Multiple Personalities

Alternate characters are an interesting topic: controlling two avatars at once can be obscenely difficult with some games (in Halo, trying to drive a warthog with my feet on one controller while firing with my hands on a second….didn’t work out too well). In WoW, most tasks went one of three ways: either you killed the dude trying to kill you, he killed you instantly, or he killed you after a long battle and you came back and managed to kill him by pressing the right buttons at the right times. Controlling one character with any degree of control took skill, and two characters at once when each one required a different button to be pressed depending on the situation every 1.5 seconds was an experience in frustration. Not that I couldn’t get it to work, but it was just annoying.

Eve continues to set itself away from other MMOs with an almost reliance on alts. Living in a WH with only contracts to go on to work out market prices, or even living in nullsec or having a really low security rating nigh demands having alts that can check the market for you, and then there’s the matter of convenience.

When I just started mining, apparently I was so pathetic that no-one even bothered to steal from my can of veldspar. But as I progressed to mining barge, can flippers ceased to be someone to muse upon as a dude whined in local and started becoming a very irritating problem. I was wary to let one can or more float in space before I brought my hauler out, which was a pain, especially when I got killed by a battle badger while trying to re-ninja my ore.

Here’s the strategy I finally figured out: When someone flips you, dock immediately. get your hauler out, warp to the cans. Pick a celestial at random. maneuver your hauler so that the can is directly between you and the celestial. Engage warp without aligning. as your ship lines up with the planet or whatever, open your ninjaed can and make ready. Half a second before your ship reaches 75% speed, drag as much ore as you can into your cargo. The moment your ship hits 75%, it should shoot off like a rocket and you’ll have saved one hauler load of ore. Hide in a station for 15 minutes, come out, start mining in a different system.

After a few weeks of this I was fast running out of throat lozenges for after cursing at flippers and made an alt using the buddy system. My slim justification to myself that since the activation fee was 20 bucks, I’d only have to pay 4 extra bucks once to never have can flipping problems ever again. I started the alt, closed out of all the tutorials immediately and trained gallente industry V.

Suddenly, flippers were a thing of the past. Any ore I had mined went immidiately to the station with no loss in productivity, and Eve was fun again. The hauler account stayed with me, hauling for corp ops and regular ops, following me into nullsec and hauling there; then coming to WH space with me.

Having two accounts in eve is different from two accounts anywhere else because of the sheer utility of having two separate persona for you. One can scout for the other, rep for the other, mine for the other, shoot for the other, and with Eves auto-repeat managing both of them is fairly intuitive.

Awkwardly, I’ve accidentally left two alts in WHs we left and had to pod them both >.<

I think this topic has been covered by someone else already, but the psychological experience of an MMO is essentially obtaining what others don’t have. Whether it’s gold, ISK, a battleaxe bigger than yourself, a navy domi, faction fit mauraders or every single damn item in the game, everyone wants more than everyone else in order to say “look at me, I’m awesome”.

Since training an alt requires you to stop training on your main, this goes against the average MMOer instints of being better than everyone else, making the thought of stopping training on your main nigh unbearable. So, making an alt account is a pretty easy step for most committed players, which is why I now have an orca pilot, another WH goer has two hulk accounts and a third has two with a third still training.

Assuming you can either provide the 30 bucks a month or 600 mil a month, a second account will make your Eve experience significantly easier.

Oh, and the nullsec dude apparently multiboxes four hulks in his infinite ABC nullsec system.

Fly safe.

Fly safe.

Also, arguing with yourself in front of new guys in the corp channel is hilarious.