This has bothered me for a long time. It costs between $10 to $15 for an Omega subscription, but $20 to train a second or third skill queue on the same account. Add to this the fact that skillpoint giveaways, etc., are typically account-specific, and it makes no sense to create multiple characters on the same account. Why is there such an incentive to create characters on multiple accounts instead of the same one?
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You can only use one of the characters at a time per account where as if you have two accounts, you can have two active characters at the same time…and that means you have “paid” for two accounts.
This is another excellent example of why MCT is just a bad idea. Why does it cost more to train a second or third character on the same account, when I would have more utility by creating those same characters on their own accounts? It seems as though CCP incentivizes the creation of multiple accounts instead of multiple characters. It makes sense to me that MCT wouldn’t cost less than a sub, but I struggle to understand why it costs so much more.
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Yes this is 100% the case. They want more accounts, not just more characters. It costs more to push you in the direction they want (multi-accounts) and also to stop SP farming.
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Obviously, yes, but why? It doesn’t make them more money to increase accounts instead of characters. We pay them more to train multiple skill queues than we do to maintain multiple subs. Is it merely to pad subscriber numbers as a metric of success? And if this is the case, why do they even give us multiple character slots at all?
Yes, that’s why I said they’re incentivizing the behavior, I’m just curious what their motivation could possibly be for doing so. I don’t see any clear business motivation, which is what perplexes me, but given the enormous price difference I have to assume there is one. Frankly, if they lowered the price of MCT to be competitive with subbing, they’d probably have more of my money as I became tempted to actually pay for the queues.
Okay, you lost me here. CCP doesn’t tolerate skill farming as some form of unexpected emergent gameplay, like living in wormholes. They invented SP farming and sold it to players in order to make lots and lots of money off of it. They are, in fact, the only ones really doing so.
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It’s only more utility, if those characters need to train for a long time.
If you just want to create a focused alt (eg. PI, trade, research alt, etc.), then you only need to train the character for a short period of time, so MCT makes sense.
But, if you want to train several characters up over a long time, separating them on different accounts is cheaper.
MCT is cheaper long term if you only need some focused alts, because the whole account is Omega and all 3 characters can use all of their skills, even long after you stop training the alts.
If those characters are on separate accounts, you need to maintain separate subscriptions to keep using all of their skills (and skills not accessible to alphas).
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What I mean is that if is was dirt cheap to MCT then that exactly what people would do. But it’s no so SP farmers are forced to (you guessed it) have a ton of accounts, all “paid” for and churning out the injectors.
…at least as I understand it…
MCT and the pricing structure has been around a lot longer than extractors.
I don’t think that’s CCP’s motivation, since MCT was introduced before extractors and SP farmers were ever thought about at all.
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It’s not even profitable to SP farm with regular subbed accounts, much less with MCT, unless you offset the costs with some significant ISK generation. CCP could lower the cost of MCT to be equal to that of a sub and would still be making just as much off of SP farmers. Besides, the price difference existed years before SP farming was even a glimmer in CCP’s eye, so I think we can rule that out as a motivating factor.
This schema made a whole lot more sense before skill injectors. It’s the reason why I have multiple characters on any of my accounts. Nowadays, however, if you want to create a specialized alt to keep on an Omega account, I’d almost rather inject the SP than pay for MCT. The injectors might be more expensive depending on how much SP you actually need, but then even that premium might be worth the instant gratification of having the alt immediately available. I guess in that sense, MCT is still the slower, more economical option.
Most seem to use low SP activities to generate ISK (PI for example) while their SP farm toon does its thing. If I cared I’d do it with my market accounts that don’t need hardly any SP to be profitable…
I mean, to each their own. At some point this sort of thing stops being passive income, and you have to ask yourself how hard you’re willing to work at repetitively boring gameplay for that $15/month.
Isn’t that the sales pitch for most of gaming these days? 
There is one possible reason CCP is pushing players toward another account than to train more characters on one account.
Repeatedly over the years we heard’’ there’s x thousands of players in EVE’’ .CCP doesnt count actual players but accounts when they say this and they’d do this to show investors they got this many customers when actual number could be way smaller
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Sure, the multiple character training bothered me too. Money-wise it certainly is cheaper to have two accounts rather than MCT.
On the other hand, once you have sufficiently trained, all three characters on the one account can do their own (Omega) thing.
So I can have a char doing invention, another being an industrialist, and the third for combat. Easier to manage the three apart than having it all in one char. Different regions for each their optimum.
And thus I have three Omega chars for the price of one subscription.
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I have never understood it, and that is for someone who has trained his alt characters to high levels. In the end I just gritted my teeth and trained them with one skill queue per account. I alternate the characters training too and make sure that I have at least got +4’s in.
But the flexibility it gives you is pretty much worth it as @Cal_Mikakka has quite rightly pointed out.
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This is a big one. I’m not sure if CCP is actually trying to incentivise people making multiple accounts (as opposed to making multiple characters on one account), but number of accounts is a primary stat tracked by companies to rate their performance and show off to investors. Social media platforms are notorious for doing little to remove bots and fake accounts because they boost numbers. It’s a good thing CCP doesn’t do that!
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It is very much like PLEX it has extra utility, I think one of the main uses I could see why you would MCT instead of a separate account (which I assume has been mentioned) is for a restricted items.
For example a cloaking device is locked out to an Omega account that status is account wide, you can train an alt into a cloak and have a main on the same account, once you have trained into the cloak you only need to omega one account to have a cloaky alt if you had a separate account you would need 2 omega accounts. same as PI alts which I would wager is the biggest use case for them.
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