Eve Online: A maze of alts

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
when we start rolling alts in Eve.

As Shakespeare probably would have said had he been a MMO player.

I have 2 accounts in Eve now and a total of 6 characters. But there's only one skill queue per account which means that only one character per account is progressing.

Here's how I have them organised:

1) Mission runner. Owner of the skill queue for my first account. Flies a Drake, a ship of the Battlecruiser class which is very strong for level 3 missions. He can actually tank level 4s but isn't quite tanky enough to do level 4s without risk nor does he hit hard enough to do them at an acceptable rate. This character is training towards a bigger, more powerful ship called a Raven, a battleship class ship.

2) Jita trader #1. This guy got about 3 days of skill queue time in order to be able to place multiple market orders. His main job is selling off modules. It seems to be taking him about a week to sell out and I restock him once a week. I trained him up so I could use sell orders (like listing an EBay auction) which allow me to make more money than selling direct.

3) Jita trader #2. This guy has the same skills as the other Jita trader. His job is selling off stackables like ammo and minerals. He tends to finish selling mid-week so he spends the rest of the week buying ammo with a 2 station range (which means I'll need to fly him around collecting once a week) and selling ammo. Most of what he does is known as daytrading or station trading when I buy in Jita and then sell in Jita for a markup.

4) Support alt. This originally had the second account's skill queue. This character has trader skills as well as the ability to fly a salvager. I usually have this character in a salvager on a second client while character #1 runs missions. This speeds up mission running time considerably.

5) First pvp alt. My first attempt at a pvp alt is a tackler in a Rifter (a Frigate class ship). Well actually he's not in a frigate at the moment I got it killed. What happened was I went out with a mob of corp mates looking for trouble and managed to tackle an enemy battle ship. I tackled a feisty beast called a Tempest, outfitted with pretty decent modules. I hung on like a bulldog until the rest of my fleet warped to me and they killed the Tempest just after the Tempest's friends killed me. A thoroughly worthwhile sacrifice.

Tackler ships are designed to be expendable and my ship is really cheap. About 450K isk some of which is recovered as insurance when it dies. One level 3 mission pays for 2-3 of these.

This alt is in Eve University. The University is a specialist corp for training new players. The benefit is we have very interesting Teamspeak lectures (we had a former Goonfleet FC talk to us on Monday), very helpful people, good forum and internet resources and occasional exciting pvp action. The downside of this corps is that they are very risk averse. So you are not allowed to undock during war (which is just about all the time) unless as part of a fleet operation and sometimes there's no one getting a fleet together. So you're not allowed to do anything.

So it's a great guild to have an alt in but I don't think I'd enjoy only having a character in that corp and not doing anything else.

6) Is my new pvp character. He is the current owner of account #2's skill queue and is training for a particularly annoying pvp role, an e-war pilot. E-War in Eve means your weapons and other ship modules basically stop working for a bit. So while I can't kill people with this ship I can really spoil people's day.

I am trying to get this one guilded with a corp that's a bit more adventurous than the Uni. I want to get him into trouble and I want to lose a few ships. That may sound odd but pvp in Eve is about losing ships. You spend ships for fun then have fun making the isk. That's Eve.