Need an Orca for mining boost? Join a mining fleet/corp. PvP you “just” need fleet mates of same mind in your timezone, you don’t need trust for this, nor alts. Cynos can theoretically be operated with one char only at some cost since recent mobile beacons, but if you need to move capitals better join a big corp with good infrastructure.
There are certain roles in bigger fleets which often are associated to alts because people don’t want to fly them (utility cynos, probers, or interdictors for example). But in here you may rely on your fleet/corp mates providing those alts.
Personally I would love CCP to make all roles and “jobs” being worth doing by an individual person. Also group PvE with fixed total rewards are stupid design, probably only there to foster multiple accounts.
It IS optimizing: in “I don’t want to wait for my friends or put in effort to team up, doing it myself is just easier”, in “I can train different things at the same time so I can do different things earlier”, in “I can be in two different places at the same time so I don’t have to fly back and forth”.
It’s quite literally the epitome of optimizing, if it weren’t then so many people wouldn’t do it.
I drop bombers and black ops on stuff with my friends, and with all sorts of people on NPSI fleets.
We need characters to look for targets to drop on and cyno up. Every character doing this increases chances of finding content.
Mobile cyno beacons (with a few exceptions) are useless for combat hotdropping
I need to trust that we’re dropping on a legitimate target and not bait from someone like Snuff
Here’s what this looks like trying to do this without alts:
From my experience between 33%-50% of any black-ops gang fleet is cyno/support alts. Force humans to fill those roles in equal numbers, and suddenly combat ship numbers drop by at least 50%. This means it is drastically harder to get sufficient numbers for the fleet to run. Far fewer fleets will be run because of this.
Catching targets and finding opportunities is fundamentally a high-skill, low success rate activity to be balanced. The most skilled and dedicated humans are now forced to only hunt for targets instead of enjoying the fights with the fleet, killing half the incentive to hunt in the first place. You disproportionately punish the people who generate content by forcing them to miss most of it.
Saying “no alts” cripples hotdropping playstyles in general, particularly if you’re not in big groups. If you disagree, go ahead and try getting a black-ops group going that doesn’t use alts and see.
Some alt roles are fundamentally a waste of a human’s time unless they have really weird definition of fun:
Utility cynos
Backscanners and wormhole seeds
Wormhole rollers
Bridging ships
etc.
These jobs are already jobs, not fun, for the vast majority. Forcing people to do them exclusively actively takes fun out of Eve.
What, if the trade-off is killing various playstyles and causing a net reduction in fun, is the benefit of removing alts?
As you see per my other paragraph in the post, I agree that certain play needs alts used by at least some people because the “jobs” are not worth doing by individual humans. That’s a challenge and ask to CCP game design to make them worth or create alternatives. Not crippling playstyles.
You can log in as multiple same player pilots. Alternately, you can log in as one of multiple separate player pilots…which to me is far more fun.
Because CCP literally encourages you to spam pilots and accounts. It’s not just a feeling.
Also, keep in mind the people saying “You don’t need alts” is a lot like saying “You don’t need a car. You can walk anywhere you really need to go.”
Which is true, as far as it goes, but rather missing the point.
CCP found out a long time ago that EVE didn’t really appeal to a lot of players. But many of the players it did appeal to, wanted it enough to pay significant cash and undergo quite remarkable levels of effort in order to achieve their goals within the game.
Hence EVE’s design as a big, slow, grindy, often boring, obtuse and opaque mass of spaghetti code they can barely even maintain anymore.
The more alts you desire, the more $$ they make. The more you control, the less attention you can focus on each one. The longer you’re sitting in space doing sleep-inducing repetitive grind, the easier a target you’ll be and the more likely you’ll blow up and need even more activity to replace it.
That appears to be the plan.
The actual result is years of decline and fewer players.
It would be nice to only need 1 pilot to do whatever you need, but that’s not EVE you’re wishing for.
Sounds like they need a new plan 
A lot of what you stated is true. At the same time you can choose to NOT (want to) play that way and do (almost) everything on one character, or at least one account.
EVE appeals to different types of gamers and those have different goals, likes and requirements. Being “the odd one out” and not grind like it’s Factorio or spreadsheet Olympics is not only possible, it can also be quite fulfilling (to the right type of person).
I’m engaged in this thread because I’m pursuing this path from the beginning, playing everything with only one char (I use another char to hold my excessive ISK). And I’m feeling quite satisfied by the fact that I managed to keep this up and the game fun for now almost 10 years despite all the playstyle nerfs by CCP over the years.
I don’t have the desire to use capitals atm, nor engage in some “serious business”. I’ll take the easy ISK when I see an opportunity but stopped regular ISK making long ago. Usually event times are cash times. It’s enough to keep going for me.
I know it takes time to setup and certain floor on skillpoints and ISK in the wallet, but you can approach EvE as relaxing and fun game experience.
I still run two accounts but it’s only really for WH use when I’m with old friends who log in… infrequently. I mostly do everything on one account and it’s really just two characters: one for pve and one for PVP. Besides that I have a few alpha accounts/chars that I use mostly for testing or “random stuff” of no consequence.
I used to have an extra account for “specialised industry” which I got after Scarcity (because my friends kept bugging me to do so) and while it made me quite a bit of isk I don’t play for the isk, I don’t NEED more isk, so I stopped bothering.
I don’t really do any trading, I don’t build or research/invent, no PI, no mining, no alliance stuff, no CTA. I have as little ties as possible (one of the reasons to post on this alt) and can do whatever I want, when I want it and how I want it. A bit of solo PVE to chill and a bit of solo PVP to tryhard, whatever I feel like at that time.
Perfectly viable on one account and could also be done on one character, I just chose a 2 char setup because I could and because it’s just easier (ie more optimised).
Hello everyone. My name is QuakeGod, and I’m an altaholic…
I have 5 Omega accounts with 15 toons that I use almost every day, and 25 Alpha accounts with a total of 75 toons that I use for testing purposes, and as character and corp name placeholders for sale at a later date…
That’s actually not true. For the past 4 years or so they followed a plan to reduce the dependency on alts and wanted more players playing together instead of players playing with more alts. CCP had this weird and toxic mindset for a while that alts were bad and more players playing with other players would be so much better.
The problem is that CCP only ever approached this from the punishment side: They started to make alt-able content more annoying and/or scarcer, but they never introduced content that you actually want to experience with other people instead of just your alts. The new content they introduced was either single-player content without any need for other players, or it was so badly laid out that it’s better done with alts than players, as rewards and/or activities were not engaging and variable enough to require 2 actual humans.
And they send mixed messaging because in the middle of that time they started sending out ads about how great it is to play with alts. It’s just a mess. This mess resulted in players shedding their alts because it was not worthwhile or enjoyable to play with them anymore and lots of actual players stopped playing, which resulted in fewer players available to play with.
CCP simply never had a well thought through plan for this madness and it showed in every step of the path.
What made EVE great were these “sleep-inducing repetitive grind” tasks that you could just do on the side while doing something else in EVE on a different char or something else outside of EVE.
Then CCP started to tinker with the tools to run these tasks and completely broke the balance between these tasks and the tools that came from the original game design phase. They tinkered with one, but never adjusted the second to match their tinkering. That lead to a massive, dangerous imbalance.
Then, when the imbalance reached unmanageable levels, they started to hammer down on the activities and made everything feel so much more troublesome, experience-hostile and unrewarding. All of a sudden, you weren’t supposed to use lots of alts anymore and were portrayed as a criminal if you did (remember the “the 1% of the 1% kill the game” quote from CCP Quant et al?). However, at the same time, playing together with actual other players was also made infeasible and CCP never introduced things to encourage that in a positive/enjoyable way.
Makes me wonder if CCP at all learned from these blunders. Some complaints from the recent FW changes don’t really inspire confidence, though.