Eve Online: Creating Alts

A few weeks ago when we were living in the wormhole I realized that there are lots of time when people are just sitting around looking for something to do. If you have Ladar sites people are harvesting gas, people are killing sleepers, people are mining the grav sites, etc. My primary character could barely fly a venture to do mining, but in my downtime when we weren't doing anything else I decided I'd rather mine a little ore than do absolutely nothing at all. 

The problem was I didn't want to stop training for stealth bombers and future plans to take a few weeks to be able to fly mining barges. So I decided to create a new character with their primary purpose being to be a miner and hauler. Both of these are things that I want, but I don't want to take the time out of my primary characters training queue to accomplish them. 

Mining (in my opinion) is pretty boring, but there are definitely times that I'm just hanging out chatting with my corp mates on team speak and we're not really doing much, and it's the perfect brainless activity to kill time. Plus we have 5-6 miners in our corp that fly Exhumers and Orca's so I find that mining can be pretty profitable if done right. Right now I'm only flying a Mining Barge but it's LIGHT YEARS better than a Venture. On average with my Retriever I  make $450,000 ISK for one cycle of the strip miners, and that's with high sec ore. Low sec, null sec, and wormhole ore are much more profitable than that. 

There are rumors that we may attempt to move out to Null Sec in the upcoming months by paying rent in a system. If that is true, we'll need some steady income from many different sources to survive out there. I personally don't think we should attempt to move into Null Sec for at least another month or two, we have too many noobs (including me) that need time to tighten up their skills or we'll just get stomped on our there. 

The point of this article was initially to talk about why you may create an alt and the type of alt you should create, so I'll see if I can get back on track now that I've rambled a while. 

If you can afford to plex an alt account, I do recommend it. It's much better to have two specialized characters than one character that can do a bunch of things, but only decently. When trying to decide what type of alt to create, stay away from making the exact same type of character. There are fighters, miners, haulers, refiners, manufacturers, inventors, traders, and explorers, logistic pilots, plus lots more careers out there. Try to choose an alt that will compliment your style of play on your primary. My primary is a Fighter/Logi support, and my alt is a Miner/Hauler (he'll probably learn how to refine too). 

If after a few months or even years you decide that you don't want to pay for two characters anymore you can always sell them on the Character Bazaar to someone else. I've heard the average value is about 400 million ISK for every 1 million skill points. So if you sell a character with 8 million SP, you can make yourself  about 3 billion in ISK "IF" you focused your character properly and didn't train skills all over the place.