A fact which doesn’t matter in a world of infinite alpha alts. One alt dies to CONCORD, you log in the next alpha alt and resume ganking. You need to stop thinking of characters as 1:1 representations of a player and more like different ships you can undock in.
If you just went and killed NPCs for 15 minutes, you would still have a character ready to gank and you would have made some ISK and some sec status and you would not have incurred the cost of the gank.
You’re missing the point that, unlike characters, player attention is a finite resource. You can’t just go kill NPCs for 15 minutes without losing 15 minutes of ganking time by diverting your attention to PvE instead. So you gain 15 minutes of PvE but you lose any gank target you could have killed during those 15 minutes, potentially including much more profitable targets. On the other hand, if you keep your attention on ganking you can just cycle through alpha alts as needed and always be ready to F1 the next profitable target.
Now, does all of this suggest that alpha accounts need more restrictions? Sure. I’d be happy to see more things removed from alpha parasites and more players forced to actually buy the game they play. But in a world where a player can have infinite alpha accounts the cooldown time on any individual character’s suicide ganking is a minimal factor at best.
We don’t gank for profit. It doesn’t matter what the value of your loot drop is. If you don’t have a mining permit, and you don’t obey the CODE, you are a target. The fact that ganking is profitable is nice, but that’s not why we do it.
True, but flying a profitable ship makes you even more of a target because now you add the people looking for easy ISK to the threat list.
It’s really not that complicated.
Parallel attention is a finite resource. Whether it’s how many EVE clients your PC can run, how many characters you can split your attention between before you start making mistakes and failing, etc, there is a limit to how much you can do at once.
Serial alt use is a near-infinite resource. There is no limit to how many alts you can make and you aren’t trying to use them simultaneously, you just log them in one after the other for the next gank. The only limitation is the (very short) time required to quit and log in with a new character.
The conclusion here is that the price of ganking that frigate for 10 million ISK is not a 15 minute delay, it’s a ~30 second delay while you log in a new alt. The price of committing to 15 minutes of PvE instead of 15 minutes of ganking is an entire 15 minutes where you can’t gank any target because your attention is no longer on ganking.
And now you are telling us that you are teleported directly in station after shooting a target, and that you teleport directly from the station to wherever you were the moment you log in.
To be precise, one can run at least two clients at the same time, with one being logged in and the other waiting at the character selection. I suppose it is possible to have several accounts running, as long as they are idly waiting for the player to select a character.
Thus, the time it takes to switch between characters is being reduced to the amount of time it takes for the character to become usable after selecting it, not counting two or three seconds for mouse movement.
This is not about complexity. I’m not asking you about “how”. I’m asking you about “why”.
You are advocating we use a strategy that, by your own assessment, is infinitely complex. (It is of indefinite complexity.) You have to MAKE infinite alts. That alone is more than the 30 seconds you claim is the only overhead. Then you have to manage each character’s skills, equipment, location in space. You might want to put them all in the same corp. You might want them to have similar names. You might not. Some of them, like the Orca pilot, might need specialized skills and consideration. Each one has their own wallet. They need to be invited to fleet when they log in. Etc., etc., etc.
Yes, of course, you consider all this and factor that into the cost of the activity they are partaking in. I am not asking you how to do it. I am asking you why. Why that method of play versus all the other available ones.
Also, isn’t what you are doing against the rules? You’re not technically recycling characters, exactly, but you are, in fact, recycling characters. You are making new characters to avoid the consequences of the actions taken by the old ones. That is not in the spirit of the game. That’s WHY there is a rule against recycling characters.
Okay, so, ultimately, this is a thread about inflation. Well, you, my friend, have given us the true cause of inflation, and that is that people people don’t understand the economics behind the decisions they make. Simple people are always suckered into paying more by those with more sophistication. The more efficiently they are suckered, the harder they have to work to meet their own needs.
You could take 1 well skilled character and run missions near Jita for a few hours a day and pay your PLEX every month without difficulty. Instead, you have devised a massive and probably unethical scheme requiring a lot more management, better hardware, more actual effort in execution, etc. And for what? Just to pay your PLEX every month?
You have essentially made a slave of yourself and you push harder and harder as prices rise because it is easier to crack the whip than it is to let go of your beloved paradigm and devise a NEW, BETTER scheme to accomplish what you are ultimately trying to accomplish.
Because you’re doing it anyway. You want to be able to press F1 as frequently as possible because that maximizes your ISK/hour. After all, that 10 million ISK frigate might not be a great kill but what about a 1 billion ISK target? Why would you want to kill it and then sit idle for 15 minutes, potentially missing a kill on a 2 billion ISK target, when you can cycle alts and gank constantly?
Also, isn’t what you are doing against the rules?
Nope. The rule against recycling characters is that you can’t delete characters and replace them. There is absolutely no rule against using so many ganking characters that you always have a ship available to press F1 even while some of them are waiting out their 15 minute timers. All of the characters continue to exist, suffer the standard sec status penalties, and get used again as soon as they are ready.
Instead, you have devised a massive and probably unethical scheme requiring a lot more management, better hardware, more actual effort in execution, etc. And for what? Just to pay your PLEX every month?
Because, again, it’s not about the 10 million ISK frigate, it’s about ganking better targets. The frigate is just free ISK that you get as a small side bonus while you also get the better kills.
Also, why would I farm for ISK to buy PLEX when I can just pay $15/month for my main(s)? I’m much more likely to be lazy about farming for ISK and sell PLEX to get it.
I don’t need a fancy spread sheet to tell you CCP has been causing massive amounts of inflation over the past 10 years. This makes plex more valuable and lines CCP pockets.
I dont need a fancy spread sheet to remember 10 years ago when a month of plex was worth 900m now its 1.7b the only winner here is CCP.
I do however remember specifically when ccp f@cked the market so bad I could no longer make enough of profit on T2 invention to afford a sub and not play the game every dam day. The market was destroyed with the PI Expansion the increased cost from 8000 per seeded resource to the pi cost of 100,000 per destroyed the market. Those who had insider knowledge stocked piled enough of the seeded resources for 10 life times at the lower price. I complained they needed to deleted all these seeded resources prior to the change to make it fair CCP ignored me. This forced out anyone who wasn’t going to do PI. Because they couldn’t compete with jimmy bob alliance with 20 trillion seeded resources at a cost 8000 per vs your cost of 100,000 per post PI. Then even if you did PI your output was so limited you could no longer justify T2 or compete with jimmy bob alliance who had insider knowledge and had stock piled 20 trillion of each resource prior to the change. CCP likes to pretend the game is fair its not even close to fair.
It has been my overall experience with CCP over the past 13 years. Once you find a way to become self sustaining and afford plex they wreck it.
Well that’s certainly some interesting paranoid delusions. Could you explain just how exactly high ISK prices for PLEX benefits CCP when the only way CCP sells PLEX is through cash transactions at a fixed price? And how CCP is responsible for those price increases when the ISK price of PLEX is 100% set by players?
