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Alternates: Are We Schizophrenics!?

Published on 22. Jan, 2009 ... written by Silene Derbhan, Tags: Articles

Ziggy > Evening guys.
Lonelyplayer > Hello, new to corp, huh ?
Ziggy > nope, i’m Stardust’s alt.
Lonelyplayer > oh kk, I thought Marspider was Stardust’s alt…
Ziggy > yeah, him too. I use him when Zziggy and Zyggi’s accounts are inactive.

I had quite a bit of those conversations when I joined my corp. The first week was dedicated to uncover who was really speaking on the corp channel. Some of my corp members have several alts in the corp, some other in the alliance, or even some unregistered to us. Actually, I would very much like to know the number of real human beings behind the 250,000 Eve accounts. Since it seems the longer people play, the higher the number of alts they are likely to possess, I’m not even sure there are 150000 active players in Eve. In my corporation alone, the numbers are quite fascinating: for 58 registered players, we have around 1/3 of alternates characters belonging to players already registered as another character.

Following the more technical guide of alt creation published by Sam Guss a few days ago, I would like to delve deeper in the game mechanics, to see why players are compelled not only to play different characters, as in any other MMO, but also to pay for every one of these added characters. When speaking of your Eve Online experience, even to another MMO player, you will often feel like the worse evolution of homo ludens, giving addiction a whole new meaning with your three open windows and multiple ships flying at the same time. So why are we ready to pay for two – or more – accounts when the game stays the same for every alt we have?

In fact there are two sides in a player who has several alts, the compulsive side and the practical one. The first side wants to experience everything the game has to offer. And with Eve Online, it is a lot. The second side wants to gain in efficiency and to optimize the way things are done. Basically, he wants more money, quicker. Let’s see how in detail.

This game is too big for me.

It is a very common thing to have several characters in MMOs in general. The very simple reason behind it is that most games are based on a class system. Every player will feel compelled to try at least two or three of the classes, both to find his preferred character and to fight the boredom of playing the same thing over and over using the same strategies and skills. In that regard, Eve is altogether more complex and less dictatorial than any other MMO. It does offer a much wider and much deeper experience, adding to the usual quest grinding mix an industry and trade system infinitely more complete and satisfying than any craft system out there, and an open PVP system that doesn’t even compare to the scripted, straightforward battles in most online games. As a result, there are about three main career paths and a multitude of variants the new player can choose from. You don’t define a class at the creation of your character, but a general orientation that you will be able to change later in the game by the skills you’ll decide to learn. It means that every door stays open when the game begins. As a matter of fact, you can perfectly create the ultimate character and master every skill in the game in order to cover all the potential professions with only one character on one account.

Of course, things are trickier than it seems and this goal cannot be realistically achieved with the current skill system. Even more, this character would be far less useful than 4 different characters with the same overall skill distribution. As it has been calculated by very clever mathematicians among Eve players, mastering all skills at maximum level would take a few years. Not two or three years, but more in the average of 23 years. This is an awfully long time in real life. As much as I hope Eve will still be around and even more awesome than now in twenty-three years, I’m not ready to make any bet on what my gaming life will be like when I’m well over fifty years old. To make things clear with a quick comparison, anybody who would start playing World of Warcraft today, given he is a dedicated player, can max up a class and its ensuing Dark Knight in a good two month. Hell, a very committed student in holidays can probably do that in two weeks and try another class before he gets rid of his schoolwork. The skill training system of Eve makes sure that after two weeks you’re just a wannabee capsuleer begging for iskies in local. Yet, at this time, you are starting to realise the huge amount of things you cannot do: this blueprint you have is useless without the minerals required for its manufacturing, your frigate doesn’t really shine in mining efficiency, that incredible gun you looted asks for twenty more days of training to be fitted, and so on…

At this point, there are three possibilities:

• You may decide that you are very happy with your initial choice of profession and invest every skill point in it for the years to come. For most players, it means dedicating to the way of the warrior and let the others do the boring chores of getting supplies to the market.
• You may decide to multitask, cross train and get a flavour for everything in Eve. It means your character will be pretty bad at everything he does for quite a while, but you won’t get stuck on -only- doing the same missions over and over for days in order to get your first Battleship.
• You may just create an alt and try to train him in a complementary way with your main.

The less compulsive players will choose the first option. But for what I’ve seen in the game, it is only a matter of time before they decide to commit another 15 Euros per month in Eve. It seems absolutely pointless to resist in the long term, so I recently succumb to the temptation myself, and must say I’m very happy I did. Because having an alt is incredibly handy at all times.

Time is money.

Eve Online’s universe is made in such a way that you will constantly need money to fuel your daily activities. From the ships and modules you have to buy to this very expensive skill book, everything in Eve is much like in real life. It costs money. And Eve money costs you time. If your initial choice was to be a fighter, mission running will be a steady source of income. But it will take some time before you are able to buy your dream battleship or every Tech 2 rig you can dream of. If you are an industrialist, it will be quite some mining nights before you can build anything bigger than a cruiser or some drones. If you wanted to be a research character, the faction grind will eat up most of your money and skill training before you can really use those research agents.

As a whole, Eve’s universe is a circle of different profession (ore gatherer, manufacturer, ship waster) which are all co-dependent. As a result your character depends on someone else at various degrees. This is where the alt comes into play. The first reason a player has to create another character is to reduce this dependency in some way. Let me give you an example: three month ago, I bought three Capacitor Control circuits for my Abaddon. They roughly cost me 45 millions. One month later, I lost this Abaddon in a mission. At the time, I had around 180 millions in my wallet. I asked someone from my corp to build one for me, rigs included. It cost me 160 millions (the market price of the whole set would have been about 190 millions). Two days ago, I lost this new Abaddon (yes, again, I’m a lousy pilot). I bought one off the market and built the rigs with my shiny new industrial alt. This time, I “only” spent the 140 millions of the ship. If I had created this alt a few month ago when I started playing, I would have had enough minerals to build the ship myself just buying the BPC for approximately 1 million. This is the first way an alt benefits you: it saves you the money you would have otherwise given to another player.

If saving money is saving time, saving time in itself is also a very effective way to accelerate your income rate. And you will always save time when playing with two characters instead of one, because you’ll be able to either compensate their weaknesses or increase their strengths. These are a few examples but I’m sure there are a dozen more:

• Having a support character for your damage dealer in missions: remote shield/rep, main tanking, added firepower, drone specialist, salvager, etc…
• Having a hauler for your miner (which increases your mining productivity by the cargo difference of the hauler vs mining ship plus transport time, e.g A LOT)
• Having a market spy in a different region for trading.

If you want to optimize even more, the advanced method of using alts is well explained in Sam’s guide. Given you’ll have more than one account, each with three separate character slots, you can develop each of these slots to benefit one of your mains. The initial juggling between accounts can be confusing at first, but with a well laid plan, you’ll be able to cover pretty much every area of the game.

In the end, for the practical side of things, having an alt makes you as efficient as two players together but without having to share the rewards.

Utility alts.

In this last category, we find the characters created for a sole purpose and trained until they can achieve one specific goal only.

A good example of this is corporation’s capital pilots. You will never use or need a capital ship for mission running, trading, mining or anything you’ll do as an individual player. But as soon as you are in a corporation and ready to kick some asses in null space, you better have those monsters to blow some POS up. This usually results in the creation of a character that will rush his way to the capital ships skills and let everything else away. The end character wouldn’t be able to fly a frigate in a lv1 mission properly, but he has all capital skills at maximum level.

A corporation CEO needs some very specific skills using charisma as a primary attribute. Knowing the general uselessness of this attribute for almost everything else, it may be a valid reason to create an alt as well.

More simply, a market informant doesn’t need any skill at all; he just needs to be sitting in another region than your trader.

Of course these one-use characters can diversify in time, but you’ll find some players who just activate and deactivate the account depending on their actual need. Dedication or addiction, I’ll let you decide…

Are we funding Iceland all by ourselves?

Needless to say, CCP is very happy with the current situation. They originated the players’ frustration with the training restriction of one character per account. On the technical side of things, every MMO on the market works on the same basis: you simply cannot login two different characters on the same account at the same time. But as far as I know, they all allow you to create as many characters as you want and the experience system gives every character the chance to attain his full potential after a “few” hours of play. In Eve, training one character means the other ones are left aside and will stay useless until you switch training (which would make your main character uselessly waiting, so it is not a real alternative). For the compulsive players, the result is pretty much that they have to create another account, or stay frustrated by all the things they are missing. From a player point a view, this is simply unfair.

From a developer point of view though, this is the perfect business model. Let’s be realistic, even if Eve is an awesome game, it will always stay a niche game, with a bunch of dedicated players in search for something more complex and less cosy than the usual Orcs and Elves slugfest. And whatever growth Eve may have known in the past few months, it still struggles to get the attention of the masses. In this situation, the alt system is doubly rewarding to CCP: not only do they gain additional customers on a regular basis, but they don’t have to spend a single euro in advertisement to get them on board. In the unforgiving online games market, it’s pretty much a businessman’s dream. And as much as I find it justified, the suppression of ghost training says a lot about how CCP is handling the whole alt business. Even if they are trying to ease players into the thing with promotional campaigns like the Power of Two, one may still be thinking that their position is on the greedy side…

Massive Multiplayer Myself

Whatever the reason you may have to create an alt or two, you’re still in control of your wallet after all. If you feel abused by the system, if you think it’s unfair of the game and the developer to restrict your possibilities for financial gain, just don’t pay. Because in the end, the alts you possess improve your own experience of the game, but it might be that they decrease the overall quality of the game.

The concept at the core of multiplayer online games is the multiplayer. In Eve Online, it would be the social network created by corporations, alliances, wars and sovereignty. A big part of the decision to join a corporation is often that you put your own qualities in a global pool where everyone’s skills will benefit the entire group. If you’re a pure pvp fighter, you will protect your corporation from external aggressions while your mates will be building ships and modules for you. If you’re a research character, you will benefit from the combat expertise of the others and bring them the possibility to have better equipment.

The alt system tends to break this social circle by allowing you to be self-dependent. This is obviously a good thing from a personal point of view, but it makes the whole point of playing with other people quite vain. If you are able to play three or four roles by yourself, you deny three other players the possibility to be useful to you. And the same applies to you: if people around can do everything themselves, why would they need you to join their circle? In this regard, allowing (and encouraging at that) the creation of alternate characters breaks the game’s social mechanics, or at least undermines the role of social exchange in the general dynamic of the game. Corporations are still an essential part of the experience, of course, but their necessity may be discussed by players who don’t aim for 0.0 sovereignty. And without a group of buddies to tag along or chat with, a lot of Eve’s activities become tedious overtime.

In the end, the only important thing is to find your path in Eve, and the only valuable path is the one that will bring the more entertainment for your money, may you spend 15 or 45 Euros per month on the game. Yes it is highly serious business, but a game nonetheless.