Move ‘em Like They’re Hot!

Two days ago, CCP announced that they would be proceeding with implementing skill trading with the February 9 patch.  Through this process, players can purchase a skill extractor for aurum (or, more likely, off the market, because very few people actually deal in aurum), which they can use to suck sp out of their characters and sell on the market. This is an entirely new feature that has not previously existed.

Cue the paranoia, screaming fits, doom crows crying “Eve is dying”, and threats of unsubbing from every quarter.

The truth is that skill trading offers a lot of opportunities, particularly for younger players.

It’s important to keep in mind that every skillpoint that enters an injector came from a character training it normally.  That sp represents the result of a certain interval of subscription time being transferred to another character.  But when that sp is transferred to another character, it’s not a perfect transfer.  If a character with more than 5 million sp injected it, some sp is lost – at least 20% and as much as 70%.  For those characters – the majority – every time an injector is used, sp leaves the game forever. The importance of that can’t be overstated. In a game that suffers from an abundance of sp and mature characters with nothing left to train, skill trading is a means of mitigating that sp creep.

Starting an Alt: Surrender

Eve is a game, in many ways, about patience.  The really lucrative industry jobs takes weeks or months to complete.  Acquiring kills can require a lot of effort and preparation – not only in understanding and applying proper ship fitting, but also flying around and finding someone willing to fight you.  Mining is a slow business requiring significant hours of investment… with few ways to speed up the process (unlike finding surprise drops from faction rats, for instance).

And skill training advances regardless of in-game activity, meaning that training Advanced Weapon Upgrades V is going to take the better part of a month whether you log in and spend hours playing or simply afk train.

In August of last year, I started an effort to create an alt from scratch.  My goal was to train a new character with all the core, fitting, armor, shield, drone, base gunnery, and base missile skills a person would need to step into any ship and weapon type effectively.  I laid out a long-term skill plan.  And it was a good one.  I’ve been training that character for the past seven months.

Or at least I was until this week, when I sold that character and cheated.

Starting an Alt: Initial Skill Plan

Having started our PvP alt and begun training the first few skills needed to plug +4 implants in, you now have some decisions to make.  After all, by this point your skill queue is starting to wind down, and you need to start training the meat of your character.

To recap my assumptions for the previous article, I’m assuming:

• That you are using four +4 implants as soon as possible after training Cybernetics (everything but Social Adaptation).
• That this character is not your first character.
• That you bought a PLEX to fund your new character’s skill book needs.  Ensuring that you don’t transfer isk between your main and your alt will open up a lot of awoxing, scamming, and espionage opportunities that wouldn’t be possible if your API shows sharing of isk between characters.
• That you took my advice and have a firm goal in mind for this character.
• That this character is intended as a PvP character.

Starting an Alt: Bringing a New Life Into This Cruel World

Over the course of one’s career in New Eden, it’s not unusual for a player to realize that one character simply isn’t enough.  Perhaps you want to awox someone.  Perhaps you simply want park a character in one location for some reason (cyno, trader, hauler, logistics, mission running, faction warfare, etc.).  Perhaps you just want to have another PvP or PvE character to help fund your game experience or cause mayhem.

It’s been about two years since I started a new character, the alt for my wife.  In that time, a lot has changed in New Eden.  It occurred to me that I couldn’t be a blogger dedicated to helping players learn about PvP and related topics if I didn’t discuss the strategy behind creating a new character.  In two days, I’ll have completed the final skill to perfect my wife’s character’s role, and that account won’t have any characters training anything.

So the “Starting an Alt” series of posts will chronicle my experiences creating a new PvP character from scratch.  Note the title; I’m starting an alt character dedicated to PvP, not a player’s first character, or an industry or trading alt.  Your main may come from any discipline within Eve, so I’ll try to write it with an eye to explaining my reasoning for each step of the process.