Wednesday, May 15, 2013

I'll be Dual Training Twice Over

It's official: dual character training will be in Odyssey:
Activating Dual Character Training on your account allows two characters to be trained at the same time for 30 full days. ... the system doesn't care which individual characters are trained, as long as the simultaneous limit is not reached.
An exciting new feature for me.  I have two accounts, both which have three characters.  These characters' functions are, loosely, as follows:

Account 1:

  • main - combat, explorer, PI, trade, jack of all trades
  • low skilled ganker - T1 cat pilot
  • PI alt - PI, modest scanning skills
Account 2:
  • trading alt - trade, freighter pilot, PI, industry
  • main - combat, modest scanning skills, PI
  • scanner alt - very modest scanning skills

On both accounts, I skimped on one or more of the alts in order to keep the main account training.  For example, my ganker alt has only T1 skills; he would be much better with T2, but I was unwilling (especially at the time I trained him) to take so much time for that.  Two more weeks seemed like a lot when my main was just 6 months old.  Another example: my PI alt on account 1 can only fly a Badger II (requires Caldari Industrial IV, ~3 days of training), and not the much-superior Iteron V (requires Gallente Industrial V, ~17 days).  There are still months worth of skills that would be worthwhile for my alts to have.  And also, as time goes on I sometimes learn about the utility of skills that I did not understand or could not exploit when I was training a character.  For example, my trading alt could profitably get into manufacture, but currently I have less than a day of training time spare for my account #2 combat pilot to get Destroyers V and BC V before June 4.

If I wanted to train in parallel now, I'd have to pay 2 plex to move my utility characters to a new account.  But I don't want to have three accounts permanently.  So eventually I'd have to pay another 2 plex to move a character back.  Training 2 months for 6 PLEX?  I'll pass.  2 months for 2 PLEX?  Gimme.

People are saying this will boost PLEX demand.  I think this is true in the short run, but not the longer run.  There will be a lot of people, like me, who will take advantage of this new feature for a limited time to round off the training of secondary characters.  But these characters will still remain secondary: I don't spend hours playing the Jita market, and I don't want to.  I do PI for PLEX.  I play the game to shoot spaceships.

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