January 24, 2013

How many accounts? How does 90 sound?

quote: CSM Winter 2012 Summit Minutes (pg 110)
UAxDEATH suggested a tangible benefit for players with multiple accounts would be discounts on subscription costs. He mentioned that at one time he had 90 accounts, but since becoming a CSM he has cut back to only 37, and asked “what would inspire me to [reactivate] those accounts?"

Seriously, WTF?  I can’t picture why someone would have 37 accounts, much less 90 accounts.  So let me muse outloud here about factors to do with multiple accounts:

Multiboxing: Field your own fleet, as long as you’re not doing something that requires too much attention.  Cloaky scout + Attacker + Logi (plus additional Attacker if you can stand it) seems like about the limit.  I’ve heard of quad boxing like that, and people doing solo mining fleets (which pretty much points glaringly to the known problem of mining is boring).  But is anyone really going to be running more than let’s say 16 accounts in multiboxing without crossing over into botting?

Specialized Alts: Moving away from the simultaneous usage, you have specialized usage.  Most common is probably an industrialist: a manufacturer and/or a researcher.  This character you’d log in just to pile in more jobs.  Similar is a trading alt whose job it is to sit in a trade hub and move orders around.  Maybe a hauling alt sitting in an NPC corporation.  But all of these characters can sit in the extra two character slots per account.  So when UAxDEATH says he had 90 accounts - that means he could have had 270 characters - that seems more than anyone can log in and swap out jobs with.  But seriously - are there 90 different specializations that you’d really want to have handy?  Do you need a left-handed shield logi pilot in case you don’t feel like flying your right-handed logi pilot?

Paying for them: Was UAxDEATH sitting on such a personal Tech moon worth of passive-ISK that he was generating any appreciable portion of those accounts in PLEX?  Is Gevlon Goblin a small-bit player compared to what UAxDEATH was running? Or was he really shelling out something north of US$1000 every month to feed a meglomanical EVE addiction?

Keeping up with them:  What effort does it take to keep skill queues going for 90 accounts?  Even if they’re all averaging a 10 day run for skills (you can’t only train Vs nonstop) that still means logging in and out of 9 accounts every day just to set your next skill up, not counting the time to actually plan all that in EveMon.

So I can’t help thinking - did UAxDEATH accidentally give away that he was involved in botting?


What would inspire him to go back up to 90 accounts? Seriously? A complete lack of sanity (and a life), perhaps? What am I missing here that makes this make sense?

3 comments:

  1. Hmmmm.... if you get to a point where you're turning over high end characters in the market continually, you could at least offset the costs of having that many.

    The run up would be the long, slow and totally painful bit... and you'd need capital skills to make it worthwhile.

    Utter pie in the sky stuff really, but the only thing I could think of.

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  2. lol So basically all the people I met at EVE Vegas last fall were basically ~50% of the EVE populace?

    I find it ironic that CCP talks about "consequences" to actions. What "consequences" can be visited upon a player when he has even 10+ accounts with 3 chars each account? What does it matter what he does with one char out of that potential 30?

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    Replies
    1. Hmm, considering that Nosy Gamer (http://nosygamer.blogspot.com) has mentioned how CCP doesn't seem to have a good way to separate a real-life player from the in-game account that's a very good point.

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