EVE Multiboxers

[Flight]

As to 'offline' training I take it to mean getting training while your account is not live.

e.g. I want to train Battlecruisers V which will take approx 31 days

My account time expires in a week so I spend the next week training other skills and then a couple of hours before my time expires I set Battlecruisers V to train.

I open one of my other accounts and play that for a month, at the end of the month I set Drone Interfacing V to train (another 30 day skill)

I resubscribe/buy a GTC for the first account and I have Battlecruisers V trained up without paying for 30 days of play.

You can cycle through accounts like this for quite some time getting 'free' training but it does need a bit of planning ahead.

They stopped this in a patch last year mate. Now when your account expires training stops.

[RobinGBrown]

Thats a shame, but it does mean I won't be bothering as much with EVE as I was hoping to. EVE is twice the price of WoW and about 1/10 the value, it was mainly the ability to offline train my chars so that when I came back they'd be able to do something that made it worthwhile.

Sorry guys, I'll carry on playing while I've got subs going but after that I'll be gone.

Whats really annoying is that EVEMon reports the skills as being trained! Grrr!

Edit: sigh... I really hate the way EVE screws you over

[d0z3rr]

My 3 miners will finally get Retrievers on Friday!!! YES!!!! No more 589m3 of cargo space and constant dragging and dropping of minerals.

[Souca]

Thats a shame, but it does mean I won't be bothering as much with EVE as I was hoping to. EVE is twice the price of WoW and about 1/10 the value, it was mainly the ability to offline train my chars so that when I came back they'd be able to do something that made it worthwhile.

Sorry guys, I'll carry on playing while I've got subs going but after that I'll be gone.

Whats really annoying is that EVEMon reports the skills as being trained! Grrr!

Edit: sigh... I really hate the way EVE screws you over

If you really aren't having fun, I can understand not playing. As for the subscription fees, you should be able to get to a point where you don't even have to pay real money for them. I know it's not as nice to have to pay for the character sitting on a 30 day skill, but it does open up the ability to have 4-5 miners that only get used to pay for other characters accounts.

My goal is to find a comfortable way to pay for my accounts with ISK. That way I can have more than I can play at once if it benefits me. If it means I spend a full week mining hardcore to pay for 6 months of all my accounts, then I'd be fine with that. How many accounts I have will end up being determined by how many I can support with in game funds without having to feel like I'm grinding too much.

I hope you can find a way to stay and still enjoy playing

- Souca -

[RobinGBrown]

Sorry about last post it was a bit of 'late night melodrama', really should learn to go to bed rather than post after 8PM...

Thats said I am dissapointed in the change they've made, in practical terms it means that the cost of me playing EVE has increased by maybe 30%. So to get one of my mains to carrier, which was my ultimate plan, will cost 2 years of subs at 14.95/month which is 360! With careful planning I was going to save about 6 months of that time with ghost training.

Like I say I'll still play but I suspect in the long run that I won't have enough time to grind the mining to make the ISK to buy a PLEX each month, should be okay in the short term, especially with some buddy program help though and maybe that will get me close enough.

Speaking of grinding I had my two hulk miners out earlier this week and noticed that the yield in practical terms for tech II modulated strip miners with crustals (crustals? interesting typo!) compared to tech I strip miners is almost double! So for all those training miners make sure you get mining V and the various <asteroid> processing skills to III so you can use the modulated strip miners.

I'm still very interested in joint mining ops at weekends/evenings becasue those should be busy enough to be good fun. Solo mining with three accounts still leaves me twiddling my thumbs half the time. Have to add a hauler and see how I do.

p.s. I thought I might try my hand at some cheap tech I piracy on one of the other accounts - does anyone have rifter BPO/BPCs so I can build my own disposable ships?

[Souca]

Speaking of grinding I had my two hulk miners out earlier this week and noticed that the yield in practical terms for tech II modulated strip miners with crustals (crustals? interesting typo!) compared to tech I strip miners is almost double! So for all those training miners make sure you get mining V and the various <asteroid> processing skills to III so you can use the modulated strip miners.

Yea, it's pretty much a requirement that you train up refining and refining efficiency on your miners. The Veldspar crystal only requires Veldspar Processing 3 and it's prereq Refining 4, but the higher level ore processing start to require refining efficiency. Mercoxit require Refining eff 5. It's unfortunate since it's a lot of training for base skills you don't need in a multibox setup where you might only have one character with high level refining.

One thing to notice when looking at the modulated strip miners is that they have to yeild numbers. one is the general yeild and the other is the part specific to the crystal. If you look just at the general part they seem majorly inferior to the normal strip miners, but even with tech 1 crystals they really outperform. The jump from tech 1 to tech 2 crystals isn't that huge, 1.675 multiplier to 1.75. Granted that excludes the bonus you get from the skill training you'd need to use tech 2 crystals. Right now I get about 964m3 per strip miner on Veldspar with a tech 1 crystal and no mining upgrades fitted. I think I hit 1010m3 with one MU fitted.

I'm still very interested in joint mining ops at weekends/evenings becasue those should be busy enough to be good fun. Solo mining with three accounts still leaves me twiddling my thumbs half the time. Have to add a hauler and see how I do.

I should have a huge chunk of time on Sat and Sunday. Friday night depends on how dead work leaves me. I plan on bringing 3 retrievers, an Iteron 4 (one week and 850mil ISK till freighter), and up to two ravens for rats and can flippers (and 4 mining lasers each).

Depending on what the belts look like, we may need to go to a different system or just plan on mining ice. I heard something about Ice going away in empire space. The story was that Ice in empire would no longer regen on downtime, so once it's gone it's only in 0.0. anyone know anything about this? If this is the case, mining ice and sitting on the output could be profitable long term as the ice starts disapearing prices should go up in empire space.

p.s. I thought I might try my hand at some cheap tech I piracy on one of the other accounts - does anyone have rifter BPO/BPCs so I can build my own disposable ships?

I have BPOs for Rifter, Incursus and Catalyst. I'm still working on how to copy and research them since I've yet to find a single copy slot open in three different regions. Currently I'm just planning on grinding up standing and putting up a POS and paying the hourly charter fees. It gets me a bunch of lab slots I can use plus there is a system with no stations I might drop it in to have a dump point for mining there. Any idea on how long it takes to get standing up to 7.5 ish? How many social skills would you train before you started this crazy plan?

As for cheap, the ships aren't really the problem. An Incursus will run you 200k, but for decent firepower you're looking at 400k 1.2mil per blaster. Add in a Webifier, Warp Scrambler and afterburner. Low slots get armor and guass balancer. Here is the cookie cutter for Rifter piracy:

From http://eve-stuff.co.uk/resources.php?a=piracy

Highs: 3x 150mm autocannons, Small Nosferatu
Mids: 1mn Afterburner, Warp Scrambler, Stasis Webifier
Lows: 1x 200mm reinforced rolled tungsten plate, 1x Small Armor Repairer, 1x Damage Control Unit

All said, it's not too expensive, just not as cheap as you'd think. My suggestion is to figure out the fitting you want, buy enough to fit 10 ships or so, get the ships and the fittings to the system you plan to work out of and then start your career. Yuo'll blow up, so best to have replacements handy so you don't have to spend 3 hours picking up all the stuff you need to refit, especially once your status goes red and the fleets begin shooting at you. The guide I linked above has a bunch of fundimental info.

- Souca -

[Alptraum]

Ok im pretty sleepy since i worked like 16 or 18 hours straight today plus another bunch driving home...but got 3 more copies of Eve so got 4 alts now....went to log the 3rd alt on and my 2nd alt was disconnected..was some tiny screen poped up but vanished before I could read it....does eve have some retarded issue with u trying to run 4 or 5 eve clients off the same computer? cause that's gonna suck if they do. All these accounts are activated with 60day gamecards not trials either.

[Souca]

Ok im pretty sleepy since i worked like 16 or 18 hours straight today plus another bunch driving home...but got 3 more copies of Eve so got 4 alts now....went to log the 3rd alt on and my 2nd alt was disconnected..was some tiny screen poped up but vanished before I could read it....does eve have some retarded issue with u trying to run 4 or 5 eve clients off the same computer? cause that's gonna suck if they do. All these accounts are activated with 60day gamecards not trials either.

Not sure what the problem was. I've run around 6 at once. Eve does log stuff in a weird place, but if you find the logs there might be some info in there. On my machine they end up in my user folder under Documents. I'm running Vista, fyi.

Just converted my two miners from trials tonight. They are currently training up to barges 3 so they can hop in their retrievers. I did forget to train mining up to 5, so it will be 3 days or so until they can use the good strip miners, but it's better than nothing

- Souca -

[RobinGBrown]

Ok im pretty sleepy since i worked like 16 or 18 hours straight today plus another bunch driving home...but got 3 more copies of Eve so got 4 alts now....went to log the 3rd alt on and my 2nd alt was disconnected..was some tiny screen poped up but vanished before I could read it....does eve have some retarded issue with u trying to run 4 or 5 eve clients off the same computer? cause that's gonna suck if they do. All these accounts are activated with 60day gamecards not trials either.

You can only have one trial account per pc - was one or both of them a trial (e.g. buddy program invite)? Easy to miss if you're a bit tired.

I can run 4 instances on my quadcore - although I'm employing a second PC (Athlon XP...) to run a single instance and only 3 on my main PC

Make sure to turn down the graphics settings for EVE, it's hardly worth having all the fancy lighting effects most of the time

[RobinGBrown]

I should have a huge chunk of time on Sat and Sunday. Friday night depends on how dead work leaves me. I plan on bringing 3 retrievers, an Iteron 4 (one week and 850mil ISK till freighter), and up to two ravens for rats and can flippers (and 4 mining lasers each).

Depending on what the belts look like, we may need to go to a different system or just plan on mining ice. I heard something about Ice going away in empire space. The story was that Ice in empire would no longer regen on downtime, so once it's gone it's only in 0.0. anyone know anything about this? If this is the case, mining ice and sitting on the output could be profitable long term as the ice starts disapearing prices should go up in empire space.

I have BPOs for Rifter, Incursus and Catalyst. I'm still working on how to copy and research them since I've yet to find a single copy slot open in three different regions. Currently I'm just planning on grinding up standing and putting up a POS and paying the hourly charter fees. It gets me a bunch of lab slots I can use plus there is a system with no stations I might drop it in to have a dump point for mining there.
Any idea on how long it takes to get standing up to 7.5 ish? How many social skills would you train before you started this crazy plan?

Looks like we can get a mining op going this weekend then. I've got my two hulks plus a myrmidon salvager to provide drone support. I'm going to level up a WoW team in the Hinterlands on Friday night but Sat & Sun is good for me. There is an ice belt marked in Abudban on Ombey's maps but I don't know if it's there. I scanned out some wormholes and a gas cloud site during the week, it's worth doing the scanning every week as you can find mining sites that can be exploited.

For ice mining we'd want to get the barges that are optimised for it - the skill is also needed.

I'll have a look at what materials are required to make Rifters and the other stuff needed, maybe try to get some module BPOs/BPCs.

Researching the BPOs is needed to optimise the material requirement for manufacturing, it's a swine but there you are. I really don't understand why there isn't a 'lab ship' (remember Traveller?) that has a research lab built in. EVE has mining ships, so why not research ones? They'd be very popular as can be proved by the constantly full labs in Empire space.